Chapter 21
Maggie
It’s barely past dawn and I’m standing in my own kitchen with my coat still on, because the window over the sink doesn’t close all the way and the cold got into the room before I did.
There’s a pearl on my right ring finger, which is Saturday’s ring, and today is Monday, and I have noticed this and done nothing about it.
I walked six blocks west of Finley’s at first light wearing the wrong ring, and the bowl by the door where the rings live is two steps to my left, and for some reason my hand will not go to it.
The apartment is dim. The lamp over the kitchen table throws the kind of yellow that doesn’t match the window, not yet, because the window is just going pale at the top of the frame.
I can feel it going pale somewhere under my breastbone, right where the apron strap crosses when I’m at the counter, which is not where I am.
I empty my coat pocket onto the table, because I can’t hang the coat up until I’ve done it.
A receipt from Voshen’s, two dollars, Saturday afternoon, folded into fours.
The stub of a pencil. A paper napkin I carried the whole walk home in my left hand for no reason a sane woman could give you.
A matchbook from the Bell House with all the matches still in it. A hair tie. I line them up.
I put my left palm flat on the wood of the table. The wood is cold. The wood is not Harsk’s table, which is the thought my brain decides to hand me in the morning, thank you very much.
I have not known what to do with you.
That sentence is back. It didn’t finish landing the first time, last night, and now it’s circling for another pass.
The handwriting on the page was six years younger than him and not one bit different.
His thumb was at the corner of it. My hand was in his before dawn.
It’s before dawn again. I still haven’t had one useful thought about staying quiet.
My left hand stays on the table. My right one comes off.
The laptop’s been on the table since Thursday morning, lid open, screen asleep, the deck still sitting awake behind the sleep because I haven’t closed it since June’s back room on Sunday. I touch the trackpad with one finger and the screen comes up like it’s been waiting.
FINLEY’S COFFEE. A POSITIONING FRAMEWORK FOR INTENTIONAL GROWTH. prepared by Maggie Russo, Russo Strategy.
The cursor’s parked on the Q of Q1. I haven’t moved it in three days, which for a woman who used to bill by the deliverable is its own small confession.
I look at the title slide. I look at it like I haven’t let myself look at it since I read his page on his table. The slide does not change, because that’s not a thing slides do, and also because it’s exactly what I wrote.
Okay.
The lid stays open. The file stays where it is. My right hand comes off the trackpad and goes back into my coat pocket, because the coat is still on and the pocket is where my right hand goes when there isn’t a next thing for it to do.
The pencil stub rolls a few seconds toward the napkin and stops. The window goes one shade paler at the top. I sit in the chair without taking the coat off. This is what a person does after losing an argument with herself. I sit anyway.
Mid-morning, and I’m wiping down the steam wand for the second time in four minutes, my head a full flight up the back stairs in a kitchen where I sat last night and held a man’s hand over a notebook and did not say the thing I drove north carrying.
The chalkboard says VANILLA CARDAMOM. ALSO ETHIOPIAN. in his tall block letters, written before I got in. The four-top by the window paid and left, and the bell over the door hasn’t rung since.
Bex is at the till counting the float, and she’s counted it twice already this morning.
Her thumb goes over the bills a third time, slow and careful.
I watch. The small cold thing I’ve been holding off since dawn lands.
I know what counting a drawer a third time is.
A person who counts a drawer a third time is practicing the steady hands she’s going to need for the next part.
I have been her. I’ve stood in a room counting something I’d already counted because the counting was the only thing keeping my hands from telling on me.
New shoes at the foot of her stool. White canvas, toe stripe bright enough I read it under the hem, gone darker at the heel where she stepped wrong in the alley.
She didn’t used to have new shoes. Friday she came back from lunch with a chain cup, the green logo turned toward her body. She saw me see it. I said nothing.
“Boss,” Bex says.
Harsk is at the far end of the counter with a portafilter in his hand. He sets it down. “Bex.”
She comes off the stool. Her hands go behind her back to the apron strings. I keep wiping a wand that’s already clean and remind myself the chalkboard says cardamom and I am not going to look up. I am, of course, already looking up.
