Hospitality is a feat of memory. For an averagely busy cafe, 300-odd names walk in the door, of which a server has to—in fleeting encounters—remember. Inevitably we don’t, not every name which is usually excusable because customers tend to forget too.

“I’m so sorry, I’ve forgotten your name,” I once said to a regular of two years.

“That’s okay, I don’t know yours either,” he said. “And I won’t remember if you tell me.”

“I’ll save you the trouble then,” I said frankly though without sass or contempt because I knew as well as he did the commercial nature of our transactions—which we were perfectly okay with. Genuinely relating to every person in a cafe, in life, can be draining.

As with every relationship, there’s only ever tension when certain feelings are unrequited: The barista sees the customer as a friend while the customer sees the barista as a convenient source of caffeine, or on the other hand the customer sees the owners of a cafe as almost family and as such mentions them frequently among other kin, so much so that when the customer dies the organisers of the funeral unanimously agree to pass on an invitation to the owners unbeknown to the fact that the affections were grossly one-sided.

The tension, I’ve found, arises not only from the contempt of the customer whose feelings haven’t been reciprocated but the barista’s sense of guilt for having been the source of another’s hurt. For anyone who isn’t brazen and shameless like the woman who dipped her hand in a latte glass, the guilt drives a barista to either avoid the person or to overcompensate with niceties. A play of either introversion or extroversion. Liam’s mum and aunt turned out to be the latter.

In the dim light of the festoons surrounding the bar, Liam continued telling the story which went as follows:

The mother and aunt assumed the funeral would be packed. The logic was if invitations extended to the owners of the local cafe then surely hordes of other people who only softly brushed shoulders with the man’s life would also be invited. The plan was to swiftly and inconspicuously walk into the memorial service, sit at the back and in a similar fashion leave.

The mother and aunt realised that plan could not be so, though, after walking into the service to see an intimate room of around 10 people who were looking at the casket, ruminating, leaden with grief—relatives, perhaps, or at least people closer enough to know what the person inside the casket looked like. The procession turned to the door. The two women looked lost, stunned, and to justify being there, blurted, “We own the cafe down the road. He was one of our dear customers.”

The women walked up to a pylon next to an older lady. Here, the overcompensating niceties began. “He used to order an extra hot flat white and sit at the back quietly. Just a delight, he was,” the mother said to the elderly lady.

“Had the most wonderful smile,” the aunt added to which the elderly lady returned a reluctant grin.

The sermon began. A photo of the deceased man was projected onto a large sheet. The mother turned to the aunt, silently gauging whether she, after seeing the photo, recognised the customer. The aunt shook her head. The mother shrugged back. Both confused as ever. The priest continued to talk while the projector screen displayed a chronological montage of the man’s personal history. The procession sobbed and sniffed. The aunt, who wasn’t feeling sad at all, felt a growing sense of the ‘other', an awareness of disassociation from the collective grief, inspiring further guilt and over-correction. She tried to cry, to manufacture fluid out of the eye glands—to no avail. But she still drew a tissue to wipe away a tear that clearly never shed which only made the sense of alienation not only abstract, an inner reality, but also very concrete and observable to everyone in the room. And thus, the cycle of overcompensation went.

The priest lowered his head and ended the sermon on a poignant quote which the mother and aunt nor Liam could remember. He, the priest, then looked up to the procession and softly said, “If anyone else would like to say anything, please feel free.”

Silence.

“Anyone?” he said.

The question was precautionary because people were in thought. The priest wanted to make sure people had heard. Nobody needed to speak. What could be said?

The aunt, though, interpreted the question as a plead. The deceased man had drawn a crowd of 12 people, two of which didn’t even know who he was and now the people who were supposedly the closest to him didn’t have a word to say about his life. She felt the room become heavy as if awkwardness had its own physical density, the spaces between things closing in. She became flustered. The man’s life was being reduced to an awkward silence. Wasn’t anyone else feeling this? The priest looked around.

The aunt couldn’t say anything, of course. She didn’t even know the man, had nothing truthful to say. She knew this which is why she was surprised as anyone when she found herself saying a sermon of her own:

“Frank used to come in every day. Drop coins onto the bench. Order. He’d always tell jokes.” The aunt’s left upper thigh suddenly felt on fire, like someone was pinching her skin with a clamp, then twisting it. She was in pain. But also halfway through a sermon. “‘How does Moses make his coffee?’ Frank would say. ‘Hebrews it’. Such a wonderful sense of humour,” the aunt continued. “He always used to make me smile, Frank did.” The pain became unbearable, causing her to look down. Someone was in fact pinching her thigh—Liam’s mother. Only then did the aunt realise the procession was looking at her blankly and that along with the pinching Liam’s mother was also whispering the name plastered over the projector screen and the brochures. “Allan,” she said again. “His name is Allan.”