Chapter 7
Maggie
The heater in my room at the Sea Wisp clicks on on Tuesday morning, which is the only clock I trust in here.
The mini fridge stays quiet for once because I unplugged it last night out of pure spite, and the print over the headboard is still that fishing boat at a dock I’ve decided does not exist. I’ve been awake since long before the alarm I no longer set, which is not a virtue, just what happens when the bed and I have run out of things to say to each other.
The binder is shut on the desk under the lamp where it’s lived since Sunday, the pearl ring from Saturday centered on the cover like an offering to a god I haven’t opened in a week.
That’s on purpose. I’m getting good at on purpose.
The chipped silver ring goes on first, because Tuesday is the silver one and the silver one is the part of this morning already pointed the right way.
Middle finger, right hand, the chip worn into the inside of the band where it’s been since the year my Nonna died and I started wearing it on the days I worked.
It taps the dresser once when I settle it.
Then I line the rest up. The binder clip from the desk drawer.
The cinnamon receipt folded back into its quarters, the half pencil beside it, the single silver earring whose match vanished months ago.
I scoop the whole sad little museum into the inside pocket of my coat and pat it once, like checking for a passport you’ll never use.
The marine layer is heavier than it was Thursday.
The gravel lot is gray, the harbor is gray, and the gulls haven’t started in yet.
Across the asphalt the front window of Finley’s is the one lit thing on a dark street, yellow and steady, a room with somebody already in it, and from here I can see the chalkboard catching the inside light. I cross.
The bell rings as the door swings in. A little of the fog comes with me, gives up at my shoulder, and I shut the door on the rest.
Harsk is at the counter in a clean apron the color of brown paper, one carafe already in his right hand.
The cup at the station I’ve started thinking of as mine is poured before I’m through the door, the steam off it bending sideways in the draft, and I’m not going to make a thing of the fact that he times it to me now.
“Morning,” I say.
His chin lifts a quarter inch over the carafe, which from Harsk is roughly a parade.
I’m next to him at the back hook taking down my apron from the peg between his and Bex’s, and the cedar comes up again, the warm-wood-and-coffee thing I caught Saturday and Sunday at noon and Monday when we passed at the elbow.
It’s right here now, in the half foot of air between his apron and mine, close enough to be a fact and not a guess.
My shoulder turns a beat toward him and takes it back.
I tie the apron on.
There’s nobody yet to perform for. The first customer is twenty minutes out, and Tuesday doesn’t need anything out of my face.
I move the inventory from coat pocket to apron pocket without looking, each thing passing under my thumb in the order I lined it up on the dresser, and the silver ring taps the back counter once when I’m done.
I pick up the cup. Small, black, one sugar, exactly the temperature of a thing somebody else thought about before I asked.
Behind me the chalk starts going, which means Harsk is doing the board, and I don’t turn around to watch a six-foot-ten man write letters too tall for the space he’s given them, because that’s a thing I could watch all day.
The first customer is a man in a fleece I haven’t seen, in for a drip black who reads the paper on the window bar while it pours and folds a one into the jar before he goes. The bell rings him out, the fog trading places with him.
The stack of cards is in my apron pocket against my hip.
Twenty of them. I drew them last night on the back of an order pad, sitting on the brown bedspread with the lamp on and the half pencil, and twenty was the number the half pencil and I agreed on before I capped it.
FINLEY’S FRIEND across the top in block letters, because the only handwriting I trust to face the public is block letters, and a row of ten little boxes under it.
Tenth cup free. On the house, with thanks.
My letters lean back four degrees against the forward four of Harsk’s, which is the kind of thing I notice about a man’s handwriting and then make myself stop noticing.
On the nose the bell goes and it’s Garza, the white box of crullers held flat across both forearms because the bottom is still warm, the fryer oil and cinnamon reaching me a half second before he does.
“Maggie,” he says.
“Garza. Black coffee?” The box goes on the back bar by the case. I take the lid off and count by twos. Eighteen.
He sees the paper on the window bar on his way to turn, reads the headline, and his eyes come to me. “You guys good?”
