Chapter 17 #3
I sit up. The quilt comes with me to the shoulder. The flatter pillow ends up at my back. He looks at me from his side of the bed with what he had at the counter and one thing more besides it, and I don’t name the one thing more.
“Come on,” I say.
“Coming.”
The hall back to the kitchen is shorter from this side of the night than it was from the other side.
I’m in a t-shirt of his he handed me off the chair.
The cotton is soft and a good foot too long at the hem.
He’s in his jeans and the white undershirt.
The boards under us make the same sounds they made on the way in.
One of them is softer than I’ve heard it in nine weeks, because he’s the one standing on it.
The kitchen light over the small table is still on at the cord.
The kettle’s where I left it, cold. Garza’s paper bag is on the counter where he set it down when we came up at four.
He picks the bag up and sets it down again, gentler, like he sets a saucer under a cup at the bar, and the bag doesn’t crinkle.
The crullers inside are the cinnamon ones Garza fries on Wednesday for his Thursday morning, the ones Harsk pours the private carafe alongside and the bag’s been sitting in the apartment six hours without a soul opening it.
He opens the box and hands me one. The cruller’s still soft.
I lean my hip on the counter. The counter’s cold.
The cardigan’s somewhere I don’t need it.
His shoulder is right at my eye line at his height, because he’s sitting now, on the high stool I’ve never once used because the high stool is the wrong height for me alone.
He’s sitting on it for me. The stool takes him.
We eat the crullers. The cinnamon comes off on my fingers. He has the second one. He holds it out toward me, then offers a third. I shake my head. He takes that one too. The eating is a small thing, and the room is small around it.
The lamp by the kitchen window is on. I didn’t turn it on.
It’s the little one on the bookshelf next to the sash, throwing a low warm light at the harbor side of the wall, and the last lamp that lived in that spot is the one he broke reaching for the high shelf two weeks ago and replaced the next morning without either of us making it a conversation.
I look at it once. He doesn’t look at me looking at it.
I don’t say a thing about the lamp. The cinnamon on my thumb goes into my mouth, and I keep the noticing.
The drawer under the window is latched. The desk in front of it has nothing on it.
His eye doesn’t go to either one, the same way his eye didn’t go to either when he came in.
He keeps his looking off the things I haven’t offered, and he’s kept it off them since that first Monday in October, through the cinnamon, through the bed, now at the counter.
What I haven’t told him isn’t in the drawer. The drawer’s the smallest part of it. It’s on the counter, between the cruller bag and his hand, and I’m the only one in the room who can see it sitting there.
I open my mouth to set it down where he can see it too.
“Harsk.”
“Mm.”
The words are lined up behind my teeth in their order, ready to come out in the order I put them in, like the stone and the pencil and the half-matched earring I lined up on the brass mailbox an hour ago.
I came to this town to write about a coffee shop.
I picked yours because you were the only one in the room.
There’s a file on my desktop with your carafe in it, and I haven’t shown you a single page.
All I have to do is lift it out and set it on the wood.
He looks at me. Not the counter-look, the harbor side of his face turned to listen for the next thing.
The other one, the one he’s only had since the back room in October, with nothing held off anywhere on it.
He’s waiting for whatever I said his name for, and he isn’t bracing for it, because it has not once occurred to him that the woman in his undershirt in her own kitchen would have a thing behind her teeth she hasn’t put down.
That’s what closes my throat. Not the file. The not-bracing.
“I’m glad you came up,” I say.
It isn’t what I opened my mouth to say. It’s a true thing and it’s a coward’s thing, and it does the job a coward’s true thing does, which is buy the whole night back at the price of the morning.
“So am I,” he says.
And there it is, in my own kitchen, with the lamp he replaced throwing its warm light on the wall: I’ve kept something from the one person in this town I never have to keep anything from.
I didn’t even reach for the voice to do it.
The voice would have been the easy way, the bright lift, the honey, the smile that handles a hard moment so I don’t have to.
I didn’t use it on him. I wouldn’t. I just closed my mouth on the true thing and set a smaller one down in its place, here, in the one room that’s never once asked me to be a brighter version of myself than the one in the bed down the hall.
He takes the small thing and doesn’t check it for what it weighs, because it hasn’t occurred to him there’s a weight.
That’s the part that’s going to sit on me. He won’t weigh it. I’ll have to.
He folds the empty paper bag down its long crease and sets it on the counter at the corner where Garza’s bag goes when there’s going to be a Garza’s bag in the apartment again.
My hand stays on the counter. The cinnamon’s on the side of my thumb.
The harbor at the window is the rain, still going. He stands up off the stool.