Chapter 15
Maggie
I don’t move. Gray light fills the room, the kind that comes before the sun clears the headland. I don’t know this ceiling. The beams are strange, and a crack runs down one corner. A faint white circle marks where a lamp used to hang.
Hi, I think, to no one, to the ceiling.
The place beside me is empty. I put my left palm flat to the sheet on his side, like I used to put it against the steel counter at Finley’s when I wanted a surface to tell me something, and the cotton tells me he’s been gone long enough to be downstairs but not long enough to have gone cold.
Long enough for the burner. Long enough for the bell.
Something heavy left the foot of the bed in the night, because there’s a warm hollow in the blanket near my right ankle, which means the cat is downstairs with him, of course she is, because everyone in this building has somewhere to be except me.
Far below, through a floor and a brick wall, the bell over the front door of Finley’s rings once.
My right hand is up by the pillow with nothing on it, the bare hand turned toward the side of my mouth where it ended up when I fell asleep, and that small empty stripe of skin is the thing the whole morning seems to hang itself on.
The nickel band is on the small table on my side, where I slid it off somewhere in the dark, which is not a thing I have done in sixteen years for any reason but a Sunday.
I haven’t made up my mind about the rings in sixteen years and I haven’t made it up this morning either, and on a morning like this one that turns out to be fine by me, which is new.
I sit up.
The sheet falls. I’m wearing one of his undershirts, sleeves to my elbow, hem at my knees, the cotton washed so many times it’s gone past gray.
On the left side of the chest, just under the collarbone, there’s half a handprint of flour.
Four fingers. The thumb missed. He must have come up in this shirt from the bakery yesterday with the flour still on him.
It came up onto his sheets and down onto me, and now here it is on my left, doing the absurd small job of telling me how he spent his Monday.
Nonna, I think, piccola, look at this, in the kitchen voice that isn’t a voice so much as the warmth Saturday afternoons had in Citrus Heights, back when the enamel pot was on the burner and the whole house had been built for one purpose for one hour.
My body remembers last night without my asking it to.
There’s a soreness at the top of my left thigh.
It has nothing to do with the blanket. The pillow keeps handing me his smell: bread, clean cotton, the back room with its brick wall.
The small wood-sound the bed made under his weight has climbed into my ribs and set up there. I’m keeping that one.
The chair by the window has my clothes on it, and he’s folded them.
The jeans lie across the seat, the cream sweater on top with its broken button turned to the inside, my bra and underwear tucked under the sweater, and last the cardigan from the bonfire with the heron mask still in the pocket and my socks set on top of the mask.
It’s a man’s fold, square and a little too careful, the work of someone who decided what to do with my clothes without asking and then did it the only way he knows how to do anything.
I sit there in his undershirt and look at the stack. The wellness vocabulary tries to climb up the back of my mouth as a joke about aligned visions and folded laundry, and I don’t let it. The joke can keep.
The window looks out at the harbor. I’ve walked under that window twenty-two mornings now without once being on this side of it, so the boats out past the headland look softer from in here than they ever do from the street.
The shelf to the right of the bed holds books on brewing and bread and a small green hardback whose spine I can’t read from here.
The kettle’s on the little stove. The clock on the second shelf has no hands at all, and of course it doesn’t, I think, and what that does to my chest is not what I’d call sensible.
I’m awake. I’m in his bed alone. My clothes are on the chair, folded, with the broken button hidden, and the bell has rung once downstairs, which means the burner’s on and the espresso machine is awake and there’s coffee waiting whenever I decide to be a person about it.
I get up.
The floorboards under my bare feet are cold.
The wool blanket folded across the foot of the bed has been folded to forty-five degrees and not ninety, like I’ve folded mine since I was a girl, and he’s folded it like that without knowing I do it.
I put two fingers on the corner of it as I pass, and the gesture is more than I meant to make.
I take my time getting dressed. The bra, the underwear, the jeans.
