In her thirty-two years, Claudette had managed to date one man who might just have been the one. Charlie was a boyishly handsome, fun-loving, fully employed, and emotionally stable paralegal in a big firm working his way through law school at night at Oklahoma City University. The couple dated for about a year and were talking about moving in together when Charlie unexpectedly stopped by the apartment Claudette shared with her mother. It was a Wednesday evening, Claudette remembered, because she and Esther had rushed through dinner so that her mother could get to her weekly Stitch-and-Bitch gathering on time. Over fish tacos and coleslaw, Claudette had hinted to her mother that they would not be roommates forever. “That’s totally fine, sweetheart,” Ms. Lucas had responded in her  languid transplanted Texan drawl. “But if you’re considering moving in with that beau of yours, ask yourself this: why would he buy the cow when he can get the milk for free?” Before Claudette could react, her mother jumped up, stacked her dishes by the sink, gathered her knitting bag and purse, and headed to the door. As Claudette began to fill the sink with soapy warm water, her mother called out, “Bye, dear, I’ll be home around nine.” Claudette heard the apartment door open and her mother gasp. Drying her hands on her apron, she rushed out of the kitchen to find her mother standing and clutching her chest. Charlie stood in the doorway with his hands on Ms. Lucas’s shoulders. “Speak of the devil,” her mother said. “Your beau ‘bout scared me to death, lurking outside our door. Why didn’t you tell me Charlie was coming? I would have made extra tacos.” Without waiting for an answer, she shrugged off Charlie’s hands and disappeared.

At first, Claudette was delighted by Charlie’s surprise appearance. He had timed his arrival perfectly so that the couple could enjoy a few hours alone. Her delight quickly dissipated as she took in the look on her boyfriend’s ruddy face. Slowly, she approached him, her face frozen in an expression of worried curiosity. “Is everything okay, Charlie?”

“Yes and no. We better sit down.” Sitting at the half-cleared dining room table, Charlie broke the news to Claudette that he was moving to Denver. “It’s two things, really,” he told her. “I don’t want to live my whole life in this city. My classes are all online, so this seems like a great opportunity to try out a new setting.  Greenstein, Wyatt, Garber, and Wong has a satellite office in Denver, and I got approved to transfer.”

“You did all this without telling me? What if I don’t want to move to Denver? What about my mother?”

“Well, Claudette, that’s the other thing. I care about you. A lot. But... I think I need something... different. A different kind of partner. You’re awesome, and some guy is going to be very lucky to snag you. I’m just not that guy.”

By this point, Claudette was crying and making no effort to staunch the flow of tears down her cheeks. “Different? What is that even supposed to mean? Different.”

“I don’t know how to put this without sounding harsh,” Charlie explained, “but I need someone who doesn’t want to take care of me. Who doesn’t constantly wait on me and anticipate my needs. Someone who isn’t so... doting.”

Claudette gave up on romance after Charlie. He had been the only good one in a string of pitiful boyfriends and dating him had gotten her nothing better than any of the others. In fact, she concluded that God had blessed nuns and lesbians with more sense than He had granted her. Claudette’s luck with roommates had not been much better; during and after college, one after another had been ill-equipped to cope with even the most basic wrenches life threw their way. That’s how she ended up sharing an apartment with her mother. Once over two-dollar pitchers at a happy hour with her co-workers, someone had asked the question of the group, “What’s your superpower?” The answer came to Claudette in a flash, although she wasn’t willing to share the truth; her superpower was attracting sad souls needing a mommy figure.

Claudette’s recovery from the breakup had been a long, hard slog. Her mother had been a great support, allowing not one single platitude to escape her lips. Nary an “I told you so” or a “You gave away the milk for free.” Esther had done what Claudette needed most. She had reminded Claudette that Lucas women are strong, that they are smart, that they are resourceful, and that “Lucas women are survivors. We don’t need no damned men.”

Claudette became determined to remake herself. To become more independent. Less doting. To take care of herself more than she tended to others. Despite the fear that working at Frontier National Bank would eventually drain her of her very essence, Claudette marched into her boss’s office and asked for a promotion which he readily granted. “What took you so long?” Mr. Waring had asked. “You were ready to be a supervisor a year ago.” Once the slightly higher salary had started to show up in her paychecks, Claudette moved into a one-bedroom apartment and resigned herself to the life of a lonely midwestern bank supervisor. Her life wasn’t bad, but it felt soulless. She spent her weekdays at the bank where she was popular among the customers and well-liked by co-workers and managers. In her free time, she frequented cafés where she would enjoy a variety of coffee drinks while she read novel after novel. On the weekends, she occasionally went out with friends from high school or from work. Every Sunday, she had dinner with her mother, who fretted over her only child. “Why aren’t you dating, honey? It’s time to get back on the horse.” “Why don’t you do something different with your hair? New do, new you.” “What about children? You are planning to give me grandbabies, aren’t you?” Claudette was adept at dodging her mother’s comments by changing the subject. “Mom, I was thinking about Uncle Buck the other day. What was that story you told about Buck and the water snake?” And off Ms. Lucas would go, telling a long, detailed story from her childhood back in southeastern Texas. Or, sometimes, Claudette tried challenging her mother. “I thought Lucas women don’t need no damned men.” Her mother had a variety of quippy comebacks for this, though, all of them along the lines of “we don’t need them but that doesn’t mean we can’t want them.”

