Chapter 5
Maggie
The bell over the door does a different kind of work on a Saturday than it does on a Friday.
It rings once for a woman in green fleece who buys a single drip and then goes quiet for nine minutes before it rings twice for two tourists in matching windbreakers, up from Mendocino, who would like to know, if I have a second, whether the pour-over is from Ethiopia.
It’s the slack middle of the afternoon, and that’s the rhythm of it.
“It is,” I say, voice on, smile on, the pearl on my right hand catching once on the wood as I turn the cup.
It’s the ricotta ring, the one I wear on Saturdays because my Nonna made the ricotta on Saturdays, and I think that and don’t say it, because the windbreakers did not drive up the coast to hear about my Nonna.
“Single-origin. Yirgacheffe. He’s got a stack to the left if you want to take a bag home. ”
They want a bag. They want two. The woman counts out twenty-six dollars in fives and ones and apologizes for the ones, which means the ones are tips from some other counter, which means she is somebody’s somebody, performing the relaxed coastal weekend so hard she’s nervous about her own small bills.
My corners hold. I let her keep the apology, because I have apologized for worse to people who deserved it less.
When they go, the room goes quiet. The fog’s lifted to a high marine layer that makes the chalkboard letters look like they were drawn by a more patient man than the one who drew them.
Today we’re pouring vanilla cardamom and Yirgacheffe pour-over, with decaf available on request. He added the pour-over line at noon, and the slope of the V in YIRG matches the slope of the V in VANILLA exactly, which is the kind of thing the agency trained me to notice and bill a client for, and which I am now noticing for free, in a town where my entire client list is one orc and a cat.
Manifest the Saturday, the interior says, dry as the toast I am not eating.
Harsk is behind the counter sleeving filters.
For the length of time it takes him to lift a sack of beans off the top stack, the back room door swings open enough to show me the shelf, and on the shelf the little unlabeled carafe, full again, coffee the color of cherry wood.
Not the Yirgacheffe. Not on any board he’s ever chalked.
My eye goes to it like a closed door in someone else’s house, and then I make my eye come back, because I am a professional, past tense, and a professional knows what isn’t hers to look at.
The cup at my elbow is empty. There’s a fresh one beside it. Hot, small, black, one sugar, the coffee I poured for myself once on my first morning and have not had to pour since.
He’s at the counter. He’s not looking. I pick up the new cup, and by the time I’ve set it back down the old one has already vanished off the wood, which is a sleight of hand you cannot rehearse.
I nod at the air. The nod is for me, not him.
He doesn’t see it, and I’m glad, because there’s no dignified way to be caught thanking a man who has arranged the entire morning so you never have to.
A man in a Carhartt comes in for a drip. The carafe is in my hand before he reaches the wood. By the third Saturday, he’ll be a regular.
A few hours to close. The light through the front window has gone long and bronze, edging the chalkboard letters like stage light on a set that doesn’t know it’s a set, and I press my left palm flat to the counter and feel the cold come up into my hand.
The bell rings. I put the smile on.
It’s 4:57 when the last customer leaves, a woman in a yellow rain jacket who’s spent the better part of an hour telling me about her sister’s wedding in Fort Bragg next June, the venue, the dress, the brother-in-law who has Opinions about the seating.
When she muscles her shoulder into the door, the bell rings and the door shuts and the room is the room again.
Then the bell does that second little ring it does when the door’s resettling on its frame, and after that there’s no bell.
The marine layer came back in over the afternoon.
The foghorn out at the Light is working its slow six-second cycle.
The espresso machine’s not pulling and the grinder’s off, and under the back counter the refrigerator clicks on, hums through one long breath, and clicks off again.
The cat is asleep up on the back counter in a rectangle of light that stopped being light a while ago and is only the gray the front window makes of the afternoon now.
I’m at the steam wand with a damp bar towel in my left hand, wiping like Harsk showed me my second morning, top to bottom, the seam at the back, the spout, the underside nobody would check and he checks.
Harsk is at the counter with the till drawer pulled. I could watch him do it out of the bottom of my eye if I wanted to. I have decided to keep my eye on the wand.
