Chapter 16
Harsk
The office at the back of the prep kitchen has gone the cold it gets when no one has been in since the bonfire night, when I went up the stairs and did not come back down to it.
The fluorescent is on. The maroon arm of the chair is where it has always been, and the roll of receipt tape from the last register pull sits on the desk under the lamp where I left it, the days since gone by without my coming back to the column.
The carafe is upstairs. I came down without it.
I sit, and the chair makes its small wood sound. Presso is on the desk corner next to the closed notebook. The alley door is locked and the front is dark, and the Monday board lies in pencil on the back desk under my left hand, not yet inked.
I uncoil the tape.
It is thermal print, the small register kind that fades by the second winter, and the first three feet are Friday. I run my thumb down the column for the named pours. Burundi. Yirgacheffe. The house. The Quiet Pour. Honey and paper.
The Quiet Pour line on Friday comes to fourteen.
I sit with the number a moment. It does not go into the column the back of my head used to keep, the one where a fourteen once sat against the chair the day the mortgage closed and against the framed photo on the back wall. This number is just fourteen, and fourteen is good.
I uncoil another foot, and there is Saturday. A short day, the early close, eleven on the Quiet Pour line.
Eleven for a short Saturday makes twenty-five across the two days. The week before, the week the line first went up on the chalkboard in her hand, the two-day count was nine.
The number is going up, and the pencil stays in the apron pocket a second longer than I mean it to.
The apron hangs on the hook behind the door.
I get up, pull the pencil from the pocket, and open the notebook to the weekly totals.
I started that page Tuesday two weeks back, when the line first ticked up.
I date the page by the line, not by the top.
I draw the next box. QP, wk 3. I write the number in.
Then I look at the page. The overhead is the same fluorescent, the lamp the same lamp, the maroon under my elbow the same maroon. The light has not moved an inch in fifteen years. I am the one sitting in it different.
I close the notebook.
Presso lifts her face and looks at the front, though nothing is at the front and no one has been at the door the whole hour I have been in here. I stopped trying to read her face when she does that a long time ago.
Auntie’s tin of cardamom cookies is on the corner where it has sat since Friday, lid still on. I will open it with the second cup and the cruller half from Garza and the carafe.
The receipt roll goes back where the roll lives. I stand, and the maroon arm makes its sound.
The front of the building is still dark and the chalkboard is not yet inked, because the day has not started and I have not decided what to write. Liana is on the noon shift, in before midday for the iced one and to keep Maggie company on the floor.
The carafe is still on the second shelf upstairs. Pencil in hand, I head to the front.
The bell gives Liana’s double knock, the second small ring landing on the heel of the first. Her pace through the door has not changed in four years.
She is in the vet’s coat with dog hair on the cuff at the elbow and the stethoscope folded once into the pocket at her hip, the fold of a day she has been on her feet since before the clinic opened.
“Iced coffee.”
“Liana.”
I have it built before she reaches the wood. I pour. The cold coffee hits the cubes at the right angle and they nudge against each other. Lid on. Straw beside it. She lays a five down without looking at the till.
Maggie is at the chalkboard with the rag, and she turns. Her voice comes a degree softer than the door voice, landing at the corners of her mouth without lifting the rest of her face.
“Liana.”
“Maggie.”
The chalk goes back on the shelf. Maggie crosses to the front of the counter and sets her elbow on the wood at the angle a person sets an elbow when she is not about to leave the conversation, and Liana picks up the iced coffee and does not move from the counter either.
Two women who have not seen each other since Wednesday, finding their footing.
I am at the grouphead. The shot is at second twenty-two, and I let it run to second twenty-five.
“Dog at five this morning,” Liana says.
“Yeah?”
“The bichon up the hill. Ate a glove.”
“A whole glove.”
“Right down to the snap at the cuff.”
Maggie’s laugh is the laugh I have heard her give Auntie at the prep table on a Saturday afternoon, short and surprised at itself, and it stays in her face after the sound is gone.
“Is it going to—”
“It’ll be fine. Glove comes out a glove on the other end.”
“Liana. Please.”
“I am a professional.”
The shot is down. I dump it in the knock box, set the portafilter back in its slot, and run the cloth.
The two of them at the front counter is a register I have not had on the floor before. Maggie’s smile is not the one she keeps for customers. This one is for Liana. Her shoulder eases first and her mouth follows after.
