Chapter 15 #2
Eleven on a November Tuesday at Finley’s is its own small weather, slow like the off-season, softer at all the edges.
The bell doesn’t go off more than once every twelve minutes.
The espresso machine has time to think between pulls.
I’m behind the counter wiping down the wood with the cloth I’ve run over the same six wipes for five minutes now, because the wood is already clean and the wiping is just to give my hands a job that isn’t the smile.
I’m not on the schedule today.
At eight I came down in the cardigan with the heron mask still in the pocket.
Harsk turned his head toward the cased opening without turning his shoulders, like he does, and set the apron in his left hand down on the counter where I could reach it without leaning across him.
That was the entire conversation about whether I was working.
I tied the second strap behind my back without looking.
The keys are in my left pocket, which this morning is also his pocket, because the pocket is in his cardigan over his undershirt over me.
The bell has rung four times since eight.
Korren came in by Harsk’s clock. I know because I learned it from the back room doorway.
He left without ordering a refill. He nodded at me on his way past the counter, like any other day, except the nod ran a quarter second longer at the chin.
And he didn’t put his five on the wood. The five stayed in his pocket. None of it showed on my face.
A man I don’t know comes in. The bell rings. He’s in a navy fleece zipped to the throat, a knit hat, and hiking boots that have been wet recently and dried in the wrong shape. He comes in like a stranger in a town he’s only passing through, eyes on the chalkboard before they’re anywhere near me.
I straighten up. The strap of the apron is tied. The bell is still settling in the brass and he hasn’t seen me yet, so I’ve got four seconds and the four seconds are mine to use.
“Good morning,” I say, my voice gone where it goes. “Welcome to Finley’s. What can I get started for you?”
He looks at the chalkboard, which says TODAY: VANILLA CARDAMOM. DECAF AVAILABLE. in the block letters Harsk put up and he reads it like anybody reads anything on a wall in a town they’ve just rolled into, quick, eyes already coming back to me for the verdict.
“The cardamom,” he says. “Is that sweet?”
“Lightly. The cardamom does most of the work and the vanilla just rounds it out. We can do twelve ounces or sixteen, hot or iced, and if you want it less sweet I can pull the vanilla back.”
“Twelve. Hot. Standard.”
“For here or to go?”
He hesitates half a beat, his eyes on the window two-top. “Here, I think.”
“Wonderful. Grab a seat anywhere and I’ll bring it over.”
He nods and turns. Four steps to the window two-top in the wet boots that aren’t going to be dry until Thursday. He pulls the chair out and sits, already looking at his phone before the chair has settled under him.
The smile goes off my face like a light off a porch.
One motion, and not a slow one. The mouth comes down, the shoulders come down behind the mouth, the chin drops, and the half step in my voice goes back down into my throat where it waits with the rest of the things I don’t need until the next time the bell rings.
The cloth in my right hand hasn’t moved the whole time.
I turn toward the espresso machine. Harsk is at the grouphead, where he’s been the whole time, his back to the man at the window and his face angled three-quarters toward the counter where I am and a quarter toward the back wall, where he can pretend he’s checking the pressure gauge if he needs the cover.
He saw the smile come on. He saw it go off. The off came down at the same speed the on did, and he had a clean view of both.
There’s no fix to his face, none of that quick rearranging some people do when they’ve just caught something they weren’t supposed to catch.
The only thing on him to read is the thing I learned to read from the wrong side of the counter, which is the small loosening at the back of his jaw that he doesn’t know he has.
It’s the same loosening he had in the doorway at eight.
He isn’t deciding what to do with what he saw. He decided already.
He turns three degrees toward the grinder, which isn’t a turn so much as a granting of the air, the orc version of the guy on the next bar stool letting you know he sees you and he isn’t going to make you say a word about it and he’ll just be over here.
The pressure on the gauge holds. His right hand goes to the dose and his left hand goes to the tamp, and the pull is one motion.
I make the cardamom, twelve ounces, hot, standard. The steam cycle hits the steamer at ninety seconds and I do the foam with the small jug off the warmer and the milk goes where the milk goes. The cup is the white one with the wide rim, and I set it on the saucer with both hands and walk it over.
“Here you are.” He looks up from the phone for a polite second, says thanks, and looks back down. I put the cup on the wood and I turn, and the voice goes off again before I’m even back at the counter.
Harsk hasn’t looked at me. His weight has shifted a quarter inch toward the corner where my saucer sat this morning, and that’s a thing I’ve been able to read since my second week.
I take my place at the till. He runs a cloth across the steam wand.
I open the drawer and start counting the twenties for no reason on earth except that my hands want something to do that isn’t holding a smile.
The clock above the back doorway has barely moved.
The man at the two-top finishes his cardamom in eight minutes, and he brings the cup back to the counter instead of leaving it on the saucer, which means he was raised right somewhere. The smile comes up.
