Chapter 13
Maggie
Sunday has no ring. Sixteen years and I have never once given Sunday one, so today the finger is just a finger, which in my own private filing system means I haven’t made up my mind about something.
The something is the binder.
The corner smells like clove and woodsmoke and the particular sweetness honey gives off after it’s been on a low burner for hours and is starting to consider becoming something else.
I open the door. There’s no bell at the storefront.
The deeper bell stays at the family room next to the Bell House across town.
Voshen’s has a brass bowl on a stand by the register instead, and a small half-orc boy on a stool, the striker gripped in his fist with the gravity of a maitre d’, brings it down once as I step inside.
The note travels the whole length of the room.
“Good afternoon,” I say, and my voice goes up exactly the lift I told myself in the truck not to do. The boy nods at the bowl like it’s confirmed something about me that he suspected.
“Maggie.” Auntie Voshen is at the back with a clipboard and doesn’t look up. She says my name like Harsk says it, which is to say with a period firmly on the end of it. “Come back.”
So I come back.
The room runs long and low-ceilinged, with an indigo curtain pulled to one side at the far end, and through the gap a woman in an apron smudged to the elbow with flour is sliding a tray of round breads onto a cooling rack while a taller, dryer woman watches the breads with the focus of someone who has been promoted to quality control and decided to take the appointment personally.
The dry one is Hattie. We’ve never met, and her eyes have already finished at my shoes.
“Hattie.”
“Maggie. Showing up.”
“Olmar’s out getting lanterns from the truck,” she says, like the introductions were a contract we both already signed.
There’s no flour on her anywhere, which is exactly how I know she’s been around the flour all day.
“Twenty-seven lanterns and a roll of wire. He insists it’s an exact number.
” She tips her head at the breads. “Tray seven. Auntie wants nine done before she starts the second batch.”
“Where do you want me?”
“Honey.”
Auntie’s come through the curtain. Six feet even, blue apron, gray hair in a knot held up by a single pencil shoved through it, and the pencil is the exact same kind that lives in the pocket of an apron at Finley’s six blocks east of here.
I don’t say so. Hattie puts a clean apron in my hand and I tie the second strap behind my back without looking.
I’ve been tying borrowed kitchen aprons since I was seventeen.
Auntie watches the tying. She is not watching the bare ring finger. She is watching the hand, and the hand, for once in its life, is steady.
“Honey’s on the second shelf,” she says. “Cardamom in the small green jar. Clove in the green jar with the chip on the lid, not the unchipped one. That clove is for the ren-voshen in November.”
“Honey, cardamom, chipped clove. Got it.”
“You came alone.”
“Today, yes.”
“On a Sunday.”
The finger again. I keep my eyes off it. “Sunday’s the day I don’t wear a ring.”
Hattie’s mouth does the small thing it does, and she does not look up from the dough.
“All right,” Auntie says, in the same voice Harsk says all right in, a different mouth landing the same period, and I can hear her deciding she now has somewhere to put me.
I press my left palm flat to the steel counter for half a second.
First, the honey goes in the bowl. Second, the cardamom goes in.
Third, I am here on a Sunday afternoon in a teahouse on a coast I’d never set foot on ninety-three days ago, making bread for children I have not been introduced to, and the room is not empty.
That third one I keep to myself.
Hattie’s at the dough. She says, without looking up, “How’s he doing?”
The hand in the honey jar doesn’t stop. The voice that comes out of me is the one I’ve been rehearsing for nineteen days in a kitchen six blocks east of here. “He’s fine.”
“Mm.” Hattie scoops a thumbprint of dough off the rim of her own apron and pinches it back into the bowl. “Saturdays are hard for the café.”
“They are.”
“Bex doing okay?”
“She’s learning.”
“Mm.” She gives me one short fast look and takes it away again. “I had a friend who used to say she’s learning about somebody when she meant something else altogether. Took me about a year to crack what she’s learning meant in her mouth.”
“What did it mean?”
“It meant she’s going to be all right in the end and I am tired today. And it meant I see her, which is the harder half to admit out loud.”
The honey jar is down to the bottom, so I set it aside.
The binder under my arm is still under my arm, and somewhere on slide nine of it is THE CHAIN’S FIRST COMPETITIVE MISCALCULATION, sitting on a desktop in Greg Massey’s portal, eight inches from the floured elbow of the woman who just asked me how Harsk is doing.
