Chapter 3
Maggie
The binder is shut on the desk by the lamp where I dropped it Tuesday afternoon, and I haven’t opened it once.
That’s on purpose. The firm would have put it on a slide: today the binder is for after the shift, because the shift is the data.
I can hear exactly how I’d have said that in a conference room, and I’m a little impressed and a little ashamed that the voice still comes when I call it, smooth as ever, before dawn in a beige motel room with no smile on and nobody to sell it to.
So I get dressed instead, and I start with the ring, because the ring is the one thing about this morning that’s already the right way around. It’s the small garnet on the thin gold band, the warm stone at the pad of the finger, and it has a specific weight on my right hand that I’d know blind.
Then I line the rest of them up on the dresser, which has become what I do now.
A small silver binder clip from the desk drawer.
A blank sticky note off the pad by the phone, folded once.
The half pencil that’s lived in my coat since the city, its eraser worn flat.
A single small silver earring whose match has been in my left ear for three months and which I’ve stopped pretending will ever turn up.
And a cinnamon receipt from Finley’s yesterday, already folded into quarters before I’d consciously decided I was a woman who keeps things in an apron pocket she doesn’t technically have yet.
I scoop them into the inside pocket of my coat and pat it once, like I’m checking for a passport. An aligned inventory, I think, for an intentional Thursday, and I want it on the record that I’m being sarcastic at myself, because if I’m not the one doing it first, my mother will.
I run the morning out loud while I do it, like my Nonna ran a rosary, except hers had God in it and mine has only my own nerves and a numbered list I can’t quite quit.
“One. Walk across the gravel lot and across Main Street and through the door of Finley’s.
Two. Tie the apron in three motions and listen at the wand for the sound he told me to listen for.
Three. Give Harsk Olenden no reason to regret the hire, after he watched me come back about the sign yesterday like a woman who’d lost an argument with a piece of paper.
” The third one runs longer than the other two. I leave it.
The binder stays on the desk.
Fog has rolled in by the time I open the motel door.
The gravel lot is gray. The air tastes like harbor and woodsmoke at the back of my throat, and out at the light the foghorn works its slow six-second cycle.
Main Street in October is the kind of empty that isn’t abandoned, just not switched on yet, and across the asphalt the front window of Finley’s glows a small warm rectangle in the fog like it’s the only thing in town that got the memo about being awake.
I’m stalling. I’m going to stop stalling now.
I cross.
The bell rings as the door swings in, and a little of the fog comes with me and gives up at my shoulder, and there’s Harsk at the till in a clean brown-canvas apron with one hand flat on the wood.
Six foot ten in a room with a ten-foot ceiling, which does something to the proportions of everything else in it.
Gray as the harbor at this hour. Modest tusks, dark hair cut short, and a face that isn’t doing one single thing I know how to read.
“Good morning,” I say. “5:38.”
“Morning.”
He says it once, like yesterday, at the pitch of a man who’s been up since the dark and has made peace with it.
The carafe by his right hand is one he poured before I walked in.
He tips his chin at the back hook, where my apron is hanging on the peg next to his like it’s been there longer than a day.
I take it down and move the inventory from my coat pocket into the apron pocket without looking, each thing passing under my thumb in the order I lined them up on the dresser.
“First strap,” I tell the apron, under my breath.
“Second strap. Knot.” The smile holds for two seconds with nobody watching and then slides off on its own, and it’s back half a second later because the bell rings and the door’s opening behind me.
It’s a man in a fleece with a thermos that’s lost most of its paint, here for coffee and not yet interested in being a whole person about it.
Harsk lifts his chin. The man returns it.
“Good morning, what can I get started for you?” I say it, and my voice lands the half step up it needed.
The man looks at me a beat longer than he looks at most surfaces.
Harsk says, “Drip, black, top off the thermos when you’ve got it,” and I have the carafe in my hand before I’ve decided to pick it up.
There’s a second customer, a woman in a wool coat with a paperback. There have been four, and none of them is the rush, because the rush is what comes. I tie the strings tighter at the small of my back.
The binder is still at the motel.