“Thanks, that was great.”
“So glad. Come back.” He turns. My face flattens before his back is past the till.
Harsk is at the steam wand and he hasn’t moved his head, but the corner of his mouth, which keeps its own slow weather, has done a quarter of nothing.
The quarter of nothing isn’t a smile and it isn’t the lead-up to one.
In a room with my mother, I couldn’t read it.
But in this room, on this side of the counter, with the front bar between us and the cloth still in my right hand, the quarter of nothing reads as I saw the gear, I saw you choose, the choosing is yours.
He doesn’t say it.
I bump the till drawer closed with my hip.
I cross to the espresso machine like you cross any few feet of floor between yourself and the only other person in a room, which is to say without making any of it into a sentence.
I pick the empty saucer up off the corner where mine has sat since morning and carry it to the sink in the back.
He’s at the grouphead. I’m behind him at the sink.
I run the water hot, the saucer goes in, and at last I set down the cloth I’ve been wiping the same six wipes with and dry my hands on the apron.
When I turn back, he’s shifted right at the machine, which is the shift that opens up the slot at the counter where I belong, and he hasn’t looked at me to do it.
I take my slot.
The next bell doesn’t ring for another stretch of quiet, and in the minutes in between, my face goes back to the face I haven’t worn for any room in this town in twenty-two mornings, except in the back room and the bookstore and the apartment above the bar.
I haven’t decided about the bookstore for the afternoon yet.
The binder is over there on the back armchair where I left it Friday night, and June stays open until five on weekdays, and the lunch service here runs until two.
After two the front door gets the latch.
I’ll untie the second strap, hang the apron on the hook, walk the six blocks west with the heron mask still in my pocket because I haven’t bothered to take it out.
June will be at the counter with her tea and her reading glasses.
I’ll sit in the back armchair with the binder on my knees.
The title slide will be the first thing I see when I open it.
The title slide. I don’t let myself rehearse it in here.
The bell rings, and I refill the saucer for the regular at the door.
The bell over June’s door rings its own way, nothing like Finley’s, and I’m inside before I’ve made any actual decision about being inside, the binder under my arm and the heron mask still in the cardigan pocket because I haven’t bothered to take it out for any of the six blocks between here and here.
June is at the counter. The reading glasses are on, the half-frame ones she puts on for the receipt book and then forgets she’s wearing when she stands up, and her tea is in the chipped mug at her right elbow, the white one with the harbor sketch on the side that’s been at her right elbow every afternoon I’ve ever come in here.
She looks up over the top of the glasses.
“Hi, you.”
“Hi.”
She doesn’t ask why I’m here on a Tuesday with the binder, or why my coat is still on. She just tips her chin at the back armchair.
“You want tea?”
“Please.”
“Five minutes. The kettle’s been off a while.”
I cross the shop to the armchair, the green one with the worn spot on the right arm where her tabby used to sit before her tabby retired upstairs, and I set the binder on my knees with my coat still on and the cardigan still buttoned.
His undershirt is under all of it with the four-finger mark on my left rib, and I know those four fingers are there without putting my hand anywhere near them.
My body still has the morning in it. My shoulders are down from where they came down at the counter. My throat hasn’t gone back to its day-pitch yet. I don’t think it’s going to.
I open the binder. The title slide is the first thing.
FINLEY’S COFFEE: A POSITIONING FRAMEWORK FOR INTENTIONAL GROWTH
In the title font. In the title size. With a small subhead under it, italic, the kind of subhead you write on a Tuesday after a glass of pinot, that says prepared by Maggie Russo, Russo Strategy.
I look at it. It’s the work I’m good at, the work I’ve been good at for years.
The font is right. The kerning is right.
The subhead does the small assertive thing a subhead is supposed to do, and positioning framework is the correct phrase for everything on the slides underneath this one, and the correct phrase is what the case study will say I delivered.
Harsk would read it like a person reads a stranger’s note left on his own kitchen table. He wouldn’t put it down angry. He’d just put it down.
I don’t look at the second slide.
June crosses to me with the second chipped mug, the blue one. The tea is the bergamot she keeps on the back shelf because she knows I drink it. She sets it on the side table at my left elbow and doesn’t look at the binder.
“Anything I should know?”
“No.”
“Tell me when there is.”
“I will.”
She goes back to the counter. Her glasses slip down half an inch and she pushes them back up with the same knuckle she uses every time.
The receipt book opens. The room goes quiet like a bookstore on a slow afternoon: one person at the counter, one in the back armchair, the heater clicking on for the late afternoon.
I close the binder.
I pick up the bergamot, and the handle is warm. Nonna, I think, and the handle stays warm.
Binder closed on my knees, mug warm in my hand, 2:38 on the clock above the register. I haven’t looked at my phone in fifty minutes. The door doesn’t ring again until quarter past three.