I was at a bar in the city celebrating my brother’s birthday when his friend Liam began talking about the time his mother and aunt, who owned a cafe in a shopping centre, received an invitation to a customer’s funeral.

We were sitting outside in a courtyard under the festoons and city skylights. Streets bustled; patrons revelled. I sipped on a pint of beer—the new, expensive sour types infused with exotic fruits which don’t taste like beer at all—considering what Liam had said. “They were that close?”

“No,” Liam said, sipping a pint of sour beer too. “They had no idea who he [the customer] was.”

“But the customer was a regular?”

“Evidently. Mum and the aunt couldn’t remember her, though.”

“Weird. So they didn’t go?” I said. “To the funeral, I mean.”

Liam clawed a handful of chips into his mouth and was about to answer when my brother Zak turned from the people on his right to us and said, “What are you guys talking ab—.” I shushed him before he could go on for I hung on Liam’s answer.

“Yep. They went,” Liam said through the half-masticated potatoes.

The cafe, according to Liam, had become a hub for seniors: By mid-day the village’s residents arrived on mass, congregating around tables, walking sticks beside, orthopaedic buggies parked outside, and a coffee—always extra hot and weak—on the bench. Here, the customers would sit for hours, nursing the solitary drink.

“We got worried if a regular didn’t come in for a few days,” Liam, who also worked at the cafe for several years, said. “I mean, these customers were very frail.”

I asked if that happened a lot, customers not returning because of health reasons. Liam said the last customer who seemed to disappear was a lady who was about 97 and could only stand up with the help of two carers. After not seeing the lady for a week, he asked a customer—with whom the 97-year-old usually had coffee with—whether she was okay.

“She’s alive and well,” the customer said. “She just doesn’t like your cafe anymore.”

“I definitely wasn’t expecting that answer,” Liam told us.

A waitress collected the empty pint glasses off the table and smiled as if she heard Liam’s story.

“Harsh,” Zak said to Liam but not in a sympathetic way. He was smiling as well.

“Death was probably the more preferable answer,” I said. “In that particular case.”

“More preferable for who, Jayden?” Zak said. But he did not phrase it as a question.

Zak got up and left to get another round of pints.

“You have to admire the customer’s honesty, though,” Liam said.

She did seem refreshingly unrestrained. I reflected on that—on how death being imminent must have a role to play in older customer’s lack of timidity in cafe settings. The fear of a barista’s judgement must seem very pale, indeed, compared to that of non-existence.

Zak returned, placing down three more sour beers. I sipped the beer listening as Liam continued telling various anecdotes about other brazen customers whom he had to serve. The customers included a lady who complained that her coffee was too cold and decided that a reasonable way of demonstrating this was by dunking her hand in her latte glass. “See,” she said to Liam, coffee spilling to the floor.

“I was like I don’t see,” Liam said then reached for an empty water glass on the courtyard bench and re-enacted the scene by swirling his hand around the glass like a soup ladle.

“Maybe she wanted to show off her general immunity to heat,” I said, having worked at a cafe popular among an older demographic who could skull extra hot coffees like water. Immunity may be the wrong word. Tongues (and hands, evidently) don’t build up resistance to hot drinks the same way a body can for tetanus. Heat receptors, after a life of prolonged trauma—boiling instant coffee—merely give up, most likely become numbed.

“I wouldn’t unpack the reasoning behind it too much, Jayden,” Zak said. He was drunk now, slurring. “She could’ve had amnesia. Or something.”

Upon reflection, Zak had a point. In the brisk winter air and perhaps in a bout of forgetting what a latte is for, the lady could’ve mistaken the warm glass for a vessel to bathe cold hands, which sounds ridiculous, I know, but at the time, as far as the reasoning behind cringeworthy happenings go, everything seemed mild and feasible in the wake of hearing what happened after Liam’s mother and aunt drove to the funeral of a customer whose name drew a blank.

You can read what happens next, the 2nd part of the story, in next week's post. To get notified for it, click here to subscribe (if you haven't already).

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