The previous night mother had attempted to make tea.  Tea then coffee, that was the plan.  In the little pre-packaged pouches provided by hotel concessions.

Upon inspection mother noted two nay, three things:

Advancing, almost marine rust on the warming plate

Water in the well from some previous occupant of the room

No heat, no perk 

So she reported it to the desk clerk, all the while noting the following-

A previous hotel encounter wherein a woman of rapidly advancing years has chided the desk clerk for a similarly broken coffee maker.

And the likelihood that somewhere, somehow, the night shift clerk possessed a hog, of the Harley-Davidson, not Charlotte’s Web variety.

He said they were all out of fresh coffee makers.

He said he would transmit her request for a new one to the day guy.

Who ended up being a woman of short stature.

Who said she would fetch a tall person to fetch a new one from a high shelf.

This leaving mother to picture the places in the hotel with high shelves and coffee makers

…as she returned to her room.

And talked to her lovely and prepossessing daughter approximately thus:

I was surprised you did not come to breakfast.

Well, in truth, it was because I knew you would bring back the good stuff.

I wanted you to come down because there was a family next to us. Grandparents, a dad discussing his absent son who was allowed to drive down on the highway.

He described the process the way you might describe throwing a child into deep water in order to swim–“eventually he stopped weaving and wobbling”-which of course makes one wonder about when he was “weaving and wobbling.”

Then the father called his son to breakfast-whisp of a boy with hair like a tornado-whoosh!

Knock on the door.

Daughter opens it to a young man, tall, dark, and handsome, like a prince in a fairy tale, only coffee maker instead of glass slipper.

He proffers the box, offers to install it. Mother says she can manage, not realizing that he is a prince, the door is a portal and that all along the coffee makers had carefully conspired to bring these two together.