The Italian's Proposal

Chapter 3

The coffee shop was packed, it was a small place, with only eight tables, each with four metal chairs with semi-padded backs. Customers usually came in desperate, as if a rabid dog were chasing them and it was life or death to get a coffee. Melody was trying to work at lightning speed, cranking the machine, pouring the coffee that was kept hot from the glass pot, and charging the customers. It was a lot of work for one person, but the place was being remodeled and because she was pregnant and the owner had taken pity on her, Melody was the only employee in the coffee shop.

She was in charge of opening and closing and on days when she couldn't open the place at seven in the morning, Mr. Doyle would come down from his apartment and open it.

The Doyle family had lived above the coffee shop for over twenty years, supporting themselves from it as their only source of employment, the couple had only one son, who had gone to college on a scholarship, and only returned for the summer. Raymond loved his father, but he couldn't stay in the shop forever. At least that's what Doyle told her when she came recommended by Lucy. Her friend had known Doyle for years, he had given her first job. That was why Melody was struggling, she didn't want to make her friend look bad, not after she' d gotten her a job and given her a temporary home.

"Young lady," the man in the rumpled shirt called out to her for the umpteenth time.

The man had asked her for a double espresso and the machine was jammed, something that used to happen, but she hadn't found someone to fix it.

"I'm coming, sir. I'll get this started right away," Melody apologized without looking at the man. She was sure that, if she looked at him, she would find a face of disgust and anger.

"That's what you told me ten minutes ago."

"As you will see, neither you nor the others have had your coffee dispatched. It is not personal. You can wait or you can walk for twenty minutes and find another coffee shop with minimally regular coffee and where you might even find hair in it."

The customers standing around the bar stared at her as if all hell had broken loose from her mouth.

But none of them said anything. She was right. Melody knew all of Manhattan like the back of her hand.

There wasn't a single coffee shop nearby, at least not one worth even going into.

At Doyle's - a most unoriginal name - at least she had excellent coffee and rich buttermilk rolls and honey.

Melody was doing her best, she had put in the effort from day one, and even if things weren't flowing the way she wanted them to, at least she had a job.

The other employees Mr. Doyle had in the cafeteria were young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty, guys who didn't really need to work eight or ten hours, but who did it to have something extra and earned with their own sweat. She knew that at least one of them had gotten the job as part of the beginning of becoming independent of the parental bond.

Kids like she had once been. Even when she came of age, her father still provided for her, she didn't have to work that was the whole point. Her father always stressed it to both daughters of the marriage: Working is not an option. Studying, a university degree, is the best inheritance I can leave you when I die.

For the girls it had been drastic, but now she understood in part, why her father said that and never tired of repeating it.

She was never going to regret going through with her pregnancy, her child was her family, from the moment she saw the positive pregnancy test, her baby had become everything to her. But her mother was right about one thing, she was going to change her life forever, the life that with so much eagerness and sacrifice her parents had given her.