Roasters.

The shop.

Roasters is the coffee shop on the east side of Main Street, between the post office and the Lamplighter diner. It opened in 2011 in the storefront that had previously been a tax-prep office. The roastery itself is in the back room; the bags of green beans come in by truck from a port two states over every other Tuesday. The owner, a former big-city barista, moved to Harmon for reasons her customers have stopped asking about.

The room is small. Six stools at a counter that runs the depth of the front window, two two-tops by the door, a small table at the back where the regulars who knit on Wednesdays knit on Wednesdays. The light is good in the morning. The coffee is, by Harmon’s standards, excellent; by the standards of any city the owner has worked in, fine.

The counter.

The six stools at the front window are the Roasters scene. They face out at Main Street. The customer who sits there has, by sitting there, declared something about why they are downtown: they are not in a meeting, they are not waiting for anyone, they have come specifically to look out at the street with a cup in front of them. The Lamplighter’s booth is for the conversation the protagonist did not know they were going to have. The Roasters counter is for the conversation the protagonist has already, privately, started, alone.

The Seer appears at the counter in The Honest Woman, in chapter three, sitting at the stool to Ruth Calloway’s right at seven-eighteen on a Tuesday morning. The Seer does not speak. The Seer simply, in the way of the books, is there. The warning Ruth carries home that morning is the warning she gives herself, in the Seer’s implied presence, looking out at a street she has looked at every weekday for nineteen years.