Chapter 9 #2
At 9:34 Harsk is at the espresso machine with the linen over his shoulder and the steam wand pitched exactly right and his left hand on the chrome side of the group.
The light through the front window is that same pre-lift gray.
His hand is wide and gray and steady on the metal, the old scar across the back of it, the brass apron buckle catching the corner of the frame, and it is, professionally speaking, the single best free piece of brand asset I have ever been handed by a man who would rather not be photographed.
I take the picture with my phone, I don’t say a word, and he doesn’t turn around.
Same beans since 2011.
He’s got the easel pulled out from inside the front door, and he taps the side wall with the blunt end of the half pencil to find his spot and leans the easel against the bench while he goes for the bracket.
A customer I don’t know buys a small black with one sugar.
She looks at the dahlias like something lovely in a place she didn’t expect.
She buys a cruller and takes a card. I’m down to three.
At my station the phone is face up on the wood with the photo on the screen and the caption typed out under it and the cursor blinking after 2011.
The chalkboard is propped against the bench.
The pearl taps the wood once. Outside the gray is starting to lift.
I tell myself I’ll post from June’s wifi at noon, and I get back to work.
The chalkboard out front of June’s reads WHALES MENTIONED INSIDE in letters that have been there a month at least, the S trailing off into the corner like a letter when the writer got distracted by something better.
The bell over June’s door is the small low one.
June’s at the front counter with a paperback flat on the wood and her chin in one hand and a gray sweater the exact color of the fog that was here this morning and has since cleared off.
“Hi,” I say.
“Yeah.” She doesn’t look up. “Heard the bell.”
The binder is under my left arm. My phone is in my back pocket. It has been buzzing in little flurries of four and five since I sat down, and I have been heroically ignoring it.
She doesn’t ask. So I lift the phone up over my hip and tilt the screen at her without bringing it close, because June is a woman you show, not a woman you hand things to. The @finleyscoffee header. The photo under it, his hand on the machine, the brass buckle in the corner.
“Two fifty-three,” I say, and scroll the thumb once. “At noon I had eleven.”
“Oh.” Her eyes go back to the page, and she turns it with one knuckle. “Good for him.”
The back armchair is past the cookbooks and the small mysteries and a shelf of staff picks with a card in June’s pencil that says NOT VAMPIRES THIS WEEK, which is the most June sentence ever committed to kraft paper.
The chair is the one chair, its cushion gone soft in the shape of everyone who’s ever given up standing in here.
There’s sage on a higher shelf and five years of dust the sage has been politely holding.
I sit, the binder lands on my lap, and June crosses to the side table with the kettle without ever lifting her eyes off the paperback.
Two minutes later there’s a small white mug at my elbow, black tea, the milk gone exactly the right color, and she’s already back at the front.
I have given up trying to thank June for things.
June does not want the thank you. June wants you to drink the tea.
I open the binder to the CASE STUDY divider. The half pencil is back at the shop in the apron pocket, and the half pencil is also, somehow, in this pocket, because that is the thing the pencils do, they reproduce. I take this one out and write the date at the top of the page. OCTOBER 24. SATURDAY.
What’s on the page below it is what I’ve been building since the binder said interesting to me a week ago Tuesday and I wrote the word down with no object after it like a crazy person.
The shop has its purpose. Its work runs on a routine I can name.
But what the man behind the counter does?
In eight years of client decks, I’ve never put that on a single slide.
There’s a section heading from yesterday in my own cursive, WHAT HARSK DOES THAT I HAVE NOT SEEN A brAND DO, and a list under it I’ve been feeding one line at a time.
A cup of the customer’s drink on the counter before the customer reaches the counter. Fifteen years of that, no slide deck required.
Chalkboard handoff. My letters leaning back four, his pencil leaning forward four, the same board carrying both.
The silent refill of the window-bar carafe, no asking which.
Pencil to the back-room notebook for every order, never a pen, never a screen.
I add the next line. How he answers a question you didn’t get to. The pencil stops on the period. I read it back. The sentence is mine in a way the rest of the list isn’t. I haven’t said it out loud to him. Nobody has heard it. It’s on the page. It belongs to me, and it’s staying there.
Mine.
I leave it where it is and turn to a clean one.
The phone in my back pocket pings against the binder spine, and I lift it.
Two seventy-eight. A new comment under the photo from a handle I don’t recognize: two clamshell emojis and same beans since 2011, so what’s the chain gonna say.
I laugh once, quiet, the kind that doesn’t carry past the cookbooks, and I set the phone face down on the arm of the chair so it can’t make me do that again.
The list is six items long now, and I’m starting to suspect the list is the whole point and the binder was just the excuse.