The honey on my thumb has gone warm. I leave the binder exactly where it is.
Auntie’s at the oven sliding tray seven out, and the bread comes off it the color of dark honey at the crust.
“Maggie. The honey on the next batch, go just under what you used this round. Less is forgiven. More is not.”
I nod at the bowl. “Got it.”
“Say it back.”
“Less, never more.”
“Yes.”
Hattie hasn’t looked up. She says it again, softer this time. “How’s he holding up?”
I don’t answer for a second. The voice that comes out is not the one I use at the counter.
“He hands me the carafe before I ask for it. He says yes to the things he says yes to. He’s been quiet all week.
Fine on the surface. Underneath, not fine at all.
He’d put me on the sidewalk before he’d let me say so out loud. ”
“Mm.” Her hands don’t stop. “I won’t tell him you said it.”
“Thank you.”
“But you’ll know I know.”
And there it is. Now I know.
Olmar comes in through the back with a coil of wire over one shoulder and a paper bag of pears he sets on the counter without a single word about it.
He nods at me. I nod at him. He says, “Maggie,” and I say, “Olmar. Lanterns?” and he tilts the wire on his shoulder maybe a quarter inch by way of a complete answer, and that’s the entire exchange, and it is somehow not nothing.
So we work, measuring out the honey and the cardamom in careful turns. Hattie takes the clove herself, because the chipped jar lid does a thing under her thumbnail she’s worked out over years. Auntie pulls tray eight, then nine.
At 5:10 I take off the borrowed apron and fold it like Auntie showed me, forty-five degrees and never ninety, because ninety slips at heat, and I set it on the hook.
“Come back Wednesday for the lantern fitting,” Auntie says.
“What time?”
“Four. Bring the binder if you need it. Leave it in the truck if you don’t.”
I don’t have an answer to that, so I don’t manufacture one. I lift the binder. My hands are cleaner than an hour ago. But the thumb is still tacky with honey, and the right ring finger is still bare. The bare finger does something the silver and gold never do.
The boy at the bowl, God love him, does not hit anything on my way out.
The door closes behind me and the brick step is still holding the last of the day’s warmth. Across Main the banner shifts in the wind off the harbor and declines to say anything new. Thirty days. I hitch the binder higher on my hip and start the six blocks back.
Six blocks at the pace of a woman who has just been nudged by an aunt she’s known for two hours, and I let myself in the back door of Finley’s on a Sunday with the binder under my arm and honey still tacky on the thumb that touched it and the right ring finger still bare and still, somehow, narrating.
The back kitchen is the only lit room in the place.
The lights up front are off, the espresso machine’s off, the warmer’s off, because Sunday is closed and Sunday is the day I have a key and don’t unlock the front door with it.
The only sound in the whole building is the small fridge cycling under the back counter.
He hasn’t heard me yet.
Harsk is at the prep table with both sleeves shoved to the elbow, flour to the elbow on both arms, and a smear of it across the brown of his apron where his forearm wiped through.
Twenty-seven lanterns’ worth of ren-keva spice batch is sorted into eight small bowls in front of him and he’s halfway through the ninth.
The back kitchen smells like clove and warm flour and the iron of the prep table, and underneath all of it, faintly, like honey, which is the part I brought in with me.
The pencil’s in his apron pocket. The other pencil is parked behind his ear.
He picks up the next measure with the careful hands he always has, and a small cloud of flour comes off his forearm. It settles on the brown of the apron, the wood of the table, the cuff of the shirt he shoved past his elbow that is now, very much, no longer past his elbow.
I make a sound.
It is not a polished sound. It is not the front-counter one. It’s the one Hattie pulled out of me an hour ago when she asked how he was holding up, a laugh, or half of one, the kind that lives at the back of the throat, and it’s out of me before I can get a hand on it.
He looks up.
He doesn’t startle. The look that crosses his face is the look of a man caught covered head to elbow in flour who decides, in about a quarter of a second, that he’s content to be caught this way. His jaw works once.
“Voshen’s,” he says.
“Two hours of her.”
“You smell like clove.”
“You look like a Tuesday.”
He looks down at himself. Flour to the elbow. Flour on the apron. Flour on the cuff he shoved up that has slid back down. He looks back at me. “I have been at this since 5:00.”
“I can see that.”