Eight years of conference-room training is not going at a twelve-hundred-word hit piece in my friend’s coffee shop. I slide a card across the wood instead. “We’re doing a thing. Tenth cup free. Tell your people.”
He picks it up, turns it over, turns it back. “Cute.” It goes in his breast pocket. “My wife’ll lose this and ask you for another one in a week.”
“I made twenty. I can make more.”
He nods on the way out, and the bell takes him.
Behind me, Harsk stands at the espresso group, linen over his shoulder. He watched the card cross the wood. He says nothing. His hand stays on the steam wand while the milk climbs to the pitch he wants. I tuck that against the silver ring with everything else I’m collecting off this man.
It’s a couple I don’t know, two pour-overs to go, and the woman has the article up on her phone, which seems set to keep happening, like weather.
She reads me the second paragraph in the tone of someone doing me a favor and wants to know if there’s anything we can do.
“You can keep coming in,” I say, and I slide a card across.
“Get it stamped every visit, and the tenth one’s on us.
” The man takes the card and laughs at my letters.
“You drew these?” “With a half pencil last night, yes.” His wife says, “Oh, honey,” in the voice women use when they’ve decided I’m a little tragic and they’re rooting for me.
They buy a cruller each on the way out, so the pity is tax-deductible. Sixteen.
Boots come in, then the forestry coat. Korren takes black, double pour, and I have his cup down first. He reads half the paper, turns the page, reads the rest, leaves the five on the wood.
He doesn’t take a card and I don’t offer him one, because Korren is the kind of regular who would find a loyalty card faintly insulting, like getting carded at your own funeral.
There are six crullers left and Bex is in the canvas apron with the milk pitcher in her hand before anybody’s told her where to put it.
By mid-morning I’ve handed out eleven cards. Pat comes through on a day off her usual Monday schedule and takes one without making me put it in her hand. “Harsk.” A nod. “Maggie.” She slides it in the pocket of the parka next to her keys, and the bell sees her out.
The cedar is still in the half foot of air behind the counter when I reach past Harsk for the small drip carafe and he gives me the half inch of room without being asked.
His eye goes once to the stack of cards by my elbow and back to the grouphead, which is a whole conversation if you’re fluent, and I’m getting there.
He pours a refill into my cup and I drink the first inch standing up. The bell is already going for the next person. The stack at my elbow is down to seven.
With the stack at six, Bex on the counter, and Harsk wiping down the steam wand, I tell him I’m running next door, and he says, “Alright.” I pull the apron off over my head, hang it on the hook, put my coat on because the fog is still in.
Two doors down. The bookstore chalkboard out front says WHALES MENTIONED INSIDE in letters that look like somebody wrote them once and has been daring the weather to do something about it ever since.
The bell over this door is lower and smaller than ours, which I read, with no evidence whatsoever, as a person who prefers it quieter.
The woman behind the counter is reading a paperback flat on the wood, chin in one hand.
Late twenties, pale, hair pulled back, a gray sweater the exact color of the fog she seems to coordinate with.
She looks up. She doesn’t put on a smile, which I respect like a fellow professional declining the bit.
“Hi,” I say. “I’m Maggie. From Finley’s.”
“Yeah.” She closes the book on her thumb. “I’ve seen you go by.”
And that is the whole greeting. She watches me. I keep my mouth where it is, because she would see anything warmer coming a mile off.
“Could I borrow your wifi? I want to set up an Instagram for the shop, and mine’s slow on the hotspot.”
“Sure.” She turns the paperback face-down, walks to the back, comes back with a square of card stock, the password written on it in small careful pencil, and hands it over before going to the kettle without another word.
I sit at the little table by the window with my phone. Finleys.coffee. Bio: Heritage roastery on Main Street. Since 1889. Same beans since 2011. The last line is something Harsk said once at the back counter without knowing he was saying anything, which is most of how he says the good ones.
She sets a small white mug at my elbow. Black tea, milk already in, gone the right color.
“Thanks.”
“Yeah.”
She goes back to her counter and reads and does not ask why I’m building an Instagram on her wifi instead of the one across the street, which makes her the least curious person in Teakettle Bay, or the best at pretending. The handle saves. The tea is good.