At three I close the binder, and my thumb stays on the page edge a beat longer than it needs to. June’s at the front with the paperback flat and her chin in her hand, and the door bell hasn’t rung once since I came in. The pearl taps the laminate. I stand up.
The binder is back on its hook by the apron pegs, where my apron strap is still twisted from last night and where I have officially stopped pretending I’m fixing it today.
Bex is on the espresso. Harsk is at the side wall holding a bracket up at the angle a chalkboard would hang from, and he has not asked me where I went, which is its own kind of generous.
The phone on the back counter says three eighty-one likes.
I do not say three eighty-one out loud, because saying numbers out loud is a city habit I’m trying to quit.
The dahlias on the counter are the same gold at the heart they were at nine.
I lean a small bowl of FINLEY’S FRIEND stickers, cut from a sheet of brown kraft at the lull, up against the till.
Late in the afternoon Bex unties her apron, her mother at the curb.
“Same time tomorrow?” and Harsk says “Sunday,” and Bex says “Right” before she’s even done asking, and the bell goes, and the truck pulls off.
The chalkboard is on the side wall, and Harsk tests the lower edge with the heel of his hand and goes to the back room.
At four he’s at the back door with the empty canvas tote under his arm.
“Veshar.”
“Yes. Won’t be long.”
“Back by five.”
“Alright.”
The door closes, and I have the front to myself.
The new loyalty cards are in two stacks of ten on the low ledge of the front window, the second batch finished at the lull before Bex left.
FINLEY’S FRIEND. Ten boxes. Tenth cup free, on the house, with thanks.
My letters lean back four. Pencil first, then peel, then press.
I bring the bowl of stickers over to the window.
The light through the marine layer is the gray I have stopped pretending I have a name for. I peel an F off the sheet and press it to the cover at the upper left corner. The sticker sits. I do twelve of them without looking up, because looking up is how a person ends up thinking about things.
The bell goes and the cold off his coat reaches me two seconds after it.
The espresso machine starts up, the pull is a short one, and I’m on card sixteen and not looking up.
Then there’s the floorboard a quarter-second before he reaches the window, and the cup goes onto the sill at my elbow, the crema the color of brown butter, the steam sliding sideways toward the glass.
I turn.
He’s looking at me.
The light from the harbor side is the long slant the late afternoon gets when the marine layer’s thin enough to let the gold come up under the gray.
He’s at his full height, a half step back from the sill.
The brass buckle is at the corner of my eye, his left hand at the edge of the saucer.
His eyes are brown. The line at the corner of his upper lip where the tusk sits hasn’t changed.
Neither of us says anything. The look doesn’t break.
The harbor is out past the glass, the gold’s coming up under the gray on the water, the cup at my elbow is going hot into the wood of the sill, and my right hand has come to rest on that sill without my deciding to put it there. The thin gold band with the pearl on it is against the wood.
Oh.
The band taps the wood. Then it taps again, and I know I am doing it this time and I do not stop, and neither of us looks away.
The break, when it comes, isn’t a break so much as a slowing. His head goes down a quarter inch and mine answers it, he nods and I nod, he takes a half step back and the cup stays right where it is. He goes to the till. I turn back to the cards.
Card seventeen is in my left hand. The F I’ve peeled is stuck to my right thumb. I press it to the cover and do the last three without slowing down. Slowing down is what got me into whatever that was.
At one minute to five I take the small cup off the sill, and the first sip is the thing I came back to the window for and didn’t know I was coming back to. The espresso is the bitter the morning’s beans land on by the fifth hour, and I set the cup back down.
My apron comes off the hook between Harsk’s and Bex’s empty one. The twist is still in the strap. It can stay there until it dies of old age.
“Tomorrow,” I say.
“Sunday.”
Out the back door. The alley is gray and the fog comes up to my collar. The thin gold band with the pearl sits on my right ring finger. Espresso lingers at the back of my tongue all the way up Pine.
The alley opens onto Main between the dry cleaner’s awning and the side door of the hardware store, and I come around at the curb.
The front window of Finley’s is lit from the inside, the yellow a room gets when the day outside has stayed gray on it, and from the sidewalk I can see the whole of it: the cup still on the sill where I set it down, the dahlias on the counter beside the till, the chalkboard on the side wall in the bracket Harsk tested.
The espresso machine is off, the glow at the gauge gone dark.
Harsk is at the back counter with the bar towel and the cup he keeps for himself at close, and he doesn’t look up.
My right hand finds the coat pocket and does its inventory: the binder clip first, cold against the thumb, then the corner of the cinnamon receipt, the half pencil, the single small silver earring with no match. Four. I put them back.
The lamp in June’s window is still on at the back, the kind that stays on until she gives up on the page she’s losing to.
Tomorrow.
I turn from the window. Pine is two doors up, the side door of June’s is propped open with the brick, and I go up.