The former barista calls them her dudes.
They lifted her spirits if she was having a down day and gave her the biggest tip she’d ever seen when she left them — and the coffee shop — behind.
“I looked so forward to every Thursday,” Kasey Yates says. “It was just my joy.”
Their friendship is an unlikely one, this klatch of retired doctors and lawyers and judges who gathered to gab and drink coffee each week, and a mom serving up lattes and cinnamon rolls at the Harbor Coffeehouse in the Piedmont shopping center.
“I was always so impressed with them, they were just so humble and they accepted me as an equal.”
The dudes were equally impressed with Yates.
“She just has a bubbly personality,” said Chuck Gregorius, a retired anesthesiologist. “You’d go up to the counter and she always had this bright, sunny smile.”
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She’d set up their tables, says Harry Tolly, the lone dentist in the bunch. “She was just helpful.”
Says pathologist Bob Shapiro: “She was always the nicest to us.”
She was curious. Learning their names, coaxing details of their lives.
She loved that they celebrated each other’s birthdays by making the birthday boy buy.
And they loved how the coffee shop celebrated them, arriving with a candle-lit cupcake and goofy sunglasses and hats.
The dudes were meeting as usual Thursday — a group that started small 11 years ago and has grown to more than 25.
Artist Cliff Hollestelle was an original, so was heart doctor Chuck Wilson and Bill Owen, who had a career in pharmaceutical sales. Tolly joined six years ago. Gregorious has been around for three.
Yates joined them, too, for the first time since her last day on the job. She found a spot at the long table, enveloped by men who’d traded in suits and scrubs for flannel shirts and red sweaters and workout attire.
Plates of small cupcakes and brownies lined the tables in honor of the occasion. A 40th birthday for Yates and a bigger number for Von Innes, 84, a retired architect and engineer.
Yates had taken time off from work to be there. A birthday present to herself.
In late November, she left Harbor Coffeehouse and started a full-time job with insurance and benefits.
She was excited to have the security of a new job, but she knew how much she’d miss the coffee shop, and her guys.
“It was the first time in my life I’ve felt deeply sad and very happy at the same time,” she says.
She'd started pouring coffee in 2011, just a few hours a week in the beginning, back when it was Sunrise Coffee, and then the Love Knot.
Back when she didn't need to work.
“Originally, when I got the job, a family friend owned it,” Yates says. “And I had coffee shop experience and I said I’d help get it going.”
She liked the work and she started adding hours as her son and daughter grew.
But then her marriage ended and she knew she’d need to find another job.
She wrote a letter to her dudes letting them know what was happening in her life outside the coffee shop, in case she wasn’t her usual sunny self. And letting them know how much they meant to her. Their kindness. Their friendship.
Her last day came, and went.
A few weeks later, she got a call. The Thursday guys had something they wanted to give her.
A group photo of the men at the coffee shop. A card in a red envelope: We all regard you as a gift. Your smile and cheery personality brighten our Thursdays ...
Her final tip.
There were hundreds of dollars in the envelope, Yates says. Enough to help with Christmas for the kids and a down payment for her 16-year-old’s first car.
The gift was overwhelming — and so was the friendship that proceeded it.
“They made me smile at a hard time in my life; it meant more to me than they know.”
At 10 a.m. Thursday, coffee is over for another week. Her dudes rise from their seats for a last photo with their former barista and friend.
Gregorius explains the farewell present before taking his place.
“We were all very fond of her and we remain that way,” he says. “It’s too bad she has to work during Thursday coffee.”