I leave his undershirt on underneath the sweater because the flour print is mine for now and I’m not ready to give it back yet.
Cardigan over the top, heron mask still in the pocket, socks last. The cardigan still carries woodsmoke under the brick-wall smell.
My hand catches the lapel and stays there.
In the small mirror over the basin my hair is flat on one side and not the other, and I leave it.
The key is gone from the chair by the door, which means it’s in his pocket downstairs, so I put my hand on the brass knob instead.
I’m going to go down. I’ll take the back stairs and stand in the back room doorway for a minute before he sees me.
There’s one more thing I’m not saying, even to myself.
I turn the knob.
The back stairs come out into the prep kitchen by the sink. The prep kitchen ends at the cased opening to the front of house. I stop in that opening, socks on the brick, the heel of my left hand against the jamb. I don’t go through.
He hasn’t heard me.
He’s in front of the espresso machine in profile to the back wall and in full back to me, in the brown apron with the strap crossing left of his spine, his right hand at the grouphead with the portafilter locked in and his weight on the right foot, which is where his weight goes when the pull is doing what he wants it to.
His shoulders are at rest, except rest isn’t the right word for what his shoulders do, because the muscle across the top of them is wide and not loose, and what I’m watching is the absence of the small shift he makes every time the bell rings, since the bell hasn’t rung.
The shop is empty. The window over Korren’s spot at the end of the bar holds an empty stool and a folded paper from yesterday, because Korren has already been and gone; he comes in at twenty past six and sits for forty minutes saying nothing, then leaves the five on the counter and goes home.
That’s a clock he set for himself the third week I worked.
I don’t move.
The walk down the stairs has put last night back into the soft place at the top of my left thigh.
The undershirt is warm where the sweater covers it.
Cool where it doesn’t. The flour print sits right where his palm has known the front of me.
I’m not standing like I stood here last Tuesday.
My hips have a whole opinion about it now.
The cardigan’s bunched in the crook of my arm, still holding the woodsmoke under the brick-wall smell, and my hand on it hasn’t loosened once since I came down.
He drops the dose into the basket. The tamper goes into his left hand, and the tamp is one motion that doesn’t look like effort. He turns the portafilter up under the grouphead. The latch makes its small wood-and-metal sound. His right shoulder rises a quarter inch and lowers, and the pull starts.
Every morning since I got here, I’ve watched him at this machine from the wrong side of the counter, and never once from this side of the room.
From back here his head sits differently on his neck.
He’s taller from behind than from across the bar.
From here the shoulders are the whole picture and the tusks aren’t in it at all.
The man at the machine is just a man making coffee for a shop that has nobody in it yet.
What gets me is that his hands haven’t changed for the emptiness.
He’s making it with the same care he’d give a line out the door.
Oh.
The pressure gauge holds and he doesn’t look at it, because he hasn’t needed to look at it in nine months.
The crema banks at the lip of the shot glass at sixteen seconds, like he taught my hands it would.
I can’t see the saucer from here. But I know which one he’s put it on: the one nearest the door, with the small chip on the inside of the foot. Mine.
He’s making it for me.
He hasn’t heard me, he can’t have heard me, because these stairs don’t creak like mine do and my socks are quiet and there’s a whole wall between my breath and his. He put my saucer at the corner because he knows I’m coming down. Something moves in my chest, and my hand on the jamb tightens.
His head turns.
Something’s reached him. Maybe it’s the light at the opening, or the back-room air stirring as someone comes downstairs.
He turns his head toward the back without turning his shoulders, like he does when his hands aren’t finished.
His eyes find me through the opening. The steady working set of his face doesn’t drop. It opens by about an eighth of an inch.
He doesn’t say anything, and I don’t either.
The cup goes onto the saucer. He sets the saucer at the corner of the counter where it goes every morning. He doesn’t carry it to me at the doorway. He doesn’t gesture me over. He puts the cup down on the wood. His hand lifts, falls back to the bar, and stays there.
The bell over the front door rings.