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An hour later, Megan was leaving the seawall after taking a good long walk south to the Cabrillo Power Plant before turning around to head back north to Carlsbad Village Drive. She was carrying her leather messenger bag that contained her iPad, wallet, phone and headphones. It was another perfect California day, sunny with a very slight breeze blowing in from the Pacific, tinged with salt and the scents of the ocean and beach, scents which always made Megan feel safe and at home. Despite the continuing lockdown there were plenty of folks out strolling, like her, all wearing face masks and trying their hardest to maintain some kind of distance between themselves and others. Megan found it funny how face masks had become a new fashion accessory and a form of personal expression. She herself wore a plain black one. Nonetheless, nowadays, when she went for one of her walks, she made a game out of trying to spot the most interesting mask. Today’s winner (so far) had been a young girl of around ten whose mask depicted a cartoon mouth with its tongue sticking out.

As Megan waited for the light to change in order to cross Carlsbad Boulevard, she yawned...a huge one. The second one in as many minutes, in fact. God, why was she so tired? The idea of going back to her condo and taking a nap was seductively appealing but damn it, it was Friday! She was not going to waste this lovely early-evening at home in bed. Well, in bed alone, at least.

Coffee!

Coffee, after all, was the solution to a lot of life’s problems. And when coffee failed, wine was always Plan B.

It was then that her eyes picked up on something across the street. She blinked to be sure it wasn’t some kind of hopeful mirage because such a scene was now a rarity in this pandemic era. But...yes, it looked like…

On the corner was a coffeeshop, Brawn Brothers. That in itself was not unusual, coffeeshops were everywhere, but the fact that Brawn Brothers had a patio full of guests was odd! And from what she could see, there were guests inside too!

Were cafes now allowed to have sit-in guests? With

all the changing rules in California about who could do what Megan supposed it was possible. Quite frankly, she had lost track. But hadn’t she read that the Carlsbad/Oceanside region had recently experienced a surge in Covid cases after an earlier attempt at reopening the state?

Megan felt a tiny but hopeful pang of excitement. She hadn’t enjoyed sitting in a coffeeshop working on her drawings since before everything shut down back in March. Unfortunately, that establishment, Your Best Shot, her absolute favorite, would never re-open, a permanent casualty of the pandemic.

Even though the light had changed and she could cross, Megan stayed on the curb, instead using her iPhone to find other nearby cafes. She had been such a loyal patron of Your Best Shot that she hadn’t set foot into any other local places in at least three years. And Brawn Brothers was out. The place was obnoxious, she remembered, the customers too young and the vibe too frat house.

Wait...here was a place. And it was just up the street a bit on Grand Avenue. Four and a half stars on Yelp and Google. La Vida Mocha. Megan seemed to remember some of her friends mentioning it some time back when it first opened. And if they were open, really open, and she could sit and chill in a nice coffeehouse vibe...

Okay...why not?

Chapter 2

“Holy fuck,” Vanessa said into the phone, not really caring that it was her mother on the other end. “Remind me again that we live in America.”

Her mother tutted but did not reprimand her daughter’s language.

“Still no luck?”

“Only in that I have now memorized every single word on the website because I only ever get to see this one page,” Vanessa answered.

“Just keep trying.”

Vanessa bit her tongue to stop a sarcastic comment from leaping out of her mouth. Moms were great, but why did they insist of offering such useless advice at times?

Instead, Vanessa said, “I will definitely keep trying, Mom. Look, I’d better go...”

“A customer?” her mother asked hopefully.

Vanessa decided to lie. “Yeah, a customer, Mom. Love to Dad, talk to you soon. Bye.” And she tapped the red button on her phone’s screen.

A customer. Yeah, right. She’d had three all day. None since…what, one-thirty-ish?

The thing about coffeeshops, Vanessa wanted to tell the State of California, was that customers wanted to spend time in them. Thus, magnanimously allowing coffeeshops to remain open only for take-out during the pandemic was kind of pointless because the only people who wanted to-go coffee were people heading to work. Yet the only workers willing to plunk down five bucks for an iced mocha or seven bucks for a caramel frappe were of the white-collar variety. But the white-collar variety workers were all working from home. Not only that but white-collar variety workers were typically smart enough to realize that it was possible in the twenty-first century (and the twentieth and the nineteenth, the eighteenth, the seventeenth—all the way back, Vanessa figured, to Neanderthal times) to make coffee at home. It was that kind of intelligence that allowed those people to become white-collar workers in the first place.

Coffeeshops were establishments people went to in order to be away from home, to get a caffeine fix while also indulging in being out in society—even if some people’s idea of socializing was sitting at a table, eyes glued to a laptop, AirPods stuck in their ears. Most people just didn’t bother going to a coffeeshop if once there they couldn’t find a comfy spot to sit and enjoy being out.

So, while Vanessa was grateful to the good folks up in Sacramento for allowing her to earn a meager living by keeping her shop open for the handful of people each day who found themselves in need of coffee but unable to get home to make it themselves, she really wished they’d come up with another plan.

And she also really wished Washington would get their act together and fix the website for their newest loan program for small businesses. All week long, Vanessa had been trying to access the site to apply for some of that money the politicians were boasting about handing out only to end up feeling like she was living in Honduras or some other third-world country that didn’t know how to build web pages.

She sighed. She had enough of that for the day. Closing the lid of her laptop she looked around at her empty shop.

La Vida Mocha had started off gangbusters. Sure, in a town the size of Carlsbad one could expect a new place to be busy for the first couple of weeks after opening, simply because the residents now had something different to try. But Vanessa’s coffeeshop had sustained its popularity well after the novelty had worn off. This was helped by her choice of location. La Vida Mocha’s spot on Grand Avenue was on a block in which Vanessa’s only neighbors were an art gallery, a New Age crystal store, a dry cleaner and a place that sold beach clothes. Across the street was the Thirsty Lion, a British-style pub, and an antique bookseller. There wasn’t another coffeeshop for a couple of blocks.

It also helped that La Vida Mocha served really good coffee. Vanessa had been very picky about where she sourced her coffee from, choosing a California supplier known for high-quality products. And because Vanessa had also worked for three years as a barista after leaving the corporate world, while running her personal trainer business as a side gig, she knew how to get the best results from her coffee and her equipment. The reviews of La Vida Mocha were phenomenal (even when Vanessa ignored the ones that were obviously written by her friends) and the coffeeshop had even gotten a favorable write-up in the Orange County Times.