It was the kind of October rain that comes sideways and means business. I had been in New York for two days for a conference, and my husband, Daniel, was flying in that evening to spend the weekend with me before we both headed home to Chicago.
I had an hour to kill between the conference venue and my hotel, and I made the rookie mistake of deciding to walk it.
By the time I ducked under the first awning I could find, I was completely soaked. My phone had died somewhere in the previous block, and I had no idea yet.
The awning I was standing under belonged to a coffee shop called Alma’s.
It was small — maybe eight tables, the kind of place where the menu is written on a chalkboard, and the chairs don’t all match.
Through the window I could see warm light and a handful of customers, and I stood there for a moment weighing my options before the rain made the decision for me and I pushed the door open.
The man behind the counter looked up.
He was somewhere in his mid-30s, with the kind of tired around his eyes that doesn’t come from one bad night but from a long stretch of them. He had a dish towel over one shoulder, and he was restocking cups when I walked in, dripping onto his floor.
“Come in, come in,” he said immediately, waving me forward. “You’re soaked.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, gesturing at the puddle forming around my shoes. “I just needed to get out of the rain for a minute.”
“Don’t apologize for the rain,” he said, already moving toward the counter. “Sit down. What can I get you?”
I hesitated. “I don’t have my wallet with me — I left it at the hotel this morning. I can’t pay for anything right now.”I pulled my phone out to at least use it while I waited out the rain, and the screen stayed black. Dead. I set it on the counter and laughed at myself a little.
“And apparently my phone’s dead too.”
He glanced at the phone on the counter. “I can plug that in for you if you want. We’ve got a charger behind the counter.”
“That would be amazing, thank you,” I said, sliding it across to him.
He looked at me for a moment with something quiet and steady in his expression, the kind that belongs to someone who has seen a person in a difficult moment before and simply knows what it calls for.
“I’ll make you something warm,” he said. “Go ahead and sit.”
A woman came out from the back — his wife, I guessed, around the same age, with flour on her apron — and he said something to her quietly that I couldn’t hear. She glanced over at me and nodded, then went back through the door.He brought the tea over himself and set it down in front of me.
“Thank you,” I said. “Really. I want to pay you back — if you have a card reader I can come back tomorrow and—”
He shook his head. “It’s tea.”
“Please,” I said. “I want you to know I’m not… I mean, I have a wallet. I just left it at my hotel. I’m here for a conference.”
I don’t know why I felt the need to explain myself, but I did.
He smiled at that, and it softened the tiredness in his face considerably.
“I didn’t think anything,” he said. “It’s raining. You needed somewhere to sit.”
He pulled out the chair across from me, looked toward the counter to check that everything was fine, and then sat down. “I’m Marco.”
“Tory,” I said.
We talked for almost 40 minutes.
The rain didn’t let up, and Marco was easy to talk to in the way that some people simply are — unhurried, genuinely curious, and not performing conversation but actually having it.
I asked about the café, and he told me he and his wife, Rosa, had opened it four years ago with everything they had.
The neighborhood had changed around them faster than they anticipated. Rents went up, foot traffic shifted, and they had spent the last year and a half doing everything right, while still slowly falling behind.
“We work every shift ourselves now,” he said, without self-pity. “It keeps the labor costs down. Rosa bakes everything in the back.” He looked around the room with the expression of someone looking at something they built with their hands.
