Cheryl Bedini, who had trained to be a lawyer but returned to her beloved Sag Harbor for good in 1993 to open the Java Nation coffee roastery on Main Street with her husband, Andres Bedini, died on April 22 at home of a heart attack. She was 55.
Ms. Bedini’s life was one of distinct chapters. There was a childhood attending city schools and spending summers in the traditionally black resort neighborhoods of Sag Harbor. There was boarding school in Massachusetts, college at George Washington University, followed by an idyllic period as a young professional in the nation’s capital. Then there was law school in California (she graduated but never took the bar exam), followed by a sudden epiphany over burgers and beer during a visit to Sag Harbor.
Later, once she was a mother, she took on volunteer roles in the Sag Harbor School District, heading its multicultural night for a decade and vocally supporting its sports teams. She was known both as a loyal friend and a person who would brook no fools — a quality that infuriated many but was also a point of deep admiration among many others.
During an early 1990s visit to Sag Harbor, she and Mr. Bedini were finishing up a meal at the Main Street Tavern. He said, “Man, I could really use a cup of coffee,” and one of them, they could never agree which, suggested they open a coffeehouse themselves.
They poured their first customer’s cup in 1994. The shop they called Java Nation, up a raised alleyway with little in the way of foot traffic until they arrived, eventually became one of the village’s busiest social hubs.
Cheryl Carrion was born on June 29, 1964, at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan to the former Lois James Fairley and Wesley Howard Carrion, the youngest of three siblings. Her parents both worked, and she was often in the care of her grandmother Lois Vashtai Simpson Fairley from Ashville, S.C., with whom she had a special bond and who lived nearby and could come to the house. The family lived first in Queens, where she attended school in East Elmhurst. When she was about 9, they moved to Westbury. She attended the United Nations School in Manhattan, which took two hours to reach on public transit. As a high school junior, she transferred to Northfield Mount Hermon School in Gill, Mass., where, among other things, she was a track star, throwing the shot and discus, and setting a record as part of a 4-by-100 relay team. She also played on the basketball and volleyball teams.
Sag Harbor was perhaps the biggest constant in her life. The family had a summer house in Sag Harbor Hills from 1960 but had rented before that in Chatfield’s Hill. Though her parents divorced, they each bought houses of their own there, her mother finding one on a high bluff overlooking Northwest Harbor.
“Cheryl loved both houses. There were dirt roads and she would walk in flip-flops between her mother’s and father’s,” Mr. Bedini said. She never missed a summer. “That’s when she fell in love with Sag Harbor. Her parents could not get them out of the water. Even in law school she kept coming back. . . . She could not stay away from this place.”
By the time she graduated from high school, her mother was living in an apartment on Roosevelt Island in New York City, and she enrolled at New York University, transferring after a time to George Washington University. She and Mr. Bedini, from Bethesda, Md., and who went to a different college, were introduced in 1983 by a friend of his who was at George Washington.
After graduating she worked for a data-entry firm, then as a bike messenger, and then landed a job as a paralegal at Kaye Scholer. Mr. Bedini sometimes was called in as a ringer to play on her firm’s softball team. There were two games a week, followed by beers or dinner. They moved in together and spent idyllic years as young professionals in a thriving city.
She entered Santa Clara Law School in 1990, and Mr. Bedini joined her in California. There, amid the early years of the specialty coffee boom, they developed a taste for the fresh-roasted products in the new shops that were opening. After she finished her law degree, they decided to move to Sag Harbor and try opening a coffee roaster. They married in Reno on the trip. Mr. Bedini recalled that it cost them $28 and that he declined an extra few dollars for a tuxedo rental.
While living rent-free in her mother’s basement they found what they thought would be a good location on the Kimco mall property on Montauk Highway in Bridgehampton, but on the eve of signing the lease, another tenant in the complex, also roasting coffee, objected and the landlord scrapped the deal.
That day, Mr. Bedini, out for a beer in Sag Harbor, noticed for-rent signs in the Shopping Cove. He talked to two business owners there who joked that the only people who ever walked past were on their way between Murph’s Tavern and Sholly’s Pub. Al Daniels, the village building inspector, was skeptical; he had never heard of Starbucks, which was opening its first storefront in New York City at about that time.
They took the lease, bought a roaster, and opened their doors. Ms. Bedini ran the roaster and worked behind the counter. “She was more of a morning person,” Mr. Bedini said. Business was slow at first; maybe 25 customers came in by noon. They traveled widely, visiting coffee growing regions in India, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Peru, and Argentina, among others.
As the shop’s following grew, the couple organized a women’s softball team, which played in the East Hampton slow-pitch league. A first daughter, Chiara, was born in 2003 and a second, Aniela Sofia, in 2007.
Java Nation lost its lease in 2012. Friends carried the 1,000-pound roaster in two pieces out the door and onto a truck for the move to its present location on Maple Lane in Bridgehampton. Following the move, Ms. Bedini began to focus more on her house and children and helping out at the school.
“She would go to all the meetings, volunteer for anything,” Mr. Bedini said. She organized the multicultural night, ran an annual fall barbecue for the elementary school, managed a prom-night “red carpet,” and attended boys and girls basketball games. She was a Yankees fan too, her husband noted, and watched football and World Cup soccer. She played tennis at East Hampton Indoor Tennis and liked to sail and bought a small boat for herself. She was a regular player at the Town Line BBQ trivia nights and would save her winnings to buy a nonresident East Hampton Village beach parking sticker each summer to go to the ocean, where she would read and nap and watch her children play in the water.
She was also a “hell of a cook,” her husband said, and saved cooking magazines and cookbooks and had recipes everywhere. “‘If you can read, you can cook,’ she would say.”
Both of her parents died before her. She is survived by a sister, Robyn Hagans of Oldfield, and a brother, Dr. Wesley Carrion, who also lives in Oldfield and is an orthopedic surgeon at Stony Brook University Hospital, as well as five nieces and nephews, two of whom spent summers working at Java Nation.
Ms. Bedini was cremated. Her ashes will be dispersed in the bay and ocean. Friends organized a “love parade” passing by the Bedinis’ house on Saturday. Led by a Sag Harbor fire truck, and with a police escort, it drew hundreds of vehicles.
