I ignore her, lining up all the now-clean coffee mugs on a towel spread out on the counter next to the sink and taking a step back to admire them.
“Did I tell you Benjamin wants me to get rid of all my coffee mugs and order matching ones for the stores?”
She gasps, grabbing a hot pink and blue mug with the word Dallas written across the center in white, hugging it to her chest.
“I’m so glad I didn’t let you know I was starting to feel bad for the guy. Let’s kill him. I know people who can make it look like an accident,” Bettie tells me in complete seriousness.
“You felt bad for him?” I ask in shock, wiping my wet hands on the apron tied around my waist as I turn to look at her.
Yes, I zero in on that instead of her comment about killing my ex-boyfriend. If one more person walks in the door and asks me about my wedding, I won’t care about making his death look like an accident.
“Only for a second. I mean, you’ve been with the guy for five years. He was here when you opened Liquid Crack, and even though he’s a pompous asshole who wears entirely too much hair gel, you dumped him when he proposed, the same day you signed the papers to franchise this place,” she reminds me.
When she sees my eyes widen with guilt, she quickly sets the coffee mug down and rests her hands on my shoulders.
“I said only for a second,” Bettie repeats. “Any man who wants to get rid of coffee cups you’ve been collecting since you were a kid deserves to be dumped. And castrated. Possibly poisoned with a side of head-and-eyebrow shaving while he’s sleeping.”
While it’s true that I broke up with Benjamin when he proposed, a few hours after my final meeting with the lawyers to sign the paperwork to make Liquid Crack a franchise, I didn’t want anyone thinking I said no because of my business and where it was going. I said no because I didn’t want to get married. To anyone. I said no because growing up in Bald Knob, you had two choices – get married to someone you’d known since birth and start popping out kids, or get the fuck out of there and get a life. I chose option two and I learned how to be a strong, independent business woman. I loved Benjamin and we had a pretty good relationship, up until the franchise discussions started six months ago. He wanted to change everything that made Liquid Crack what it is today. He wanted to make it uniform and corporate and just like every other coffee shop franchise all over the world. We’d done nothing but fight about it for months and his proposal honestly did surprise me at the time. I thought we were on our way to ending things and here he was planning for our future.
The coffee mug fight right before I left to sign the papers was the final nail in the coffin of our relationship as far as I was concerned. Every single mug in this place that people use when they stay to drink their coffees are mine. Growing up in a small town, I had nothing but time on my hands to dream about my future and all the places I wanted to go when I was finally old enough to leave. Anytime someone I knew went on vacation, I always asked them to bring me back a coffee mug. In a place where everyone knows your business, it didn’t take long for the entire town to know about my coffee mug collection and help contribute to it over the years. When it was my turn to travel, and when I finally had the money to do so, I kept up with the tradition, always grabbing a mug from the airport gift shop on my way out of town.
I love that my shop doesn’t have boring, matching coffee mugs. I love that when you come in, you never know if you’ll be drinking out of a London cup with Big Ben on it, or an Orlando one with Mickey Mouse ears.
“So, if Benjamin wanting to do away with the mugs gets him castrated and poisoned, do I even want to know what would happen to him if I told you he wanted to change the name of the shop?” I ask, taking a step back when her nostrils flare and she growls low in her throat.
“Excuse me? Can I get a triple, Venti, soy, half-sweet, non-fat, Caramel Macchiato? With extra Caramel drizzle?”
Bettie and I turn to see a twenty-something woman standing on the other side of the counter and looking up at the menu board in confusion. I knew as soon as the first couple of words left her mouth that this wouldn’t end well. The majority of young women who frequent Liquid Crack are college students from DePaul. Some of them are normal and order their coffees like the smart, college-educated people they are, while others are like this chick. They speak every sentence with an upward inflection, like every word out of their mouth is a question and they have no idea what the fuck they’re doing.
“We should go for drinks later?”
“I just bought these new jeans, but I’m not sure they look good?”