Chapter 24 #2
I go slow. The eraser is worn flat and it takes the graphite up in small gray rolls, and I go over the line three times, four, until the words are gone and there is only the ghost of the pressure where my hand bore down Monday, the small valley in the paper that a pencil leaves and an eraser cannot.
The six sentences above stand alone on the page like they stood for six years, untouched.
The shavings are on the desk, small gray rolls of the eraser and the line both. I do not brush them away.
I look at them.
The grandmother voice has not said anything since the back door did not close.
She does not say anything now either. But she is in the room like the dead in the rooms of the orcs they raised: arrived and not gone.
I sit with the shavings under my hand. Six true sentences stand above the white.
I count in the old count, in the language she taught me on a wood stove at the count of four.
Eka. Vha. Treh.
I get to three and the fourth is there, near, a shape in the dark I know without seeing, and my jaw stays closed around it. But it is there. It has not been there in a long time.
I sit with the shavings under my hand.
Four in the morning, and I am at the back counter with the kettle on and the lights still off.
I did not sleep. I sat in the chair with the shavings under my hand until the cold came up through the floor, and then I came out to the back counter and filled the kettle and put it on, and now I am waiting for it like I do every morning.
It is the one thing I have done tonight that I also do at four in the daylight half of my life, and the familiar thing in the dark steadies me. My hands have somewhere to be.
The unlabeled one is on the shelf. I take it down.
It is the carafe I have brewed into for fifteen years, the glass gone a touch cloudy at the base from fifteen years of heat, and the beans for it are in the small bin under the shelf, the ones that never go on the board, the single origin I cup by hand and change with the season and have never written a name beside in the notebook.
I dose them. I grind them at the dial set finer than the morning’s, fine for what this one wants, and the smell comes up off the grounds, and Presso lifts her head on the desk corner.
I bloom it. I pour a little water over the grounds in the cone and wait the thirty seconds, counting.
The bed swells and breathes and settles.
Then I pour the rest in slow circles and let it draw down.
Nine ounces, the temperature I keep it. I have not skipped this twice in a row in fifteen years.
I did not skip it last night. I am not skipping it now.
I pour a cup. I drink it standing at the back counter in the dark.
It is the thing it is. It is the best thing I make and I make it for no one and I have made it for no one for fifteen years, and tonight I drink it standing up and it goes down warm.
The warmth is only the heat of the coffee, a thing the kettle made.
My breath is still shallow. But the cup is hot in my hand, and the body knows the cup.
Then I do a thing I have not done.
I take the second carafe down, the one I keep for the Friday delivery measure, and I rinse it and set it beside the first and brew again.
The same beans. The same grind. But this time, when the bloom has settled, I go to the small jars on the spice shelf where they have sat since she put them there, the honey and the cardamom and the chipped clove, the ren-keva palette, the three she pulled together the morning she stood at the chalkboard and named what my hand had been doing for fifteen years.
THE QUIET POUR. HONEY AND PAPER. She set the jars in a row by the cone the day the line went up, and they have not moved since, not when the line came off the board, not when the carafe went back on the shelf, not Monday night, not last night.
I did not move them. I could not have said why.
I can say why now, which is that the body files things the chest is not ready to file, and the body filed the jars under keep.
I bruise the cardamom with the back of the spoon.
I shave a little of the clove. I bloom the second cup over the spices.
The smell that comes up is the smell of her line: honey and the warm dust of paper-kind spice.
She named it on instinct. It fills the back of the house in the dark at four in the morning.
The clove sticks to the spoon. I knock the spoon against the rim and the grounds do not come. I knock again. The spoon turns in my hand. Grounds go over the lip of the cone onto the counter. A small spill. Nothing.
“Come on,” I say, under my breath, to the spoon.
I wipe the spill with the heel of my hand.
I pour the second cup. Two cups now on the back counter in the dark, side by side, the plain one and the spiced one, the one I have made for myself for fifteen years and the one she made me make.
The steam comes off them both. The spiced one’s steam holds its shape a beat longer, a slow column standing in the dark before it goes.
I drink the plain one down.
I pick up the spiced one.
I carry it out to the front.
The front of the house is dark, the chrome catching the streetlight in its long cold line, the fog still standing in the lamps on Main, and I walk the cup to the front counter, to the place at the right end of the wood by the till where the carafe sat for six weeks and the dahlias sat beside it, the place where she stood every morning with the binder under her left hand.
It has been bare since Monday, a rectangle of clean a shade different from the wood around it that only I would see.
I set the cup down on the wood.
The front counter is not bare.
I do not know if she will see it. She will not see it.
It will be cold and I will wash the cup before I write the chalkboard and no one will know a cup was ever there.
She is six blocks west, in the apartment over the bookstore where the window does not close.
Whatever she is holding tonight, she is holding without me.
The cup on the front counter is for her, and she will not see it.
I set it down anyway.
Behind me, in the dark, the bell over the door rings once. No one is at the door. The fog stands in the lamp. The half ear flicks in the back room. I do not turn around.
I leave the cup on the wood and I go to get the chalk.