Always Cas | ✔

CHAPTER ONE; part two

     Charles comes in at nine and helps me move the last batches before he heads to the roof to tend his garden. The gardening had started at his place before he sold it to move in with Dolores two years ago. Dolores who hates gardens, hates that they attract animals and bugs and the way it all looks in the winter.

     "How does it look exactly?" Charles had said over lunch one day.

     "Dead," Dolores responded dryly. "Like someone lit the whole thing on fire."

     "But they come back in the spring," Charles insisted.

     It didn't matter. Dolores likes fake potted plants and the grass you roll out and don't have to water. She's settled on having some succulents in her front window, but that's about all the green thumbing Charles can get up to in their place. I'd offered the roof to Charles in an attempt to appease Dolores, hoping that making Charles happy would make her happy, but what started as some planters quickly turned into a greenhouse.

     I didn't expect much to come of the rooftop gardening, maybe a pepper here or there, but then Charles started producing baskets of fresh produce. Too much for him and Dolores to get through without copious waste. Even with what we were using for baking, there was still too much left over to, in good conscious, throw away. Charles suggested running a farmer's market on Sundays, and since Weston's was closed on Sundays, anyway, I gave in under the caveat it was Dolores and Charles's endeavor. Sundays were my day off, and they would remain that way.

     For the most part, Weston's has stayed pretty much the same in the last few years, serving coffee, cupcakes, and the occasional seasonal dessert. Every so often I pick up an event, the pushy couple who wants a three-tier cupcake wedding cake and won't take no for an answer. I cater a lot of birthdays but they're generally pretty easy. The only thing I expressly don't do are gender reveals, although I did, once, at Cas's urging.

     "Gender reveals are huge," he had said. "You want to go into this market."

     "What happens when you do a gender reveal, take all these photos, and your kid is actually nonbinary? Gender reveals set a bad precedent."

     Cas looked at me, then, and it was one of those moments, like he was seeing me for the first time. "What?" I had asked when he said nothing.

     "That's very woke of you, is all," he'd responded and I rolled my eyes. He was always using weird young people terms. I supposed I was technically a young person then, too, but I didn't particularly feel like one.

     Before Charles leaves for the evening, he helps with tomorrow's prep and puts the last of the day's inventory out for the evening rush. Rumi's on the register, handling the evening crowd like a champ. At some point I realized I was only hiring Baxter students to work here so then I decided to only hire Baxter students, as some sort of first job experience type of deal. The only exception being my daytime full-timer, Tasha. She's a grad student at the local University, but also a Baxter alum.

     Rumi just started over the summer but she's gotten the hang of things a lot faster than the last barista, Celeste. Celeste was great with customers, had this big smile that could assuage even the messiest of mistakes, but she was also constantly screwing up orders and moved at a snail's pace. I never had to fire anybody but Celeste made it a close call.

     Coming as no surprise, Dolores doesn't like Rumi and outright hates Tasha. She hasn't liked a single hire though, since Cas, and I don't think its any coincidence.

     "Rumi is sour," Dolores had said one day that summer. "She doesn't smile and she doesn't talk."

     "Sure she smiles," I had argued back. Rumi smiles without her teeth, this close-mouthed small thing, that you could miss if you weren't paying attention. It's to hide her braces, I think. "And anyway, smiling isn't part of the job. Neither is talking. She's a good worker."