Chapter 11
Maggie
The chipped silver ring on my middle finger says it’s Tuesday. The worn edge of the chip catches my ring finger every time I close my hand, and Nonna’s voice is doing the Tuesday thing. Not quite a voice, more a particular temperature in the kitchen above June’s bookstore in the morning.
Tuesday.
The binder sits on the table where I dropped it last night, and I haven’t opened it, because I don’t need to.
Whatever I wrote on the third page with the half pencil is already memorized.
The only reason I put it on paper at all was to find out whether it would still be telling the truth by morning.
It is. I close my hand on the cover and the silver chip digs in like it agrees.
“Okay,” I tell the kitchen, because the kitchen is the only one up. “The binder’s coming with me, I am not going to look at the third page on the walk over, and I am going to walk.”
I check the coat pocket by thumb on my way out the door, like I’d check for a passport I don’t own.
A binder clip. A cinnamon receipt. A single small silver earring whose match gave up the ghost months ago.
Three things this morning instead of four, because the half pencil lives at Finley’s now, on the apron, where it’s decided it belongs. I pat the pocket once and leave.
The side door, the brick, the pine going dark on dark, and across Main the chain’s plywood is a deeper rectangle of nothing in all that nothing. I don’t slow down to give it the satisfaction.
The brass key turns in the back door of Finley’s and the back room smells like Burundi hitting its second crack.
Harsk is in the roaster alcove with his sleeves shoved to the elbow, the burner ticking its soft little pop on the other side of the wall, and from where I’m standing I can’t see him and he can’t see me.
That’s how I planned it. I hang the coat.
The apron comes off the peg, the strap lies flat, and for once the second knot ties on the first try, which I choose to read as an omen.
The carafe is on the front counter where I set it down yesterday morning, beside the till with the dahlias at its right hand, and the chalkboard on the side wall still says TODAY: BURUNDI POUR-OVER.
CURRANT AND COCOA. in Harsk’s letters, which are always a size too tall for the board.
Fifteen mugs in the rack, two rows. The third one in the second row is the one that tips if you grab it wrong, and I leave it exactly where it is.
I know what I’m going to write.
The chalk is in the bracket.
It’s the soft kind, the kind that doesn’t skid across the slate, and I pick it up between my thumb and index finger like I’ve picked up every pencil before every pitch meeting I have ever walked into, with that small adjustment in the grip that means I’ve already decided and the rest of me is just catching up.
The Burundi line goes first. I run the side of my fist down through TODAY: BURUNDI POUR-OVER.
CURRANT AND COCOA. until the letters smear into a bronze blur and then into nothing, and my hand comes back gray and white at the heel.
I wipe it on the apron along the thigh seam where the smudge won’t show, and the chipped silver catches the ring finger again when I close my hand. Tuesday.
Then I write what I came in to write. TODAY: THE QUIET POUR.
HONEY AND PAPER. My block letters aren’t as tall as his.
Mine sit politely inside the lines, like I never could.
I put the period in after PAPER and step half a foot back to look at it, the look you give a slide you’ve built four times and are only now seeing in the room where it’ll have to do its job. Yes. That’s the sentence.
The burner pops in the alcove. Then the door from the roaster swings and Harsk is out in the front of the house, sleeves still to the elbow, a brown paper bag of cooled beans tucked under one arm. He sets it on the back counter without the setting-down making any kind of announcement about itself.
“Morning,” I say.
“Beans down,” he says.
His eyes go to the chalkboard. The bag stays under his arm half a beat longer than the back counter is expecting it to.
He reads the line. He reads it a second time, I’m almost sure, though his face holds even and his hands give me nothing back to work with.
The jaw moves once. The bag goes down. He nods at the board, one nod, brief.
“Good,” he says.
And then he’s at the espresso machine and the morning has started and the bag’s on the counter and the carafe is on the front counter to my left beside the till and the dahlias, and I press the chalk back into the bracket so I can find it again at lunch. The bell over the door rings at six.
My shoulders come back a beat and my smile lands at the corners first. “Korren,” I say. “Morning.”
He nods at me, then the same nod at Harsk through the gap.