To top off her transformation, Claudette rescued a dog. She went to the local SPCA and asked to see the longest canine resident. A sullen girl with spiky purple hair, a large nose ring, an armful of tattoos and a nametag that read “Keli” had immediately taken her to meet Espresso, a fifteen-pound, one-eyed, black mutt who instantly began to wag his stubby tail. “This one here’s been with us most of his life. We reckon he’s about a year to fifteen months or so. Found wandering the streets, sick as a dog.” Keli paused and smiled at her own joke, then resumed her diffident attitude. “Had a terrible infection in that eye. Vet couldn’t save it. I thought we should name him Cyclops, but I was outvoted. Nobody wants Espresso. Guess it’s the eye. He’s next in line to be put down if we run out of room. There’s a hurricane brewing offa Texas, so we’re likely to get some dogs from down there if the shelters have to evacuate. Tell ya the truth, Espresso’s days are numbered.” Claudette was nearly sold as soon as she heard the name. Coffee of all kinds was one of the things she enjoyed most in the world, and she was a believer in signs. The sad story of Espresso’s life was just the frothy cream on the latte. Charlie be damned, Espresso needed someone to take care of him.

Claudette, with her new position, her new apartment, and her new companion settled into a rhythm that was, if not exciting, at least comfortable. Comfort gave way to despair one Sunday afternoon when she arrived at Esther’s apartment, but no one answered her knock on the door. Claudette cursed herself for insisting her mother take back the key once she had moved into her own place. It was a purely symbolic demonstration of her independence. Thinking her mother might have run to the store for some forgotten ingredient, she checked her phone for a text. Nothing. She walked back to the parking lot and saw Esther’s car in its appointed spot. With a rising wave of panic, Claudette called the building super who offered to let her in. “I saw her bringing in groceries a couple of hours ago. She’s probably just napping.”

Claudette felt a chill pass through her body the moment the super pushed the door open and stepped back to let her pass. Three bags of groceries were visible on the kitchen counter. She hurried to the doorway and found her mother face down on the floor, her purse still over her shoulder and her car keys several feet from her body. Claudette knelt down and felt for a pulse.

“I’ll call 9-1-1,” the super offered.

“It’s too late,” Claudette whispered. “She’s gone.” After several deep breaths to calm herself, she spoke again, her words barely audible. “Just the way her mother went. And her brother.”

Claudette was only six months into her new life when Esther died. The autopsy led the coroner to rule the cause of death a heart arrythmia. His reassurance that her mother did not suffer did little to dull her ache. Claudette’s life felt more soulless, less anchored than ever before. At times, she thought the grief would literally kill her.

Claudette had never spent much time thinking about her father. She had very little information about him, far less than her mother could have shared had she been so inclined. “Sweetie, let’s just say that the only good thing that man ever did for me was give me you,” Esther would say, or “Trust me, girl, there are some folks you’d do better never to meet. Your father is one of ‘em.” When her mother discovered she was pregnant in her mid-twenties, she packed up her belongings and drove her rusty yellow Beetle the four hundred thirty miles up I-35 to Oklahoma City and found a job as an art teacher at a school for deaf children where she worked until the day she died.

A few months after the funeral, Claudette began having a recurring dream in which her tone-deaf mother appeared as a gospel singer backed by a full tie-dye-robed choir and belting out musical advice. She had taken the dream as a sign and used the lion’s share of her inheritance to follow her mother’s advice. She quit the bank job, loaded up her vintage Jeep with her few worldly possessions, and drove the four hundred thirty miles down I-35 to Delroy, Texas nonstop, Espresso happily riding shotgun.

Claudette’s first impressions of Delroy were a mix of “sweet and homey” and “backwards and dying.” In most ways, it did not match the Delroy of her imagination, one painted with the words and images of her mother’s stories. Esther had talked frequently about the little town of her own childhood. “Back in Delroy, folks looked after each other. We kids couldn’t get away with nothing ‘cause news of our misdeeds would reach our mommas faster than we could.” “The front door of our house back on Main Street in Delroy did not even have a lock. Didn’t need one.” “They just don’t build towns like Delroy anymore. It’s a damn shame.”

