Hope had Coffee

“Damn defective alarm clock.  Late again.”
Sasha so wants to drift back to sleep.  It's raining.  Hard.  A seventeen block trudge to work awaits her.  She has no car and can't afford to pay for a cab or an Uber.  What’s worse, this month Sasha had to help her mother, Luella, seriously ill and living three states away, pay overdue medical bills.  Leaving her with no money to pay the rent.  It's not the first time.  Threatened with eviction by a soulless landlord, she fears the inevitable.  Returning to the women’s shelter.  She can’t bear the thought.
Groggy from a restless night of little sleep, Sasha rises slowly from the stained mattress lying on a warped laminate floor.  She puts on her uniform, a fraying coat and tattered baseball cap, opens the triple-locked door to her tiny one-room apartment, and steps out into the dimly lit tenement hallway.  
The zombie-like slog to her job as a waitress at Tino’s 24-Hour Cafe has begun.  
Sasha’s umbrella was snatched from her hand by a teenage kid who bolted with it out of the laundromat yesterday.  She is drenched in the downpour, slipping twice on the sidewalk in sneakers long since worn smooth at the souls.  The second time she slams flat on her back against the soaked sidewalk.  Sasha struggles to her feet.  Wincing in agony with every step, she forges on.  The ferocious wind gusts the unrelenting deluge sideways through the city streets, stinging her face repeatedly.

Eloise, the veteran waitress of many a greasy spoon, rushes out the door immediately at shift change.  Her parting words to Sasha in passing are ominous.
“I’ll say a prayer for ya, sugar.  Even if you ain’t religious, you gonna need it.”  
Sasha had hardly had a second to shake off the frigid and wet when her manager, Troy, delivers the dreadful news.  Lainie, the waitress with whom Sasha shares the graveyard shift, was hit by a skidding delivery truck on her own walk to work.  She's in the hospital in critical condition.  They don't know if Lainie's going to make it through the night.  While Sasha feels sick for her friend, she knows she must now face the next eight hours all by herself.  The revolving door of drunks, drug addicts, prostitutes and criminals will show no sympathy.  
Sasha wants to cry without suppression. 
 
Into this living nightmare enters a man.  Older guy.  Dressed in a black slicker and a tan bowler hat.  He is tall and quite handsome.  Settling onto a stool at the counter, he politely asks Sasha for a coffee with cream and sugar.  He actually says "please".  She brings him his hot beverage.  He thanks her.  Their eyes lock briefly.  
Though at least seventy, his bright blues are youthful, vibrant.  His gaze penetrates.  A sudden sense of warmth rushes through Sasha.  She feels as if he is excavating her anguish. 
 
Quickly turning away, she shakes her head and scoffs to herself, "Don't be such a chump, girl."   
   
A grizzled drifter at the end of the counter shouts, “I ordered tater tots.  Not frickin' fries, you idiots!"   
He didn't.  Yet, as usual, Sasha replies dutifully, "So sorry about that, sir.  Your tots are comin' right up." 
The man looks at the geezer, not with disdain, but with evident empathy.  As if he once lived in his scuffed and shabby shoes.  
Every so often he will catch Sasha’s eye, always offering a comforting grin.  And each time she returns the gesture.  Not forced, naturally.    

After a while the kindly gentleman lays a $20 bill down on the counter for a $2.50 tab.  He stands up and pulls a large envelope out of his side coat pocket.  It’s contents are thick.  Placing it next to his empty cup, he nods and smiles at Sasha.  Once again, a peaceful current of warmth flows through her.  With a tip of the cap to his server for the evening, he turns and walks out the door.  Sasha watches as the man is gradually swallowed by darkness and sheets of rain.
Grasping the blank and sealed envelope, she gently tears it open.  Inside is another envelope and a note, handwritten in gold ink.  The message is brief.  

Please open in private.  
  
Sasha strides briskly through the kitchen and past the cook, Renaldo, who is frantically preparing orders of burgers and BLTs, and dashes directly to the walk-in freezer.  Once inside, she shuts the door tightly. 

Then she opens the envelope.  

Sasha gasps.  All she sees is one hundred dollar bills.  So many of them.  
Ever so slowly, she releases bated breath.  With fingers trembling, she begins to count.  
Sasha checks her math.  Twice.  A third time.  Finally, convinced of her accuracy, she whispers the stunning total.  
"Three thousand dollars."  
Sasha can pay her rent.  And have plenty to spare.  Completely overcome, she collapses against the shelves of frozen meat and vegetables.  
At last, she can sob uncontrollably.  
Sasha pictures her bed-ridden mother.  Ravaged by Parkinson's, Luella’s condition deteriorates by the day.  Sasha worries constantly that she will not see her mom again before she succumbs to the insidious disease.  Now she can afford to travel, to be right by her beloved hero's side. 
Sasha blows her nose into a napkin from a nearby shelf, grabs another and wipes her eyes and cheeks dry.  Drawing a deep breath, she readies to return for another seven hours in the oppressive arena of the sad and sullen.

Before she does, Sasha stops for a moment.  She thinks about a mysterious man who just passed in and out of her life in the blink of an eye.  Who was he?  Why did he do such a profoundly kind favor for her?  Will she ever see him again? 
 
A peculiar image lingers.
  
The pelting rain and blurred glass greatly distorted her view.  Still, Sasha can swear that as she watched the benevolent stranger cross the boulevard, his silhouette seemed to be…...ascending.  

And she scoffs, “Don’t be such a chump, girl.”