A five comes down on the wood beside his right hand.
I have the cup poured before he reaches the counter, the bloom and then the main pour, how he likes it, and his hand goes up to the rack for a saucer to set the warm cup on, the second row, the third mug.
Mine gets there first. I lift a different mug off the bottom row and slide his coffee onto its saucer, and the third in the second row stays put, and Korren doesn’t say a word about my hand beating his to it and I don’t say a word about why.
I pour a quarter ounce of the carafe into a tasting cup beside his double.
“On the house,” I say. “New line. Tell me what you think.”
His eyes go from me to the tasting cup. He picks it up between his thumb and one finger, like Harsk lifting a fresh shot to check it. He drinks. His chin comes up. The cup goes back down on the wood.
“Hm,” he says. And then, after a small breath the silver of the till hears and Harsk at the espresso machine likely hears too, “Yes. That one.”
He puts a second five on the wood. The black coffee comes up in the cup he came for.
He drains the tasting cup down to the last drop, walks it back to the window two-top he sits at every single morning, and the bell over the door stays quiet for thirty more seconds.
I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear with the hand that’s still gray from the chalk.
The bell has gone still and the chalkboard still says TODAY: THE QUIET POUR.
HONEY AND PAPER. in my block letters that sit inside the lines, and Korren is at his window two-top draining the last quarter inch of his double with the patience of a man who has nowhere on earth to be on a Tuesday.
The carafe is on the front counter beside the till and the dahlias, the bronze deepening at the petal edges in a way Delia would have words for.
Harsk is in the back at the roaster, the burner popping through the wall every forty seconds, the morning’s cooled beans bagged on the counter under brown paper.
I’ve got the binder open on the front counter in the gaps between customers.
Half pencil out of the apron pocket at my right hip, three words in the margin of page four.
Not the customer’s name. The order, the time, and the small lift her chin gave when she set the empty tasting cup back down on the wood.
Early returns, I think, anecdotal but compelling.
I close the binder. The bell doesn’t ring.
Then it does. Delia is through it with a wrapped bundle of stems under one arm and a deli bag under the other and her disapproving glance at the espresso machine loaded and ready, the glance she has been firing at that machine since I started here in May.
“Tea,” she says. “The bergamot if you have it. Not the green. The green is for people who have given up.”
I’ve got the kettle on before she makes it to the counter. I pour the tasting quarter ounce into the small cup beside her tea and slide it across the wood. “On the house. Tell me what you think.”
She picks up the cup like a stem she suspects of thrips, inspection first. She drinks.
Her chin lifts and stays there, which on a Calabrian woman in her fifties is half a sentence with the verdict still pending.
She drinks again. She sets the cup down.
Her eyes go to the chalkboard, then to the carafe, then to me.
“This is honey,” she says. “Real honey. Not the squeezable garbage from the supermarket. Who made this.”
“Harsk,” I say.
“Of course.” She pulls a five from her wallet and lays it on the wood beside the bergamot.
“Put it on the menu through the end of the year, at least. The town’s had a hard month.
It needs a sweet thing.” She picks up the bergamot, picks up the deli bag, and is back out the door before I’ve gotten the five rung into the drawer.
Korren at the window doesn’t look up from his cup, but his shoulder loosens in the corner of my eye.
At 1:50 Liana comes in with her stethoscope still slung around her neck and a small clean burn on the inside of her wrist she got this morning and hasn’t noticed yet. She orders her usual iced. I’ve got the cup on the bar before she finishes the word please. I slide the tasting cup in beside it.
“What’s this,” she says.
“New line. Tell me.”
She drinks. She holds the cup at chin level for one breath.
“Mm.” On goes the vet face, the one that reads the patient before it announces the diagnosis.
“Mm. This is the kind of thing my Brevik grandmother would have made me drink when I was sick and lying to her about being sick. The honey is the bribe. The paper is the disinfectant smell off the kitchen towel she’d wrap the mug in.
” She tips the cup and drains the last drop.
“I’m buying a second one tomorrow. Put my name on it for the morning.
” She drops a ten on the wood, carries her iced to the window bar two stools down from Korren, and opens the chart she hauls everywhere.