Punch, Pastries, And Poison

Late spring is my favorite time of year in Cape Bay. The icy chill of Massachusetts winter is finally out of the air, the trees are back in full leaf, and the humidity and tourist throngs haven’t yet descended on the coast. The feeling is glorious, and I want to spend every second of every day outdoors, soaking it up.

So, naturally, instead of doing that, I was holed up in the back room of Antonia’s, sorting through invoices and poring over resumes.

After nearly a year as sole proprietor of the coffee shop my grandparents had opened sixty-some-odd years ago when they’d first arrived here from Italy, I was ready to make some changes. Okay, maybe I wasn’t actually ready to make them, but I’d found myself increasingly feeling like it was time to change, particularly to bring on new staff.

Antonia’s had been running on a staff of five for a year, since my late mother—the café’s previous owner—had hired two high school students on shortly before her death. That had been enough to get by, but I didn’t want to just get by. I wanted to flourish. And with tourist season coming, flourishing meant I needed some more help.

I looked down again at the resume in front of me. Persephone Phillips. She didn’t have much experience, but I doubted that Becky and Amanda—my high school girls—had much before starting, either, and in any case, I mostly wanted the new person to help with taking orders, running them out to tables, and keeping the place clean. Not exactly rocket science.

I glanced up at the clock on the wall. Persephone should have been here by now. Running late was not exactly the kind of first impression I’d been hoping she’d make.

With a sigh, I picked up the stack of new resumes and applications from the corner of the little table that passed as a desk in the café’s back room. I looked down at the first one. Bradford Bradenton Bradshaw IV. He had a master’s degree in finance and a few years of experience working on Wall Street. Why on earth was he applying at my little coffee shop? Did he think I was hiring for a finance manager instead of a cashier? If I was, it would be for probably the least interesting finance job ever, since I had no problem keeping up with our books even though I was a communications major in school.

The next applicant was a girl who had just turned fourteen the week before—she had it written on her application and mentioned it to me when she dropped it off—whose parents had no doubt urged her to go ahead and find a summer job before they were all taken.

I wasn’t completely opposed to hiring a fourteen-year-old. If she was a good fit, I could hope to have her for four good years before she graduated high school. Fourteen—barely fourteen—just seemed so young. I looked back down at the application she’d turned in and gasped when I realized that she hadn’t even started high school yet. She was still in middle school! I reminded myself that her education level had no bearing on her ability to take an order, and I flipped her application over on top of Bradford Bradenton Bradshaw IV’s in the Maybe pile. Middle school!

I was still shaking my head when Sammy—my café manager and general right-hand woman—poked her head through the doorway.

“Sammy, you need to look at the applications I got yesterday.” I grabbed Bradford Bradenton Bradshaw IV and the middle-schooler’s papers from the pile and held them out to her.

“I’d love to”—she held out a single finger—“but your interview is here.”

I glanced up at the clock. She was almost ten minutes late. That irked me, but I didn’t think it was reason enough to dismiss her without even speaking to her. Maybe she’d gotten stuck in traffic or been getting in her car when she realized her blouse had a big grease stain from the pizza she’d dropped on it last time she wore it. Sometimes those didn’t come out in the wash. It happened. I knew from experience.

“What do you think of her?” I asked. “Does she seem like she’d be a good fit?”

Sammy shrugged. “She just came in and said she was here for her interview. I didn’t really talk to her.”

“Did she apologize for being late?”

Sammy gave me a sympathetic smile. “Nobody’s perfect, Fran. No matter how much you’d like them to be.”

I resisted the urge to point out that I couldn’t imagine having a more perfect employee than her and stood up from my chair. “Well, hopefully she’s a good fit, because I’m tired of looking at resumes.”

I followed Sammy out in the café and looked across the counter at the girl she pointed out.

My heart sank.

I was pretty sure a pizza stain on her blouse wasn’t the cause of her lateness. A cat attack seemed more likely. Or a vigorous sword fight.

Under certain circumstances, I could have forgiven her for wearing a T-shirt and jeans to an interview—some people just didn’t know better, and this place was just a coffee shop, after all. The holes were what really got me. I could see at least five in the baggy black T-shirt, one of which was a slash across her abdomen that left a gaping swath of her midriff exposed.

Her acid-washed jeans were similarly scattered with holes. If they hadn’t somehow been still attached to her, I would have thought she ran them through a shredder.

