No One You Know Read Online Free PDF Page B

her death I could not quite banish the thought that I was still living life as an imaginary number.
    Then, when I was beginning to doubt that I would ever find anything to be passionate about, I found my calling in coffee. The discovery was accidental, what some might call luck. Lila, for her part, had never believed in such a thing. Once, when I exclaimed over her good luck at having won a Walkman in a high school raffle, Lila had said, “What we call luck is really just the result of natural laws playing themselves out, a matter of probability.”
             
    A CUPPER, LIKE A SOMMELIER OR A PERFUMER, must have an excellent nose. I inherited mine from my mother, an avid gardener who arranged her plants not by color, but by smell. Walking through my mother’s garden as a child, I was enthralled by the way the heady sweetness of jasmine gave way to the tartness of lemon trees, or the way musky wisteria was buttressed by the piney smell of sage. I loved the crispness of peppermint against a carpet of cedar bark mulch, the earthiness of roses paired with delicate lavender. Once, when I was in elementary school, my mother told me I had a natural nose. I relished the compliment, and clung to it for years. My mother was always supportive, and nothing would have pleased her more than to have many fronts on which to praise me. But while Lila’s intellectual gifts made her a magnet for spontaneous and genuine praise, I knew our mother had to work a little harder with me.
    Decades after the fact, I still remembered my first cup of coffee, enjoyed on the sly with my father one Sunday morning when Lila and my mother were at church. I was eight years old, homebound with poison oak following a family camping trip.
    I’d always loved the smell of coffee, the way it filled the house in the mornings when my parents were getting ready for work. But that day, I noticed something new in the kitchen: a small wooden box on the countertop, with a metal cup affixed to its top and a crank on the side. A few dark beans rested in the bottom of the cup. My father was sitting at the kitchen table, reading the paper.
    “What’s this?” I asked.
    “A coffee grinder.”
    “Where did it come from?”
    “Your mother and I bought it in Venice.”
    “What’s Venice?”
    “A city in Italy. We went there on our honeymoon.”
    “Why haven’t I ever seen it before?”
    “I found it when I was cleaning out the garage. Why don’t you give it a whirl?”
    I turned the crank round and round, watching the teeth in the bottom of the cup break the beans into smaller and smaller bits, releasing a rich, nutty fragrance. I continued cranking until the beans disappeared. Then I pulled out the little drawer where the coffee grounds had fallen, brought it to my nose, and sniffed. It was wonderful.
    “I want some,” I said.
    Dad smiled. “Aren’t you a bit young?”
    Many years later, I would take a temp job doing administrative work at Golden Gate Coffee in South City. When the owner, Mike Stekopolous, offered me a permanent position as his assistant, I accepted without hesitation; it was the first office where I felt I truly fit in. I’d been at Golden Gate Coffee for a year when I first accompanied Mike on one of his trips. I was thirty-one years old, searching for something I couldn’t quite pinpoint—a sense of peace and well-being that had eluded me since Lila’s death. On a small plot of land in the Quezaltenango region of Guatemala, I stood side by side with three generations of a campesino family and picked ripe coffee cherries from glossy trees. By the end of the day my back was aching, my fingers sore, and my burlap bag only half full; I was stunned to learn that it required two thousand hand-picked cherries to produce a single pound of coffee. The next day, I took a tour of the processing shed, where the floaters were separated from the good cherries, which were then fed into the pulping machine before the beans, still wrapped in a