Chapter 19 #2
The bell over June’s door does its two notes, one of them a little flat, and I’m inside before I’ve decided to be inside.
The apron’s folded once in the canvas tote against my hip, and the binder’s behind the apron, because I swung by the apartment in the eight minutes between the cafe and here and picked them both up, because I wasn’t going back to either of them yet and I didn’t want them in the room without me.
June looks up over her reading glasses. The mug’s at her right elbow, harbor side, half full of whatever she’s been drinking since she opened up.
She takes me in, the tote, the buttoned coat, the time on the wall clock on a Saturday afternoon when I should be somewhere else. She says nothing about any of it.
“There you are.”
“Hi.”
“You want tea?”
“Please.”
“Five minutes.”
The armchair’s the green one, the worn spot on the right arm in the place it was on a Sunday in October.
The heater clicks once and rests. I sit down with the tote at my feet and the coat still on.
My breath goes shallow above the apron knot where the morning’s been stacking since before open, and it’s not supposed to loosen, not here.
The bookstore’s a quiet room that’s never asked me for anything.
All it does is stop the stack from getting taller.
I unbutton the coat. I don’t take it off.
The phone in my left pocket goes against my hip and I take it out. Three texts. Bex from forty minutes ago about the new oat steeper. A delivery notice that’s for June and not for me. Gianna.
you free
I tap her name, and she picks up on the first ring.
“Mags.”
“Gi.”
“Where are you?”
“June’s.”
“Good.” A pause I know is Gianna lifting the kettle off the stove, the water sound in the background, the pour, the small steam-end whistle her kettle’s had its whole life. “Mom called.”
“Mm.”
“She’s fine. She wants to come up for Thanksgiving.”
The half a degree from this morning is sitting in my chest, and the voice I’ve gone nine sober minutes in June’s armchair without using rises into my throat without me asking it to.
It’s the voice for the cardamom flat white.
It’s the voice for the bell the voice Gianna’s been getting on Saturday calls for the eight months since the article.
It comes on like a switch I didn’t flip.
“That’s so nice,” I say. The smile lands at the corners first. “That’d be lovely.”
“Mags.”
“What.”
“You’re doing the voice.”
“I’m not.”
“You are.”
“Gi, it’s fine.”
There’s a pause on her end, and it’s the pause of her kitchen, the cabinet that’s stuck since they moved in, the dog on the floor with his nose on her foot, Tessa in the next room on a Saturday afternoon.
On my end it’s the pause of June’s bookstore in Teakettle Bay on a Saturday in November, the heater on, the green armchair under me, the tote at my feet, the small ring on my right hand at the pad of my finger and not turned, because I haven’t touched it in two hours.
“How is he,” she says.
I don’t say who. The voice does its lift at the cardamom flat white. “He’s good. We’re good.”
“Mags.”
“Gi, we are.”
The voice keeps lifting, the smile holding at the corners, and I can feel the corners.
It’s the smile the woman from the bluff gets, the one I’ve been handing out from behind a register since I was twenty-three at a Starbucks in Davis, and I’m handing it now to my sister in a green armchair at June’s, early afternoon, on a Saturday in November.
The voice is up the half step. I’m giving it to Gianna.
I close my mouth around the next sentence before I send it. The next sentence was going to be it’s all so great, and all so great is the wellness PR cadence with the dust still on it, and I don’t send it.
Something falls.
Not in the room. Behind my collarbone, lower than the stack, because what falls isn’t the stack and the stack is still there.
What falls is something underneath it, a quieter thing, which is that the voice I’m using on my sister is the voice I’ve been using all morning on strangers, and that I haven’t used it once, since the kiss in the back room of Finley’s, on Harsk.
I notice it. I don’t correct it.
Piccola, I think. The italic is small. It doesn’t go to Gianna. It goes to me.
“I have to go,” I say. The lift hasn’t come down and I can’t put it down on this call. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“Sunday.”
“Tomorrow.”
“Mom okay for Thanksgiving?”
“Sure.”
“Mags.”
“Gi, sure.”
“Okay. Love you.”
“You too. Bye, Gi.”
I set the phone face down on the side table. The screen’s dark, and the phone’s warm against the wood.
June crosses to me with the second chipped mug, the blue one, the bergamot she keeps on the back shelf. She sets it on the side table at my left elbow, her eyes passing over the tote and the phone without stopping. No question comes after.
She goes back to the counter.
I sit. The bergamot warms. The clock above the register reads 1:23. The tote at my foot has the apron folded once, and behind it the binder, the cover closed where I left it on Thursday before he came up the stairs.
I lift the blue mug. The steam comes up against my jaw and stays there. The bell over the door doesn’t ring.
The bergamot at my elbow has gone the temperature of a cup that’s been sitting nine minutes, and I lift it and drink half of it down. The heat’s still in the middle of the mug even if the lip’s cooled. The phone’s still face down.
The bookstore has the sound of a Saturday afternoon at June’s, paper and the small electric hum of the lamp at the counter and nothing else.
The tote’s at my foot. The binder’s behind the apron. I lift the binder out and set it on my lap.
The cover’s the navy cardstock I had bound at the print shop on a Monday in October, the spine cracked once at the top from being opened more than it’s been closed.
My thumb runs along the edge of the cover, and the cover lifts because the laptop inside gives it its weight.
My laptop blinks awake, screen brightening. On it sits the title slide.
FINLEY’S COFFEE: A POSITIONING FRAMEWORK FOR INTENTIONAL GROWTH prepared by Maggie Russo, Russo Strategy
The cursor blinks on the Q of Q1 in the subtitle, where I left it Thursday before he came up the stairs.
Two months of this slide. A Thursday morning at my own kitchen table with the kettle on.
An afternoon at the counter at June’s with the sun coming sideways through the front window.
The laptop hot against my thighs in bed on a Thursday night.
Filed every time as a document, something to send, something to print, the deck the panel was going to read.
And I’m looking at it now in a green armchair after nine hours of giving the cardamom voice to strangers and then to my sister. The slide is the felt shape of my own name in a typeface I picked one Thursday. The cursor sits on the Q of Q1 where I left it.
Maggie.
The italic’s small. It doesn’t go anywhere.
I lower the cover.
The bergamot’s at my left elbow. The clock above the register reads 1:28. The shallow breath above the apron knot, where the morning’s been stacking, gives once. Not all the way. The small amount it gives is enough that my shoulders come down a quarter inch I didn’t know they’d been up.
The binder goes back on the floor at my foot, the cover closed, the laptop inside gone to sleep without my touching a key. I lift the blue mug. The steam’s gone. I drink the rest of the bergamot cold.