The apron comes off over her head. She folds it once at the chest and once at the waist like he taught her, like he taught me, and she carries it the four steps to the back hook and hangs it. The second hook from the door. His is the first. Hers has been the second the whole time I’ve worked here.
“Today’s my last,” she says, and her hand stays flat on the apron on the hook like she’s keeping it warm a minute longer. “I gave notice Friday. Two weeks. The two weeks is up today.”
There was no notice Friday. I’d have heard it, and Harsk knows it too, because the whole of her notice was a phone in her right pocket and a chain cup at lunch and a float counted three times before nine.
She’s leaving today, the same day she decided to, and the two weeks she’s saying out loud is a thing she’s making up on the spot, a kindness she’s doing herself so the leaving has a shape that doesn’t look like running.
We’re all three going to stand here and let the two weeks be real.
I watch Harsk.
I want him to fight it. I want him to put a hand out and say wait, say give me a week, say anything at all that is the opposite of letting a door swing shut on its own hinge.
The chain across the street is offering her twenty an hour, and there’s a strategy in a latched drawer two doors down that could move some of that math, and I’m standing here with the whole of it behind my teeth, watching him decide. Some help I am.
What he does is set both hands flat on the counter. His knuckles are darker than the rest of him, slate going to charcoal, and they spread on the wood and stay. His shoulders come down half an inch. It’s the posture of a man getting ready to take a thing, not push it back.
“You’re learning,” he says.
That’s the whole sentence. He doesn’t argue and he doesn’t ask her to stay.
The cold thing in my chest goes all the way down.
Bex’s shoulder drops just like his used to. “They start me Wednesday.”
“Alright.”
The bell over the door rings.
There’s no one there. The doorway is empty, gray morning past the glass, the chain’s flat plate front catching the light across the street. Presso is asleep on the rolled towel where the sun doesn’t reach. The bell rings into a room of three, one of them leaving.
The bell puts the sunshine on me before I’ve agreed to it. A customer. I turn for the door, contractions tightening, the half step up already in my throat.
There’s no customer. I turn back, and the brightness goes nowhere to die.
Bex steps back from the hook. Her face is the face of a girl who rehearsed this in a car with the engine off, got it ready by nine, and has been holding it ever since. “I’d have stayed,” she says. “If.”
“I know,” Harsk says.
I know what the if is. The if is rent and a phone bill and the bracing I read in her the first week.
The if is sixteen an hour against twenty, and that difference being the back half of somebody’s month.
I did the receipts. He did the receipts.
Neither of us is going to say a number out loud in front of her, and the silence is the only dignity left in the room to hand her.
He pushes off the counter. “Take Friday’s plus today. I’ll cash you out at close. You worked the drawer clean.”
“Thanks, boss.”
The boss lands like it’s landed since August, and he doesn’t correct it. He never corrects it.
Bex picks up the side towel and wipes the bar I already wiped. It doesn’t need it. She wipes it anyway, and I let her, because the last ten minutes of a job are not for the bar.
I look at the apron on the second hook. It’ll hang there until close and then come down, and the hook will be empty, and up a flight of stairs is a kitchen where I sat last night and didn’t say the thing that might have moved one number on the page he won’t fight for.
Harsk lifts a pull off the line. The shot runs gold and clean into the cup. He looks at it. Then he pours it out.
I put my left palm flat on the counter. The wood is warm here, where the machine’s been throwing heat all morning, and I keep my hand there.
The chalkboard still says cardamom. He hasn’t changed it.
It’s three on the dot, foghorn quiet, when the bell rings for Dottie Allard.
She walks in like she owned a piece of the room before she crossed the threshold, and the half step up arrives in my throat without me having to go looking for it, the honey sliding into place.
My chin lifts, my mouth moves into the shape it makes, and the apron strap behind my collarbone settles into the spot it sits when there’s somebody at the counter to see me.
“Dottie!”
“Maggie, honey.” She’s got a plastic to-go cup from her own diner in her left hand and a knit hat shoved up on her white hair like she forgot it was there. “Off the clock fourteen minutes. Give me a drop of black coffee before I have to go back and pour everybody else’s.”
“On the house.”