The bell starts ringing and doesn’t stop.
Three come through the door together, two in fleece the color of the harbor and one in a hi-vis vest off the public works truck out front.
Behind them the fog goes fast and bright with the sun breaking through to win the morning, and behind that there are four more people strung loose along the sidewalk, and that line is going to be twelve deep by ten past.
“Good morning,” I say. “What can I get started for you?”
Harsk works the till and the espresso machine, which are the same five-foot square of counter, and his hands go from the cash drawer to the grouphead and back without his shoulders ever seeming to move.
“Drip and a cardamom latte.” A beat. “Two drips, top off the thermos, fives are fine.” Then, on the next hand that lands on the wood, “Cardamom for the gentleman in the blue parka.” He doesn’t look at me when he says any of it.
The carafes come off the warmer and I’ve got the lids on before the second customer has finished asking if an oat milk is too much trouble.
The line’s to the door. By the height of the rush I’ve run the carafe dry twice and Harsk has refilled it from the back both times without a word, and I’ve learned that the to-go cups live on the bottom shelf under the wood.
The order book on the side of the till is filling up in his block letters, which is the first I’m learning that an order book is a thing that exists here.
I step over to the espresso machine, because Harsk is stuck at the till and the cardamom line is four deep and the man in the blue parka has been waiting long enough that his eyebrows are climbing and his phone is already out of his pocket.
The machine is a La Marzocco that’s been in this room for fifteen years, chrome and about the size of a small dog, with four buttons and a steam wand and a grouphead, and I’ve watched Harsk pull twenty shots on it since yesterday, which the interior helpfully reminds me is not at all the same thing as having pulled one.
Look, I tell myself, the firm trained you to turn a takedown article into a brand refresh in eighteen hours. An espresso machine is fine.
The portafilter goes up and locks under the grouphead like I’ve watched him do it, and my thumb finds the button on the left.
The portafilter ejects. Grounds spray across the counter and the front of my apron, and a soft brown halo of them settles over the navy sleeve of the man in the blue parka, who has waited six minutes for a cardamom latte and is now wearing a respectable portion of it.
Everything stops for one full second. Then it comes up out of me like it has for eight years of conference rooms, and there’s nothing I can do but let it drive.
“Oh my god, I am SO sorry, sir, please, that’s coming right off, let me.
Harsk, the gentleman in the navy parka needs a refresh and the towel off the rinse station, I’ve got it, one cardamom latte on the house, on me, your whole morning is back on the rails in ten seconds, I promise, there we go, just the sleeve, it’ll brush right off, I am SO sorry. ”
The towel’s in my hand and the wipe-down is happening and the grinder is dosing fresh under my other hand.
The man in the blue parka is laughing now, the laugh of someone who was prepared to be annoyed for two more minutes and has just decided not to bother, and the woman behind him in the wool coat says, “Honey, it happens.” Harsk already has the milk in the pitcher and the wand under it before I’ve so much as looked at him.
He doesn’t look at me.
He passes me the steamed milk. “Cardamom’s on the tin shelf. Half spoon.”
“Got it.”
The pour goes clean, I dust the top, the cup crosses the counter, and the man in the blue parka drops a five in the tip jar that I’d bet started life as a one. The line moves. The bell rings.
The firm trained me to pivot from a takedown article, so an espresso machine is fine, an espresso machine is fine, an espresso machine is fine.
There’s been no it’s okay from the till. No don’t worry about it. No look thrown my way across the wood. He’s at the till, but I keep working anyway.
By nine o’clock, the rush breaks. I’m at the window bar between customers, wiping a sticky ring where someone set a syrup bottle down without a coaster, and that’s when the flatbed across Main Street comes back into view.
The plywood wrap’s been up since Tuesday, green and white, the green of a brand that paid somebody to call it the color of authenticity.
Today the flatbed has a hoist on it and a crew of four in matching jackets, and the billboard is going up the side of the second story facing the street.
Green. White. COMING SOON in letters far too clean for the chalk on Harsk’s board behind me.
Along the bottom edge there are six lengths of orange tape, evenly spaced. Six weeks.