Free Oh! You Pretty Things by Shanna Mahin

organic milk. Everyone in the neighborhood gets at least one bottle delivered two times a week. No one on the street talks to each other, but they all share vendors: the milkman, the dog groomer, the car detailer who arrives armed with Q-tips and baby wipes to extract grime from Bentleys and Range Rovers and Carreras. We’re all in this together, yo. Our people make the village.
    I leave the antique French wine carrier by the front door on Wednesdays, and on Thursday mornings it’s filled with two glass bottles of milk, fresh from the cow. It’s the most expensive milk on the planet. No matter that we don’t use milk in this house. It’s part of the décor.
    But not today. Today I’m going to tackle the cappuccino machine and make Tyler a coffee.
    The La Marzocco GS/3 is a metaphor for my life: big, shiny, and superfluous. I grind beans in the burr grinder, tamp the grounds into the holder, and fire up the gleaming beast.
    The plumbed-in line isn’t feeding water into the reservoir, so I dump in tap water and hope for the best. A few minutes later, a stream of inky brown espresso flows into the oversize ceramic cup. I feel like I just discovered penicillin. I pour a few inches of milk into the pitcher and plunge the steaming wand into it. The sound is like a freight train. I’m used to it from my stint at the Date Palm, but Zelda tucks her tail between her hind legs and creeps into the living room.
    I hear the bedroom door creak open, and Tyler pads into the kitchen.
    â€œHey, sparkle,” I say with a buoyancy in my voice that I’m channeling from a long-ago childhood moment when my mother was lurching around the kitchen, struggling to hold a cup of coffee in her shaking hands. “How are you?”
    â€œWhat’s that?” he says.
    I’ve got the loftiest puff of foam rising above the edge of the milk pitcher, and I waggle it in his direction. “Intelligentsia coffee and the most ephemeral foam you’ve ever seen, from cows untouched by human hands.”
    â€œReally?” He cocks his head at the GS/3. “I thought that thing was toast.”
    â€œI’m the coffee whisperer,” I tell him. “You know I have a Venice boardwalk pedigree.”
    I pour the espresso into the cappuccino cups with a high-handed flourish, then scoop foam as glossy and stiff as meringue onto the top of each one. Tyler reluctantly takes the warm cup from my outstretched hand. He sniffs like a cat nosing a long-dead grasshopper on a perfectly manicured lawn.
    Then he takes a tentative sip and sighs in pure pleasure.
    I dump the coffee grounds and the milk leftovers into the Herbeau Luberon farmer’s sink, rinsing the debris into the disposal with the Frattini pull-down faucet. There isn’t one thing in this kitchen that isn’t an architectural marvel and a name brand.
    â€œOh my God, Jess,” he finally says. “This is nectar.”
    â€œThanks,” I say, shrugging like it’s nothing.
    And maybe I’m not cooking anything except ravioli, maybe I’m not even moving forward in any perceptible fashion, but that’s okay. My pleasure at Tyler’s approval eclipses all else.
    Here’s the thing: approval is an issue for me. Big. Thanks, Donna.

    Take Robbie, my ex-husband. Robbie basically bridged the gap from my wayward adolescence into my mid-twenties, a desolate period where I knocked around making ends meet with temp jobs and bad dinner dates with older men. I met Robbie after I’d crawled my way up from an assistant manager position at a gym in Venice, where my primary duty was to distribute shipments of gray-market Italian steroids, to a gig I really enjoyed at a boutique online travel agency for people too wealthy or aspirational to have their assistants bother with the details.
    Robbie was a partner in a smallish record label called Death/Friends. “Record executive” sounds glamorous, but he spent most days