The Coffee Mill They Left Me

The years between

I grew up, the way you do. I did not become anything impressive, and I want to be honest about that, because the shape of this story could tempt me to pretend I was a secret genius all along, and I was not. I finished high school and did two years at the community college and dropped it. I waited tables. I managed a diner for a while, a real one with a pie case and a counter, and I loved it, and the owner sold it out from under all of us. I got married young and it did not take. I worked at a call center for an insurance company for six years, in a gray room under gray light, taking calls from angry people about their deductibles, and every one of those six years took something out of me that I did not get back.

Through all of it I ground my coffee by hand. I had my own box mill by then, not my grandfather’s, a cheaper one from an antique mall, but it worked the same and I counted my turns the same. On the worst mornings, the ones where I could not think of a single reason to put my feet on the floor, I would sit on the edge of the bed and grind coffee by hand and count the turns, and somewhere around thirty the counting would quiet the noise enough that I could stand up.

My grandmother died. My mother died, and that one nearly finished me, and my grandfather drove three hours to the funeral and stood next to me at the graveside with his hand on my shoulder, that big cracked farmer’s hand. Afterward we did not go to the reception. We sat in his truck in a gas station lot and drank two coffees we both agreed were undrinkable and did not talk, and it was the kindest thing anyone did for me that whole year.

Her death is the hinge the whole family story turns on. When she died, I lost my seat at the table. Carol and Pete were my grandfather’s living children. I was the daughter of the dead one, and in a family that measured love in acreage and account balances, that made me a rounding error.

The last two years of his life

My grandfather got sick the winter before last. His heart, mostly, and then everything a failing heart drags down with it. He could not do the farm anymore. Pete moved a renter onto the ground and moved himself into managing my grandfather’s business, which is a polite way of saying Pete got the checkbook.

I drove out every weekend I could, three hours each way, because I loved him and because somebody had to, and because Carol lived twenty minutes from him and came by maybe once a month with a casserole and a lot of talk about how hard it all was on her.

I did his morning coffee. Even sick, even when he could barely finish half a cup, he wanted it done right, and I did it right, forty turns and adjust, and held the cup for him when his hands shook. In those last months we did not talk much about the past. We talked about the beans. The co-op had closed and I was mail-ordering green coffee and roasting small batches in a cast iron skillet on his stove, which he taught me to do, shaking the skillet and listening for the first crack and then the second, and it filled the whole house with a smell like burnt sugar. I would open the windows even in January, and he would sit in his chair and breathe it in and say, “There it is. There it is.”

One of those last mornings, and I did not think anything of it at the time, he had me get the box mill down and he took it in his lap and ran his thumb over the base and said, “You know I re-glued this thing four times. Your great-grandfather bought it new. It has ground coffee in this family for damn near a hundred years.” And I said I knew. And he said, “A machine like this, you have to understand it or it is just a box.” And I said I knew that too. And he looked at me for a long moment, longer than was comfortable, and said, “Yeah. You do.” Then he handed it to me to grind the morning pot and we did not speak of it again.

I thought he was just being an old man with an old thing. It took me a long time to understand he was telling me something.

He died in April. I was not there. Pete called me at two in the morning to tell me it was over, and the second thing Pete said, before I had even understood the first thing, was that there would be a family meeting about the estate the day after the funeral and I should plan to stay in town.