Chapter 5 #2
I lift the little ceramic tip bowl off the shelf under the milk station and set it on the wood.
I don’t say tips. He doesn’t say tips. Thirty-one dollars, three fives and sixteen ones, and he sets a small stack down next to mine without looking up.
We don’t split it tonight, because the split is a Sunday thing, and the bowl goes back to the shelf.
I untie my apron and hang it on the middle of the three back hooks, Bex’s on the right and Harsk’s on the left and mine in the middle, the top strap twisted, and I leave it twisted. I’ve stopped untwisting it like I’ve stopped apologizing for the ones, which is to say without deciding to.
I lift my coat off the hook by the door. He’s still at the till. He’s about to do all the after-close things I’ve been picturing all week without once managing to picture.
“Tomorrow’s Sunday,” I say.
“Closed.”
“Right.”
“Monday at six.”
“I’ll be in,” I say.
I put my hand on the door. When I pull the door, the bell will ring. It’s the leaving bell, sadder than the arriving one. My body has been learning the difference since Tuesday.
I pull the door. The bell rings. The marine layer comes in cold around my ankles. I step through, and the bell does its second small ring as the door settles back.
Main Street is the gray it goes in the middle of October with the layer in, the streetlights just come on and not yet committed to it.
The chain across the street has its tarp lashed down for the weekend, and the orange tape at the corner hasn’t moved an inch.
Two doors down, June’s window has its lamp on.
Behind me, in the slice of Finley’s I can still see through the front glass as I shrug my coat onto my left shoulder, there’s the whole little diorama of it.
Harsk at the counter. His photo off his left shoulder.
The chalkboard on the side wall. The back room door ajar.
The carafe on its shelf. Inside the gray rectangle, the cat asleep.
I look back the once. I make myself not look back the second time.
I walk to the Sea Wisp.
The overlook is fifteen minutes north on Highway 1, and the rental Corolla takes the curves grudgingly, at the speed it has personally selected without consulting me.
I get there a few minutes short of 6:00.
The gravel turnout is empty. I park, sit with both hands on the wheel for a second longer than I’d planned, and then I make myself get out, because sitting in a parked car staring at fog is a thing my mother would have a phrase for.
The marine layer’s in thick. The foghorn sounds every six seconds from somewhere off to my left, low enough that I get it in the chest before the ear.
The Light’s beam comes through the fog every nine seconds and goes.
Six and nine. They don’t divide into each other, which I count and then make myself stop counting.
I sit up on the hood of the Corolla. The metal is colder than I expected. My coat rides up under me. I leave it. The pearl ring’s on my right hand, in my coat pocket. I dig my phone out with my left.
Gianna picks up on the second ring. “How’s the deeply unplanned coast adventure,” she says, flat, no question mark in it, which is how she’s been answering my calls since I pointed the car north in August.
“Great,” I say. “Wonderful. Fully aligned.”
There’s a silence on the line. It’s the specific sister silence where I can hear her not buying a word of it from two hundred miles away.
“Mags.”
“What?”
“Talk to me.”
“I’m at an overlook,” I say. “There’s a lighthouse. The foghorn goes every six seconds. It plays like a movie. I’m having a moment, Gi, don’t step on it.”
“Are you crying?”
“No.”
“Would you tell me if you were?”
“I doubt it.”
“Okay,” she says, and it’s the okay that means we are absolutely getting back to that. “Where are you living?”
“Still the motel.”
“Mags. You said a week.”
“It’s nice. The desk clerk knows my coffee order.”
“Maggie.”
“What?”
“You moved out of San Francisco two months ago. You have been at a motel for half of those two months.”
“Fact check accepted,” I say, because the only thing worse than your little sister doing the math on your life is your little sister doing it correctly.
The foghorn goes. The beam comes through and goes. A gull I can’t see somewhere out in the gray makes the noise a gull makes when it has an opinion. Gianna’s breathing on the other end like she does when she’s picking which question to lead with.
“How’s the new job?” she says.
“It’s a job.”
“What kind of job?”
“The kind where they pay you.”
“Maggie.”
“I got a job,” I say.
“Where?”
“A coffee shop.”
She doesn’t say anything for what is, by my count, one full Light beam. Six, then nine. The nine takes forever.
“Are you,” she says, slow, laying it down like she’s not sure the floor will hold it, “Maggie, are you a barista now?”
“I am,” I say. “Yes. Technically, yes.” She laughs. It’s the laugh that comes up out of her stomach and ends in a sigh she doesn’t bother to hide, and it’s not the laugh she uses to make fun of me, it’s the better one.
“Oh my god,” she says.
“I know.”
“Mom is going to lose her entire mind.”
“She doesn’t have to know yet.”
“Mags.”
“She doesn’t.”
“She does. Someday. You know she does.”
“How long is someday?”
Gianna goes quiet a second. I can hear her moving around her kitchen, the kettle thing she does, the cabinet that always sticks and that she has never once fixed. Sacramento on a Saturday evening sounds like a dog somewhere and a car going by.
“Is the owner an asshole?” she says.
“No.”
“Hot?”
“Oh my god.”
“I’m just asking.”
“I’m hanging up.”
“You called me.”
“That was a mistake.”
“Maggie.”
I don’t say anything. The foghorn goes. The beam comes through and goes. The hood through my jeans is cold like only Pacific metal in mid October.
“Okay,” Gianna says, and her voice has come down a step. “Okay. Call me Monday.”
“I will.”
“And eat something tonight. Don’t just be a girl sitting on the hood of a car staring into fog.”
“That is a weirdly specific accusation.”
“I know you.”
“You do.”
“Mags.”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to be okay.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I don’t,” she says. “But I’m saying it.”
We hang up.
The phone’s warm against my palm. I switch it to my other hand and put both hands back in my pockets, and somewhere in there the fog stops being weather and turns into a substance, the kind you could lean against. The beam comes through.
The foghorn goes. Up on the hood in the gray, I do not cry, even though there’s a full minute right in the middle where the rust on the bolt nearest my hand lights up gold every nine seconds and I want to, hard, just once, and then I decide I’d rather do it on a night I haven’t already eaten a gas station sandwich in my coat.
I get back in the car. Heater on. South.
The Sea Wisp Inn on a Saturday night in mid October is the exact same beige room with the brown bedspread it was on Tuesday afternoon, the print over the headboard still the same fishing boat at a dock I have somehow lived across the street from for a week and never gone to see, and the mini fridge clicks on under the counter like it’s clicked since Tuesday, a sound I have crossed over into missing on the nights it’s quiet.
The sandwich is in a plastic triangle in my left hand.
Turkey, the kind where the lettuce has already gone translucent and the bread’s drying out toward the edges, and I bought it at the Chevron on the way down because Gianna told me to and because tonight I wanted to be the kind of sister who does the thing the other sister asked.
I sit on the edge of the bed in my coat and eat it in eight bites, counting them, like I count things when I’m eating alone in a room.
The binder’s shut on the desk by the lamp, where it’s been since Tuesday afternoon, where it was Thursday morning when I left it, where it was this morning when I left it again. Five days closed. The pen’s still in the rings.
I get up and cross to the desk. I slide the little pearl ring off my right hand, the thin gold band warm from my finger, and I set it down on the front cover of the binder, dead center, the pearl on the laminated white. I look at it a second longer than I planned to.
Saturday, I think, is done.
I brush my teeth. I lie down on the brown bedspread in my fleece, because the heater and I have an arrangement and the arrangement is that neither of us tries very hard. The mini fridge clicks. The fishing boat is the fishing boat.
I close my eyes.