Chapter 24
Harsk
Late, and the café is empty the way only a room you emptied with your own hands gets empty.
I closed at five. It’s hours past, and I haven’t gone up the back stairs.
I’ve been here, in the front of the house with the lights off, in the chair I pulled out from the window two-top and turned to face the glass, and I’ve watched the fog come down over Main once the streetlights gave it something to stand in.
The foghorn goes, out past the breakwater.
I hear it through the front door glass, the heavy old glass with the bubble in it down by the latch, and it comes through softer than it does through the back wall when I’m roasting.
The front of the house has never been where I hear the foghorn.
I hear it here tonight, which is a thing the night does to a man, lets him hear what he knows in a place he doesn’t often hear it.
The carafe is on the shelf in the back. I put it there last night. I haven’t moved it.
I made the morning’s nine ounces at four, like I have for fifteen years, and I drank none of it.
It sat on the shelf inside the back room doorway through the open hours with the lid on, like it sat for fifteen years before her, and tonight it is still there.
The front counter is bare. I am in the chair at the window with my hands open on my knees and nothing in them.
Korren came at six this morning. I poured the cup before the bell.
He drank it at the window bar. Set a five down.
I never saw it, and he never left it. He nodded and I nodded and he went out into the fog toward the timber yard, and the bell rang true behind him.
That was the morning’s one reliable thing and it held.
The day was slow, slower than the day before. I have the number in the notebook in pencil with no word next to it.
I do not turn the lights on.
The Linea Mini is dark at the counter, the chrome catching the streetlight off Main in a long cold line down the side of the boiler.
The grinder is off at the dial. The pressure gauge sits at nine where I left it.
Presso is in the back and has been since this morning, because she does not come out to the front when the front is like this.
She knows the front is like this. The half ear does not flick, because there is nothing in the room to flick at, and the two of us are in the building, she in the back and I in the front, and that is the size of the company tonight.
I sit in the chair.
The fog stands in the streetlight. The foghorn goes. I count the space after it without meaning to. Old habit. I get to three and stop. Counting the horn only waits for the next one, and I am done with the waiting. I filed the waiting a long time ago. I closed the cover on it.
The chair is from the window two-top. It is not the chair in the back, the one I sit in to decide things.
This one is for a customer who wants to watch the harbor with a cup, and there is no customer, and there is no cup, and I am watching the harbor without one, in the dark, with the carafe full on the shelf behind a wall and the brass trim on the bare counter catching nothing.
I look at the bare counter a while.
Then I look back out at the fog.
Across Main the chain has its lights on.
Greg Massey is in there. I can see him through the plate glass, which is the whole front of the building, one sheet of it, green and white under the new sign that is not lit yet because the grand opening is not yet.
He has the jacket of his charcoal suit off and the sleeves rolled, and he is doing what a man does at the end of a build, walking the floor with a clipboard, stopping at a thing, marking it, moving to the next.
He is competent. I have watched him be competent for nine weeks.
He is not a cartoon. He is good at his work.
In six days that work lands across the street from mine.
Disliking him will not shorten the distance.
He walks to the front of his glass and stops. He looks out at Main and does not see me, because his lights are on and mine are off, and a man with his lights on looking into the dark sees his own reflection. He fixes his collar in the glass. He turns back to the floor.
On the inside of his window, low, in the corner, somebody has written the count in chalk.
White chalk on the plate glass, backward to me, the numbers flipped from the wrong side of a window.
I have read it backward every day this week.
Tonight it says SIX DAYS. The exclamation point is a tall stroke and a dot, and it stands at the end like a thing up on its toes.
Six days.
I count it without meaning to. Six, and then the days laid out like a week of roasts.
Sunday I am closed, so five mornings of open, and the sixth morning is theirs.
On the sixth morning the chain across the street will be full of people who have never had a cup of mine, getting a free first one of his, glossy and fast and correct, built to be correct and not grown into it.
I have known the number was coming. The number has been on his glass all week. Tonight is the night the number is six.
I get up from the chair.
I go to the back. Five steps I know in the dark, lights still off.
The carafe sits on the shelf at my shoulder with the lid on.
I leave it there. Presso is on the desk corner.
Her eyes are open in the dark, green. She watches me come in like she watches the alley door, which is to say she has decided I am not worth standing for.
The notebook is on the desk.
It is closed on the day’s number, like last night and the night before.
Brown soft cover, the color of a paper bag, worn pale at the corner where my thumb sits.
The pencil is in the apron pocket, eraser end out.
I am not wearing the apron. The apron is on the hook, and the pencil is in the pocket of the apron on the hook.
I look at the notebook a while.
I pull out the maroon chair, the one I sit in to decide things.
Fifteen years of my back have shaped the leather.
I sit down, square my shoulders, put my weight even through both feet.
The body knows what this chair is for. The notebook falls open in my hands.
Counting pages would be pointless. The page already knows me.
It is past the receipts, past the repair logs, past the years of orders in pencil that lean a little forward, the lean of my hand.
The notebook falls open near it on its own now, the spine gone soft at the place, and I turn the last leaf by the corner and there it is, the page I wrote on a Wednesday afternoon six years ago, in this chair, in this light, with the fog that lifted at eleven and the foghorn that had been on all the night before.
November 17. I did not write the date at the top. I never write the date. But I knew it then because my sister had called the night before on a Tuesday, and I know it now because some dates you keep without the pencil.
I read it.
I am forty-seven years old. I have been counting and the counting is finished, and I am done waiting.
I am going to choose this work and this town and the people I have and call it a life, and the decision is not sad but mine.
I am writing it here so I can stop carrying it in my chest. If she ever comes, she will come.
I am not going to hold the door open any longer.
Six sentences. I wrote it small and even.
I did not cry when I wrote it and I was not sad when I wrote it.
I have told no one this and I would tell no one.
The truth of that afternoon is that I was at peace.
It was the peace of a man who has stopped waiting on a door.
The peace held six years. That was not nothing.
It was a life. The settling was a life, and I am not ashamed of the settling.
The page is true. I read it again and the page is still true. Every sentence is a thing I meant and the meaning has not gone out of it.
Then I look at the line underneath.
I wrote it Monday night, the same pencil, in the white at the bottom of the page under the six sentences, one line pressed harder than the six above it, the graphite darker where my hand bore down.
I was wrong to want this.
I read that line and my breath goes shallow under the breastbone, the shallow that has held since the back door did not close, the place going tight that no breath reaches all the way down to.
The line is not true.
I know it is not true like I know the page above it is true, which is to say I know it in the chair, in the body, before I have the words for it.
The six sentences are a man choosing a life.
The one line is a man taking the choosing back, and the taking back is a lie.
The choosing was real and so is the wanting, and one being real does not make the other stop being real.
I filed a decision six years ago and the decision held me up.
She walked in on a Tuesday morning and the wanting started and the wanting is real.
Both of them. The page is true. The line is a man trying to make it not both, because both is harder to carry than wrong, and I would rather be wrong than be a man with two true things in his chest and nowhere to file them.
I take the pencil out of the apron on the hook. I do not put the apron on. I sit back down with the pencil, eraser end down. I turn it once in my fingers. The wood is smoothed where my thumb sits. I put the eraser to the line.
I was wrong to want this.
I erase it.