Twenties first, stacked in fives, no looking down between counts. Then the tens. Then the ones in two rows. The pencil comes out of his apron pocket and goes back in. The deposit slip waits on the wood by the drawer.
I wipe the wand. I rinse the towel. I wipe it again, because the alternative is standing in a quiet room with my own face on.
The smile I had on for the woman in the yellow rain jacket is gone, and I didn’t have to take it off this time. It just wasn’t on anymore. My face is on my face. The pearl ring is cool against the rim of the rinse jug when I set the jug down.
Saturday, the interior says again, dry, unrequested.
Here’s the geometry of it. Three or four feet between us, the counter in the middle.
The framed photo behind the espresso machine, off his left shoulder when he bends to the till.
The chalkboard on the side wall where I moved it last Wednesday, the V still saying the V both ways.
The unlabeled carafe on the back shelf, the back room door ajar from the afternoon roast. I have a real talent for mapping a room I am pretending not to be alone in.
He counts, he writes, he folds the slip. I rinse the towel and hang it on the bar, wipe the splash tray, lift the knock box and tap it twice over the bin and slide it back, making a show of busyness at a counter that doesn’t need me.
The room isn’t empty. It’s small in a way it never is at noon, when there’s a Carhartt at the wood and a Liana at the window bar and the bell’s on a livelier schedule. A room with two people in it and a foghorn going at six is a different size of small.
I’m breathing. That’s where I’ve landed. I’m watching myself breathe, which is never a sign that an evening is going well.
I smell coffee, which I’ve been smelling for nine hours, the smell that’s gotten into the wood and my apron and the hair at the back of my neck by close. And under it, now that the room’s gone still, I smell something I haven’t smelled in here before.
Warm wood. Cedar, I think, except not the cedar of a closet, the cedar of a board that’s been left out in the sun and brought back in still holding the heat.
It’s coming off him, the only thing in the room that’s come close enough to land, since he passed behind me to lift down a roll of receipt tape.
He smells like that, the interior says, and for once it isn’t snarking, it’s just reporting, like your skin tells you the weather changed without your asking. Has he smelled like that all week?
I press my left palm flat to the wood again, and my eye, with nobody to talk to and no smile to land, gives in and goes where it has spent five days not going.
The photo’s in a plain black frame, about the size of a sheet of letter paper, on the back shelf behind the espresso machine.
I saw it Wednesday. I saw it Thursday and Friday and twice this afternoon, and I have not asked about it, because asking is a door and I have been very disciplined about doors.
He’s in it. Younger, somewhere in his thirties, and I am not going to try to put a year on an orc from across a room, since I have no idea what the conversion rate is and would only embarrass myself.
He’s standing in front of a Finley’s that is unmistakably this Finley’s, the door where the door is, the window where the window is, the wood the same wood.
The only thing that’s changed is the awning, the deep red of a wine bottle in the photo instead of the green it wears now.
The sign over it is the sign that is over my head right now, on the inside.
The woman beside him is shorter than he is by the better part of two feet, and older than him by what reads from here as a comfortable number of decades.
Her hair’s up in a knot that is not trying to be a bun.
Her sweater’s brown. She isn’t smiling, exactly.
She’s doing the thing the corners of his mouth do when he’s at the till and a number comes out clean, which is how I know, without anyone telling me, whose face I’m looking at.
I’ve looked at her face all week and I haven’t asked who she is, and I don’t ask now.
He’s lifted his head from the slip. He’s still looking down at the till, but his head has come up a fraction, like a head comes up when somebody in the room has turned their attention onto a thing the head can pick up without seeing.
He doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t say anything. He knows I’m looking at the photo; the room’s small enough that the looking is just in the air now, like the foghorn’s in the wall.
He goes back to the slip. Writes the number, folds it, slides the cash into the deposit bag, and zips it shut.
Neither of us has said the thing. Neither of us will. It sits where the photo sits, and we work around it like a chair somebody you loved used to sit in. I think I’m glad he didn’t say anything. I wouldn’t have known what to do with it.