Chapter 14
Harsk
The back kitchen behind me is wiped down.
The ren-keva tins from last night are stacked at the back of the prep table, and the empty measure she set down at quarter past seven is in the rack at the side of the sink where I put it after I locked the back door behind her at ten of eight.
An empty measure does not weigh anything.
I put my hand around it once when I came in this morning at four, and the hand did not pick it up, and then the hand let go.
I did the chalkboard at the back desk last night in pencil before I went up the stairs, and I carried it out to the easel before I went out the alley door.
It says HOUSE BLEND. CHEESE BISCUIT FROM GARZA, because Garza is faster than the cruller this Monday and the chalkboard is honest about it.
The letters are too tall again. The board has always been too short for the letters.
Presso is on the back counter at the end nearest the door with her half ear forward, listening for a bell that has not rung yet.
The harbor side of the building is dark.
The front window has the streetlamp on Main going yellow against the glass, and the inside of the glass shows me back to myself when I am not looking for it.
I count to four in Orcish in my head, because the counting is what I do, though it is a different muscle this morning. It is not the muscle for holding back the wanting, because the wanting is no longer a thing I have to hold back. The four beats are only for the half beat before the door.
Boy.
The bell rings.
Presso’s half ear flicks. Her boots hit the brick outside.
The door opens before it knows she’s there, and the bell rings.
That’s the first ring most mornings. She walks in.
The bell rings again so the count comes out right.
Three rings for one door. The bell has been doing this for twenty mornings now.
Warm paper and beach grass, the two notes that have arrived every morning, coming up at me from the bottom of my chest. Nineteen mornings, twenty if I count the Saturday she didn’t get in until six because of the rain. Today is twenty-one.
She is wearing the cream sweater.
It is the cream wool sweater from last night, and the powdered handprint is still at her ribs, five fingers, the right hand, the thumb low. She has not washed it. She has put it on again and walked here in it, and the print is in front of me now at the exact height my hand reached.
She does not look down at the print, and she does not pretend it isn’t there.
She comes to the counter and sets her hand on the wood.
The ring on the wood is the nickel band on her right index finger, the Monday one.
The metal sits cool against the wood, and the wood is the same temperature it has been since I wiped it at ten of five.
“You opened earlier.”
The first sentence is hers. The voice is low and unguarded, the one she uses when there is no one else in the room.
I have the cleaning-shot rag in my left hand, and I set it on the rim of the drip tray.
“I never went up.”
Her chin comes up a half beat.
“Your apron is the brown one.”
“It is Monday.”
She rolls her right shoulder once, like the strap of her bag is still there, except the strap is back in her apartment and the shoulder rolls anyway. I leave it. Not yet a problem.
The portafilter is in my right hand. I knock it so the grounds drop into the bin, and then I move to the grinder for her grind. The grind for her cup is one click finer than Korren’s, and Korren is not in until six.
She stays at the counter for a quarter of a minute without saying anything more, and I do not turn around. The grinder runs its eight seconds, and the dose comes out at eighteen and a half grams without my weighing it, because my hand knows her cup now.
Her hand rests on the wood, and her thumb finds the side of the nickel band and stays there. Ten and a half hours ago that thumb was at the lower corner of my tusk. She does not know I am looking. Her hand is at rest.
The pull starts at nine bars, the crema banks at the lip of the shot glass at sixteen seconds, and the pull holds.
I set her cup down in its corner of the counter, the same corner it has lived in for twenty-one mornings now, and I turn the handle toward her hand how she likes it without either of us ever having said so.
She picks it up in both hands and holds it a second before she drinks.
She isn’t ready yet to let the morning start.
“The handprint.”
The milk pitcher is on the warmer at my left elbow, and I move it over to the wand without turning around.
“I see it.”
“I know.”
She breathes once.
“I did not run the wash last night.”
“No.”
“I might run it tonight.”
I knock the second portafilter against the bin, once, and the grounds drop.
She drinks the coffee, and her eyes close for half a second and open again. She does not say oh this morning. She does not say anything at all.
The grandmother voice in my head says nothing either. Naskha has been quiet since the bell rang, which is not the same as being absent. She is watching.