Liana drinks, then points the straw at the chalkboard. “The chalkboard special. Iced version next week?”
“Working on it.”
“My name on it.”
“In chalk, top line.”
Liana looks at me, and her chin tips up when she has something to say and is not going to say it. She drinks. She turns back to Maggie.
They talk about June, the bichon’s owner, the chain across the street that had its second sign up before the morning rush.
The second sign was worse than the first. Maggie’s hand goes from the wood to the binder clip in her apron pocket and back without reaching for the half pencil.
Her voice stays where it came on for Liana.
I make a flat white for the man at the four-top who has held up a finger without standing. The pour, the bloom of the milk, the cup down on the saucer, the walk across the floor, the cup at his elbow, the walk back.
When I come back behind the counter, Liana has set the iced coffee down at the corner where her cup goes.
She is leaned against the counter, and Maggie is leaned against it from the other side, and the binder clip lies flat on the wood between them where Maggie set it down without looking.
The light through the front window is at its late-morning angle.
The grouphead is at nine bars where I left it.
Liana goes. The bell. She tips her chin at me on the way out.
Maggie picks the binder clip up off the wood and slides it back into the apron pocket. She does not look at me. She crosses to the back bar for the linen.
The chalkboard says MONDAY: THE QUIET POUR. SOUP AT VOSHEN’S. in the block letters I inked. The carafe is in back and the numbers are on the desk, and the afternoon is going to need the desk.
“Office at three,” I say.
“Three.”
She does not turn around. The linen is in her hand.
The back room office is the temperature it has been since the bonfire night. The maroon arm is under my elbow and the desk lamp is on and the notebook is open at the page where I drew the box.
Maggie comes through the doorway with the apron still on and a small white saucer in her left hand, and she sets the saucer down on the corner of the desk where the cookies tin lives. On the saucer is a half cruller from the bag Garza brought before the open.
“You did not eat it,” she says.
“No.”
“I am putting it down. You can ignore it.”
“Alright.”
She does not sit, because there is one chair in the office and I am in it. She stands at the corner of the desk where the saucer is, her body angled so the back of her left shoulder is to the doorway and the front of it is to me. Her left hand is six inches from my right arm.
I push the notebook six inches toward her.
She looks down. QP, wk 3. Twenty-five across two days. Friday fourteen, Saturday eleven. The reading takes her about seven seconds.
“Twenty-five.”
“Mm.”
“Wk one was nine.”
“Yes.”
She breathes in once, slow, and the exhale runs the smallest fraction longer than the inhale, audible at six foot ten in the small room. Her left hand drifts to the edge of the apron and rests on the hem without going in.
“Harsk.”
“Yes.”
“That is good.”
“Mm.”
She looks at the page longer than the page is asking to be looked at. The chipped silver is not on her hand today; the thin nickel band is. Monday.
The chair makes its small wood sound and I do not shift my weight. The office air at three feet of her carries what the floor air does not. My shoulder turns a degree toward her and I take the weight back. It has sat in my chest next to the number for six years.
She straightens. The shoulder is still six inches from my arm.
“There is another thing.”
“Yes.”
“The chain put a new sign in their window this morning.”
“What kind.”
“A drink. Limited edition. They have called it Vrennthala Spice.” Her mouth does a thing at the corner that is not a smile. “I saw it this afternoon, walking back from June’s.”
The word in her mouth is not Auntie’s. The chain has put their word on it in a font that is not the word.
“I saw the ad.”
She looks up. “Where?”
“The print on the placemat at Dottie’s. Friday lunch. A full-color quarter page.” I let the next part out slower. “They have raised the spend. Better than twenty above what they were running through October.”
“You saw a placemat.”
“Mm. They have not run a placemat ad in town before.”
She is quiet. Her left hand has come off the apron and gone flat on the corner of the desk an inch from the saucer, and the hand is not closing.
“That is the second sign.”
“Yes.”
She looks at the page again, then at the wall behind me where the chalkboard pencil bracket is, then at me.
“We do our own.”
“Yes.”
“Today.”
I look at her.
“Today,” she says again.
The grandmother voice arrives like she arrives in a small kitchen, dry, at the elbow. Two scoops. Not three. Do the work, boy.