I’ve got no problem working Christmas morning at Bean City, but that’s my rule: no Elvis Christmas music. I’ll listen to Mariah Carey or Artie Shaw or Lavay Smith and Her Red Hot Skillet Lickers all day long, but if Elvis comes mooing over those speakers, I’m going home.

I’ve got no beef with Elvis in general, you understand. I know all the words to “Blue Hawaii,”and if you get enough Fireball in me, I’ll back you up on “Kentucky Rain” at karaoke ‘til you’d think maybe America really does Got Talent. But I spent a summer painting names on ornaments at one of those 365 Days of Christmas! stores in a touristy mountain town. We only had one CD of “Holiday Classics” that played on a constant ten-hours-a-day loop, and I’m not lying to you, “Blue Christmas” was on it twice. By the Fourth of July, I was having nightmares that I’d been buried alive in Elvis’ coffin and he wouldn’t stop singing that song. “Maybe if I sing it louder, someone will come and rescue you,” his ghost proposed on a near-nightly basis. But no one ever did.

So I rescued myself by declaring a unilateral moratorium on that song, and since Jackie, my boss at Bean City, has three little kids who still believe in Santa, she doesn’t care what I refuse to listen to as long as someone who isn’t her can get the joint open by six. My family doesn’t even get home from Midnight Mass until one-thirty in the morning; most years when it’s time for me to go to work at five A.M. we’re still around the dinner table. So for me it’s not a question of getting up early, but rather of staying up until noon, which I wouldn’t be that into if I worked at a dairy farm, but I can get my head around it here, where it’s all the espresso you can drink. Which I’m sure Jackie would be happy to give me as my Christmas present if she knew she was doing it. She’s a sport like that.

I still want to get into teaching when I finish school—at thirty-three, I’m what Metro State calls a “non-traditional” student, but I shall finish—but I gotta say, this coffee-slinging gig’s alright. As long as we show up reasonably on time and don’t cuss anybody out, Jackie kinda lets us do our thing. I can have dreads to my waist, I can be plastered in tats, I can pierce whatever I want and wear a kilt to work, just please wipe out the sink before you go home. Not that I do any of that—I mean, I guess my hair’s kinda long, and I might have one tattoo, never you mind where—but I appreciate the Live Free! atmosphere, and my ink-splattered, dreadlocked co-worker Seth, who wears one every day, definitely has the legs to rock a kilt.

And it doesn’t exactly look like the Hajj around here on Christmas morning. Seeming to believe that the modern coffeehouse economy would crumble without them, one or two small-black-coffee guys still lurk with their laptops; one or two young couples cuddle up on the couch in the corner and let their hot chocolate go cold before they go their separate holiday ways; the occasional frazzled middle-aged mom, halfway to her in-laws’ in Aurora, will leave her minivan running right out front and scurry in for a double shot of Somebody Help Me Before I Strangle One Of These Kids, but these are always to go. No, working Christmas works for me—I’m churched for the year, I’m fed like a tick, I’ve drunk half a bottle of Calvados with my cousins and watched the kids gleefully rip through a houseful of presents. Now all I have to do is earn my little eleven dollars an hour playing souvenir stuffed moose shuffleboard until Seth rolls in at eleven-thirty and tells me to go home, then eat again and sleep ‘til my mom comes and bangs down the door in two days just to make sure I didn’t die. My life is not especially complicated.

Seth was supposed to be here twenty minutes ago, but I’m not fussed about it. I’ll text him if it ticks over an hour—one afternoon he made kind of a big deal out of making sure I had a guy named Lennox’s number. “If you go more than two days without seeing me, call this dude, not the cops, Benny, you gotta promise me.”—but around here, the less you squeal, the less you get squealed on, and we all have our days. Besides, it means another shot of espresso, and the chance to lean against the counter and drool over the dude in the hoodie hunkered down by the door.