I looked at Sammy imploringly, silently begging her to tell me I was looking at the wrong girl.

Instead, she leaned over and said quietly in my ear, “It’s the fashion.” She inclined her head slightly towards a group of college-aged girls who had set up camp at one of the tables with their laptops, a stack of pastries, and their lattes. Their clothes, too, looked like they’d spent some time at the mercy of a razor.

I sighed and resolved myself to ignoring her outfit. And her lateness. And her hair needing a visit with a comb. I took one more look at Sammy, hoping she’d finally admit that Persephone was a no-show, then walked around the counter to the girl. “Hi, Persephone?” I gave her a warm smile and stuck out my hand. “I’m Fran. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

She stared down at my hand before slowly taking it, if you could call what she did taking it. It was more like she slipped her hand limply into mine and allowed me to attempt to shake it. The second I released it, she pulled it back and wiped it on her jeans.

I clenched my teeth and forced myself to keep smiling. “Why don’t you follow me to the back and we can get started?” I turned and headed for the back, catching Sammy’s eye on the way. I widened my eyes, knowing she’d caught every second of the awkward greeting and attempt at a handshake. She grinned back at me but didn’t make any movement to let me know that this was an elaborate joke, which I was still wishing it was.

My hopes momentarily dashed, I led Persephone to the back, pulled up a chair opposite mine, and sat down, gesturing for her to do the same.

She peered down at it, made a face, brushed off whatever invisible dirt she thought she saw, and sat down, perching on the very edge of the chair.

I gritted my teeth some more, then smiled big. “So, Persephone, what makes you want to work here at Antonia’s?”

I listened to the seconds literally tick away on the little wall clock above my computer. It slowly dawned on me that she hadn’t spoken at all yet. Could she speak? We had arranged the interview by email, so she hadn’t had to speak then. But wouldn’t she have mentioned it? I picked up her application in case she’d written it down there and I just hadn’t noticed. “Um, do we—” I started, wondering if we needed to work out another means of communication. Before I could finish my sentence, she finally spoke up.

“It’s Ephy.”

I looked up at her, trying to figure out what on earth she’d just said. “I’m sorry?”

“It’s Ephy,” she repeated in a monotone. “You keep calling me Persephone, but no one calls me that.”

I forced a smile as I glanced down at the empty spot on the application labeled “nickname.” I held my pen over it. “E-F?”

She stared at me.

I held back a sigh.

“P-H.”

I smiled and nodded. “I?”

She cocked her head to the side with an expression like she thought I was talking nonsense.

“E-P-H-I?” I enunciated each letter.

She heaved a sigh and rolled her eyes. “Why?”

I could feel my smile getting more patronizing by the second. I clenched the pen tighter in my fingers. “I just want to be able to spell your name correctly.”

Again with her condescending look. I resisted the urge to stand up and show her straight to the door. “So, you spell it E-P-H-I?”

“Why?” she asked again, sounding even more irritable.

I was halfway to standing when it clicked. I sank back down in my chair, my face feeling like it was on fire, and wrote down the letter Y at the end of her name. She hadn’t been being difficult at all. She was spelling her name just as I asked. No wonder she was looking at me like I’d lost my mind. “Oh, of course, sorry about that.” I smiled again, deciding I was going to have a new attitude towards her and the interview. “So, what makes you want to work here?”

“I, like, really like coffee and stuff?”

So much for the new attitude. “Have you ever used a professional-grade espresso machine?”

“Yeah?”

“What kind?”

She rattled off a list of high-end espresso machines, some of which even I hadn’t even used.

I was surprised. I looked again at her resume, which definitely didn’t list any coffee shop experience. “Have you worked in a coffee shop before?”

She shrugged as her eyes wandered the room. “Just filling in for people? Like, my friends and stuff?”

I nodded, but I was skeptical. Hiring someone who needed to be taught how to use the machine from the bottom up would give me more work to do, not less. And if she needed to learn that from scratch, I’d probably have to teach her how to make all the drinks too. Between her attitude and her lack of experience, it wasn’t looking good for her. But I was afraid I wasn’t giving her a fair chance. I’d already leapt to a conclusion about her once. I’d never been responsible for hiring before, and I didn’t want to screw it up. I needed help—good help—in the café, and I wouldn’t get it by cutting interviews off after a couple of questions.

I took a deep breath and, despite my better judgement, plowed ahead.