Chapter 20 #2
“A Wednesday afternoon,” I say. “Autumn. The kitchen clock above the sink read 2:47. The chalkboard had said pumpkin allspice. The fog was up to eleven, and then it stopped, and then I knew it had stopped. I sat in the chair in the back room and I looked at the page for fourteen minutes, and then I wrote it.”
She does not look up. Her thumb is at the corner of the page, and the thumb does not move.
“I had been counting,” I say. “I do not know how else to say what I was counting. Forty-seven, for two months by then. Nine years at Finley’s that month.
Eight years at the building. And thirty years of waiting for a thing my grandmother taught me to wait for since I was a boy, waiting for it on every wrong shore. ”
Treh.
Her left hand is still flat. The palm is making a small sound against the wood that isn’t quite a sound, and the warmth comes off her skin into the grain.
“I decided I was done waiting,” I say. “The decision was to take the work and the town and the people I have and call it a life. Writing it down was how I was going to stop carrying it in my chest. I closed the notebook and the pencil went in the apron pocket. Out front, the water glass needed refilling for the woman who was running my register that afternoon. Her name was Roya. The chalkboard stayed the same. The bell rang twice, and the decision was filed.”
I stop. The shoulders come up, and they do not come down.
“It was not sad,” I say. “The chest went quiet that afternoon, and it stayed quiet for six years. I had caught up to my own life at last. The decision was the only thing I had ever made that I knew how to make.”
She closes her eyes for half a second, and then she opens them, and she looks at me and not at the page.
“What changed?” she says.
“You walked in,” I say. “On a Tuesday in October in the morning, with a binder under your arm and the sign in the window saying I needed help. The chalkboard out front said cardamom. I set the cup at the saucer at the corner of the counter so I would not have to put my hand within six inches of your hand. I did not say the thing the page would have said, because the page had already been filed.”
The kitchen above is quiet. The fridge cycles on, and then the fridge cycles off.
“I do not know how to say this part,” I say, and the jaw works once. “I have not known what to do with you.”
She does not move. Her left hand is still flat on the wood, and the thumb is at the corner of the page where it has been.
Fenra.
I do not look away. My eyes have stayed on hers since the door opened in October, and they are going to stay.
“I should have told you sooner,” I say. “Olmar said four words at the porch swing on Friday, and they have been at the back of the throat since six that night. The four words are tell her anyway. The filing was mine, and the filing was for me. That does not mean it gets to stay in the chair in the back room when you are at this table.”
She presses the palm of her left hand harder against the wood until the knuckles go pale at the joint, and the chipped silver ring catches the lamp.
“Harsk,” she says. There is a give in it, the sound of a name said by someone who has decided to stay in the room for what comes after it. I do not know how I know this, but I know it anyway.
She does not finish the sentence. The page stays on the wood between us, and she does not push it back across.
I do not ask her what she is going to say, because the asking is the next thing and the next thing is not here yet. I have shown her the page. The page is on the wood, and the four words are out of me and into the room.
The grandmother voice does not say anything more. She is down at the framed photo in the back room two floors below me, and she is not coming up.
Two scoops. Not three.
I leave the page where it is, and I leave my left hand at the edge of it where my thumb has been.
The other hand is at my knee under the table where she cannot see it, and it is shaking, the same small specific shake the right hand had at the sink the afternoon of the burn, the second the cold tap opened.
The kettle is off and the mug is at the rim of the burner. The lamp over the table is the one I bought in March of the first year for nine dollars at the hardware store on Pine, and the bulb is the second bulb I have put in it since.
Maggie’s left palm is flat against the wood between us. The page is between her thumb and my thumb, and neither of us has moved it.
The window over the sink takes the Light beam at its nine.
The window over the sink has gone the color of paper before the pencil hits it, not gray any more and not blue. The lamp over the table is brighter than the window for one more minute, and then the window will be brighter than the lamp.
Maggie has not moved. Her left palm is still flat on the wood, the thumb at the corner of the page, the page between her thumb and mine, and the handwriting is still six years younger and not different.
She has read it twice. The first reading was for the page.
The second was not. She was going back to whatever she finds inside a sentence she has already understood.
The kettle is off and the mug is at the rim of the burner where I set it down hours ago. I have not gotten up to make a second one, and she has not asked.
She lifts her right hand off her lap. It crosses the table.
She sets it on the back of my left hand at the edge of the page.
The page is still between us. Her palm covers the scar at the metacarpals.
The scar is wider than her palm at the long axis.
Her palm is wider than the scar at the short.
The arithmetic is what I see first, because I have to look at something while the rest of me catches up to her hand on mine.
She does not say anything.
I turn my hand under hers, slow, until my palm comes up under her palm and her fingers settle between mine. The chipped silver ring is at the side of my index finger. The day is still wrong for it, and I do not care about the day.
Two scoops. Not three.
The grandmother voice is small. She is not at my shoulder now. She is somewhere I am not going to find by looking, because she has said what she had to say and she is letting the morning take the next part.
The first gull goes past the window over the sink with the cry gulls have at the harbor at this hour. The Light beam comes around at its nine, and the beam is weaker than it was at four because the pre-dawn is taking it.
Downstairs in the back room the carafe is on the shelf where it has been all day.
She has not been down there, and she does not know about the carafe.
The shelf is two floors below my left foot, and the nine ounces are still inside the glass under the lid, the brew from yesterday at noon.
The shelf has held it for fifteen years on Sundays.
Today it is holding it for a day that does not have a name yet.
Her thumb moves along the side of mine. I do not move.
The notebook is open between us on the wood. The pencil is at the seam of the binding. Her hand is in mine.
The window over the sink has gone the color of the page.