Out the front window the streetlight on Main switches off by the timer in the box on the lamppost. The light over the harbor side goes blue at the edge, and the chalkboard letters lose their bronze and come up gray in a November Monday morning that has not decided yet whether the marine layer is coming back in or going out.
I wipe the counter past her hand, taking the cloth around the saucer without touching it, and bring the cloth back to me and fold it into thirds and lay it on the bar.
She sets her cup back down on the saucer.
“Six o’clock,” she says.
“Korren,” I say.
She nods. Her hand leaves the wood, and the handprint goes with her toward the back, where her apron waits. Presso’s half ear flicks once. The bell over the door does not ring.
I put my right hand on the edge of the counter where her hand was a half second ago, and the wood under my palm has two temperatures, the morning and her. I take my hand off and pick up the cloth and run the line again.
6:12, and the sun is gone behind the bookstore roofline, and Pine Street has the blue you get for the nine minutes between sunset and lamps. The lamps come on. I have a lantern in my left hand, the wire handle cold through the canvas wrap.
There are twenty-seven lanterns out on the sidewalk in front of Voshen’s, laid in a line along the brick where Olmar set them this afternoon.
The brass bowl boy is on the curb with his striker in his fist and a fox mask up on his forehead. He is not a ma?tre d’ tonight. The bowl travels with him.
“Harsk.”
Olmar comes out of Voshen’s with two lanterns at his belt and Hattie a quarter step behind him, her stag mask shoved up on her hair, a canvas jacket, bare ankles above her boots.
“Twenty-seven,” she says.
“Yes.”
“He counted.”
“Twice.”
Her mouth does the small thing, and she does not press it any further than that.
Maggie comes out next. The cream sweater is gone, and the wool tonight is darker, an oatmeal cardigan I have not seen before, the cuffs pushed up to the elbow because the sleeves are long for her arms. The nickel band is still on her right index finger, the Monday one. I say nothing.
She has a lantern in her left hand and a tray balanced on her right forearm with eight ren-keva on it under a folded cloth. The cloth is folded ready to lift.
A heron mask is pushed up on her head, the beak turned the wrong way around for the position, because she has it tipped back to keep it off her face. She catches me looking at the beak.
“It will not stay forward,” she says.
“It will when you tilt your head down.”
She tilts her head down.
“Alright.”
Behind her, Auntie locks the teahouse door without looking and pockets the key, her lantern at her belt. She does not wear a mask. She has not for forty years.
She lifts her chin at the boy with the bowl.
The note travels.
Twenty-seven lanterns lift off the brick on the same beat.
Children come up out of side doors and street corners, quiet first and then loud.
A fox is at my elbow, Olmar has a bear at his hip, and a girl no taller than a barstool is clinging to her father’s coat with a dove mask and a lantern bigger than her head. The line forms.
I am third from the front, behind Auntie and the boy with the bowl, and Maggie is fourth, a quarter step behind me on my right because the tray is on her right arm and she wants that elbow free of me.
We walk.
A gust comes off the harbor at the corner of Main and Second, a Vrennthala gust, the kind that goes looking for a candle. Three lanterns shudder, and the dove girl’s lantern dips.
Veshar is at her left.
I do not know when he came up. He has been in the line behind us since the second block, his own lantern at his belt and his free hand the size of a small skillet, with the brewer’s quiet on him.
The lantern dips. His hand is under the canvas wrap before the wax can pour.
He steadies it, and the candle holds. The girl keeps her eyes on the floor. Then she does.
“Thank you,” she says, very small.
“Hm,” Veshar says.
It is not a word in any language. It is the sound a brewer makes at a malt that holds. The girl tightens her grip on the handle, and around her the line keeps walking, and the gust passes. Veshar does not say anything else for the next block. He never does.
The brewers are like that, Naskha says.
Maggie’s shoulder turns a half beat toward Veshar without her looking at him, then stops. She looks once at me and back forward.
At Third the line turns north, and the harbor opens at the end of Main below us. The bonfire is a quarter mile down at the gravel turnout above the water, a stack of cedar and oak already shaped and not yet lit. The orange has not started. The sky is still the blue it goes an hour past sunset.