THE COFFEE SHOP

 

They are two friends or coworkers—I cannot tell.

 

They look to be in their mid-twenties and are working intently on a single Mac laptop placed on the dark wooden table between them. The coffee shop they’re in is littered with students and employees from the neighboring buildings, but those patrons are working by themselves, headphones connecting their ears to the laptops in front of them.

 

This pair is here to work together, not separate.

 

She laughs at him as he bobs his head and shoulders up and down while playing the air piano to the Motown-y jazz emanating from the speakers. She gives him a stern look, but can’t hold back her laughter for long.

 

She’s been here, ready for business, since the duo sat down. While she’s focused on the screen in front of her and the task at hand, his eyes explore the space around him. He softly smiles at every customer that walks by him, inviting them to look into his eyes as they add creamer to their coffee.  

 

He finally comes to attention as soon as she laughs and stops tapping the air with his fingers. He looks at the Mac on the table between them for maybe the first time in 10 minutes. Even so, he gently nods his head and mouths “bum bum bum, bum bum bum” to the beat in the background.

 

As he reads the screen between them, she decides it’s time for a quick break. She pulls out her iPhone and the light illuminates her fingertips in the poorly-lit coffee shop. She puts it away quickly, likely just checking a quick notification or sending a short text. The scene is uncommon in the way that I hardly ever see a person simply “just check” their phone.

 

Checking a notification generally turns into checking a newsfeed which turns into posting a status update. Her phone doesn’t seem to have that power over her, though, as she slips it back into her backpack without any hesitation.

 

He asks her about some of the words on the screen in front of them, but they seem to have lost some of their focus when she decided to divert her attention elsewhere.

 

I sneeze from across the room and he yells over to me, “bless you!” I say thanks and shift my attention down back to my laptop, where I too am sitting alone like most of the others in the coffee shop.

 

A few minutes pass by without any speech between the man and woman. They vary from looking at the stacks of paper in front of them to the Mac sitting between them, each occasionally typing in a few words.

 

Suddenly, he’s pulled away by his phone, the first time I’m even made aware of its existence in the hour I have been sitting near them. He pulls on a burnt orange sweater before heading outside, mouthing to her that it would just take a minute.

 

He stands outside the window of the café for a moment with his ear pressed to the phone, but then he disappears, walking back-and-forth for quite a while. I only see flashes of orange as he paces by the window.  

 

He’s gone much longer than a minute.

 

Inside, she pulls out her phone to occupy herself while he’s unexplainably absent. She must have drained her phone battery, steadily swiping from app to app to app. He finally finds his way back indoors after leaving her to explore her device for more than a half hour.

 

“I’m really sorry about that,” he said as he rushes back to the table. “That took a lot longer than I expected.”

 

They got back to work, but they now seemed to be at more of a disconnect than they were before. She was more unwilling to share a smile with him, and his eyes didn’t look quite as warm.

 

As I left the coffee shop, after a solid two hours of sitting, I wondered how much work they accomplished in their time together.