Chapter 23 #2
So the ticket should be easy. The ticket is the thing I’m good at, in my hand. Forty-two dollars of the thing I’m good at. Out front, the bay’s already marked. Driver calls it as he pulls in. The 5:15 rolls up.
I hear it before I see it, the air brakes, the diesel, the big shape of it pulling into the bay past the glass with SACRAMENTO lit up over the windshield in the dot-matrix orange that matches my ticket.
The door folds open. Two people get off and stand blinking in the manila light.
The driver gets down and stretches his back and looks at his clipboard and then at the doors of the station.
I have the ticket in my hand.
I don’t get up.
I sit on the molded bench. I watch the driver wait the amount of time a driver waits, which isn’t long.
He climbs back up. The door folds shut. The big shape pulls out of the bay and turns onto the road that goes past where the streetlights give up, toward the county I came from.
The orange letters get small. Then there’s the empty bay, the Coke machine humming, the man behind the counter turning a page.
I look at the ticket. It still says 5:15. The 5:15 is a thing that happened to other people now.
There’s a quiet in me I don’t have a file for.
I sit in it. I’m not crying, which I catch like you catch the silence after a sound that was on the whole time.
I keep waiting for the voice. All afternoon I’ve been waiting for it, the one that comes up to meet the room, the one that would have me round-trip the ticket and charm the counter man and call Gianna from the lot and say so funny story, I almost did the most dramatic thing, and turn the whole day into an anecdote with me holding it up at the center, smiling, fine, fine, everything’s fine.
That voice has run under everything I’ve done for six years like the foghorn runs under the town.
I built a life on top of it. I built a deck on top of it.
I reach for it. The reach closes on nothing.
It isn’t that I decide not to use it. I go to the place where it lives, the half-step up, the smile that starts at the corners, and the place is empty, like a tongue goes to a tooth that should be there and finds the gap and keeps going back to the gap because the body can’t believe the tooth is gone.
Six years it’s come up on cue. In every room, for every face.
Morning broke after the article ran. Today we bury Nonna.
And before sunrise, my mother asked it again, are you sure, Maggie.
It has never once not come. It doesn’t come now, in a bus station outside a town I drove a hundred and seventy-five miles to find.
I sit with the gap where it was. I don’t perform past it, because there’s no past it.
There’s just the gap and me and the ticket.
I put the ticket in the left windbreaker pocket, the one where the small things go, and I sit on the molded bench a while longer in the smell of floor cleaner with my hand flat on the plastic, the surface under my palm, like I do when there’s a true thing I haven’t said yet and the only one to say it to is the wood.
Then I get up and I drive back toward the streetlights.
It’s late, near midnight, and I’m making coffee, which is its own kind of joke, and I’m too tired to laugh at it.
The kitchen has the cold floorboards. The window doesn’t shut all the way.
The sage candle’s on the sill where it’s been since the first night, burned down a third, and I don’t light it.
I stand at the counter in the windbreaker I didn’t take off when I came in.
I make coffee at night. I’ve been awake since 5:43, and I’m not going to sleep.
The body wants the one thing it has come to want: a hot cup held in both hands.
No part of me has the standing to deny it.
The cup is wrong.
It’s from June’s spare set, the six she keeps in the apartment for whoever has the apartment, a thick diner-white mug with a hairline brown crack in the glaze that I’ve looked at for two months and never used because I haven’t, until tonight, made coffee in this kitchen.
I’ve made it six blocks east, on a machine fifteen years old, in cups a man set at my elbow without asking.
This is a June mug. It’s fine. It holds liquid.
It’s the platonic idea of a mug and there’s nothing wrong with it except every single thing.
The coffee is wrong too.
June keeps a tin in the back of the cabinet behind the good olive oil.
Red Folgers, plastic lid that doesn’t seal anymore.
For emergencies, she said once. For the apocalypse, or for company she doesn’t like.
I find it with my hand without looking. I’m not walking six blocks east at night, and there’s nothing else in this kitchen.
I spoon the crystals into the wrong mug, run the kettle, pour the water.
They do the thing instant does: the small brown swirl, the smell that is to coffee what a photograph of a fire is to a fire.
I hold the mug in both hands.
It’s hot. That part’s right. The heat goes into the heels of my hands and up into the cold I’ve been carrying since the back door didn’t close.
I stand in the dark kitchen at a quarter to midnight, drinking Folgers out of a cracked diner mug.
It’s the worst coffee I’ve had since the rest stop on Highway 1 the morning I drove up here.
I drink it anyway. The warmth of a thing held in both hands is the oldest true thing my body knows, and tonight it’s the only one I can reach.
My hand is on the mug and the silver ring is on my hand.
The chip is on the inner edge. I look at it.
The silver one is for the day I made the ricotta with my Nonna.
The day I’m supposed to wear it. That day was a day ago, or two.
I’ve lost the count of which day my hand is on.
The silver is still there on the middle finger where I put it for a morning that ended a long time before this. The wrong day, by any honest count.
I look at it a while.
I don’t change it.
The Folgers goes down to the grounds and I set the cracked mug in the sink. The cold is still coming in along the top of the window that doesn’t close. I leave the mug in the sink, the candle unlit, the ring on my hand. I go to bed in the windbreaker.