Following more hypnagogic urging from her mother, Claudette had wandered around Delroy’s Main Street in search of a big white house with a wraparound porch and a stained-glass front door. Just when she was about to give up, she noticed a big yellow house that had been converted into commercial spaces at the corner of Main Street and Bluebonnet Avenue. In one of the front windows, she saw a sign that read “Storefront for rent. Perfect for a boutique or café.” Slowly, she and Espresso climbed the front steps onto the wraparound porch and noticed the golds, reds, and blues in the glass of the front door. Despite the fact that she had never visited Delroy before and that the yellow clapboard was the wrong color, she felt sure that her mother had grown up here. A feeling passed through her with such intensity that she stumbled backwards into a swing and sat down. Espresso immediately jumped onto the swing and rested the front half of his body in her lap. Rocking the swing gently with her toes, Claudette felt the presence of her mother, Uncle Buck, and her grandmother, all of them lost to her now. She grabbed a pen from her backpack and wrote the phone number from the sign in the window on her palm.

*****

Earlier in the month, Claudette had decided that the co-workers at FNB who had told her she was crazy were right. She had, after all, quit a stable job with advancement opportunities and excellent benefits to open a coffee shop in a small town not too far from Austin but too far to bask in Austin’s hip weirdness and wealth. A town she’d never visited and where she did not know a single soul. Because her deceased mother had advised her to do so in a dream. And, again upon her dead mother’s musical urging, she had named the café Peace, Love, and Coffee. The spreadsheet was turning redder while the money left from her mother’s modest estate was rapidly dwindling. Reluctantly, Claudette had reached out to a mentor at the local Chamber of Commerce, a retired gentleman who had successfully run a hardware store in Delroy for more than forty years. Mr. Flores delighted in Claudette’s spunk and idealism. He very much wanted the young woman to succeed, but he had not been entirely encouraging. “Go get a real job,” he had told her, “and hire a minimum wage worker to cover the hours you work it. Do some more marketing. Bring in some entertainment. Folks in Delroy aren’t used to paying two bucks for a cuppa coffee. Gotta give ‘em something they can’t get at a convenience store for half the price. And maybe tone down the hippie décor. Honey, remember, you’re in rural Texas, not San Francisco.”

Delroy was decidedly not San Francisco, not that Claudette had ever been to California. She had hardly been out of Oklahoma.

The novice café owner accepted that kindly old Mr. Flores was right about everything except the hippie décor. Her mother had basically designed the café in Claudette’s dreams, and the décor was nonnegotiable. All by herself because Lucas women don’t need no damned men, Claudette had prepped the old plaster walls, repairing the cracks the way her mother had taught her, and painted the walls a shocking combination of chartreuse and orchid. She filled the café with two-tops and ladderback chairs she found at a hotel closeout sale. She reupholstered all the chairs in a daisy print fabric and made herself a matching apron. On the top of each round table, she painted a peace sign and placed a battery-powered lava lamp and a bud vase with a silk daisy. The walls were decorated with thrift store finds including macrame wall hangings, framed posters from 60’s movies, and long strings of beads. Her one big splurge was asking a friend from her college days to design a wooden sign to hang in front of the café along with the signs for the psychiatrist, the tarot card reader, the personal injury attorney, and the yoga studio that occupied the rest of the converted house. When the sign arrived, she found a note taped to it: Good luck with this crazy endeavor. Accept the sign as a café-warming gift. I hope to get down your way to see you and the business. Love you! Tears of joy and relief filled Claudette’s eyes as she hung the artful “Peace, Love, and Coffee” sign beneath “Bend It Like Becca Yoga Studio.”

Without enough business to keep the fledgling café aloft and with no other source of income, Claudette heeded the rest of Mr. Flores’s advice. Upon her mother’s dreamy direction, she lied on her resumé, applied to several medical transcriptionist jobs, and landed enough work to keep her busy in a closet-turned-office in the back of Peace, Love, and Coffee. The going was slow as she puzzled her way through words like iatrogenic and pathognomonic mumbled by Dr. Patel, Delroy’s only psychiatrist, and vulvodynia and episiotomy said a bit too cheerfully by the nurse practitioner at the Travis County Women’s Free Clinic. But the job paid well, and for the first couple of weeks, she had been able to jump up to greet the occasional patron that wandered in. By the third week, though, she begrudgingly accepted her fate; she would have to take on many more transcription jobs to make ends meet for the time being, and that meant hiring someone.