Chapter 25
Maggie
Early, and I’m sitting at the kitchen table with a deck that no longer has a title.
The laptop’s been open since I sat down, which was a while ago, long enough that the screen went to the title slide and stayed there.
The title slide is where the title used to be, and now there’s a blank rectangle the size of a sentence where the sentence was.
I deleted it sometime in the dark this week.
I don’t remember doing it. I remember the after, the cursor blinking in the white space like a cursor waiting for me to be the one who knows what comes next, and me not being that person yet, and going to bed.
The cold comes in along the sash. It always comes in along the sash. The sage candle is on the sill and I still have not lit it.
The little box in the corner of the planning doc tells me the application is overdue.
Not due. Overdue. The box puts it like only software can, gentle and corporate, like it was coded by a man who has never once stood in a kitchen with the proof in front of him that he let a thing go past. Deadline: passed, the box says, and the date under it is yesterday’s, and yesterday I wasn’t in this chair.
Yesterday I was out past where the streetlights give up, doing the thing I’ve spent a week doing, which is sitting very still and not getting on any buses.
The deadline came through like the 5:15, waited the amount of time a deadline waits, folded its door shut, and pulled out of the bay.
I missed it.
I sit with that. I wait for the winner part of me to come up off the bench and tell me how bad this is, how this is the whole reason I came, the grant and the mentorship and the validation and my parents being wrong, all of it gated behind a form I didn’t submit because I was busy watching orange letters get small.
The winner part of me does not come up. It’s not on the bench.
I check for it like patting your pocket to be sure your keys are still there.
Inside there’s a half pencil, a receipt smelling of cinnamon, a bus ticket I never threw out.
Not what I’m checking for. I’m getting used to the not having.
The thin gold band is on my right hand.
I put it on this morning without thinking.
Now, hand flat on the cold wood, the deck blank in front of me, I look down.
Gold coins fill my palm, and when I run the count it comes out right.
Yesterday I wore the silver. Yesterday the silver was wrong, two days wrong, a week wrong, because I’d stopped keeping the kind of time the rings keep.
Today the gold’s on my hand and today is the day the gold is for, and the match between the ring and the day is the first thing in a week that’s lined up without me forcing it.
Wednesday.
I tap the band on the wood twice. The wood’s cold. I leave my hand there a second longer to let the cold come up into the heel of my palm, like I do when there’s a thing I haven’t said yet and the wood’s the only one in the room to say it to.
I close the laptop on the slide with no title. I stand up and go find June.
June is downstairs shelving the new arrivals, which means the new arrivals have been in their box for nine days and today is the day she remembers them.
She’s got a stack against her hip and a pencil behind her ear, and she looks at me over the top of the History section with the face she’s worn at me all week, which is the face of a woman who has decided not to ask.
“You’re up,” she says.
“I missed the deadline,” I say. “I’m not going to talk about how I missed the deadline.
I need your back armchair, your wifi, and however much tea you’re willing to make a woman who let a six-million-dollar grant application lapse because she was sitting in a building the color of a manila folder watching a bus. ”
June sets the stack of books on the cart.
“It wasn’t six million,” she says.
“It was a grant and some mentorship and a photo op.”
“So not six million.”
“No,” I say. “Not six million.”
“Okay,” June says, and goes to put the kettle on, and that’s the whole conversation, and it’s the most useful one I’ve had in nine days, because June just told me, in the language June speaks, that the number was never the thing.
We work at the back of the store with the deck open on the little table between us and the tea going cold like tea does here, and for the first hour I do what I always do, which is try to save the title slide.
I try A Positioning Framework for Intentional Growth, with a comma and a subtitle.
I try it without the subtitle. I try cutting Intentional.
I try cutting Growth. Every version is a sentence I’ve written before, in another life, for a teal supplement bottle with a brushed gold cap, and every version lands in the room like a coin landing on a counter.
Flat and done, with nothing left to show for it.
June reads them upside down across the table. She doesn’t say they’re bad. She says, “Who’s it for?”
“The panel.”
“No,” she says. “Who’s it about?”
I look at the slide.
I’ve been building this deck since September.
I built it in a folder I named MAYBE. I built it at a counter six blocks east. What I learned there went under my name in clean white type.
It was never a framework. Never a brand.
It was never going to fit in a sentence with the word intentional in it.
What I learned at the counter was a man who pours a cup for the forestry worker before he reaches the till.
A florist who hates coffee, learning to drink one single thing.
A half-orc kid I trained wrong on the steamer and right by the third morning.
A town that reads a chalkboard like other towns read the news. None of that is Finley’s as a brand.
It’s Finley’s as what a place does when something across the street decides the place is an underserved market.
“It’s about the town,” I say.
“Mm,” June says, which from June is a standing ovation.
I delete the blank rectangle that used to be a title.
I type into the white space. The cursor quits blinking, because for the first time in a week it has something to do.
The sentence that comes out is not a sentence anyone’s ever written for anyone.
It’s just true. The title slide reads FINLEY’S: A TOWN’S ANSWER TO A CHAIN, and under it, in the small type, prepared by Maggie Russo, Russo Strategy, and the name stays, because the name was always the one true thing on the slide.
I study it.
I open at the title-less deck on the table. There it is, named.
“Okay,” I say. “Second problem.”
“You missed the application.”
“I missed the application.” I pull up the chamber of commerce page, the one I bookmarked in September and haven’t opened since.
“But the application was only ever the long way in. There’s a demo day.
Last Sunday of the month, open pitch. You don’t have to be on the application track, you just have to register by the Saturday before and show up and stand in front of the same panel and the same room and say your thing in seven minutes. ” I scroll. “Fifty-dollar fee.”
June looks at me.
“I have fifty dollars,” I say, and I say it with my chin tipped up, and June lets it stand, because June has seen my face when the debit card comes out and June knows fifty dollars is not nothing to me right now, and June is not going to make me say that part.
The chamber of commerce is two rooms over a hardware store with a window unit going and a woman at the desk who I’m not going to name, because she doesn’t need to be a character in this.
She just needs to be the person who slides the clipboard across and tells me demo day is Sunday the 29th, doors open, pitches seven minutes, and a hard cutoff, and takes my fifty dollars in the form of a debit card I make a point of not watching the screen for.
She prints the receipt on a machine almost as old as the one at the bus station.
The card reads RUSSO, M., DEMO DAY, NOV 29, $50.
00. It says a confirmation number, and the confirmation number is shorter than the one on the bus ticket, which I notice, because both of them are in my pocket now.
The ticket I didn’t use and the receipt for the thing I’m going to do.
The new one cost more and the number’s shorter, and I don’t know what to do with that except put it in the pocket with the other one and let them both sit there, two pieces of paper, the leaving I didn’t take and the staying I just paid for.
“Good luck,” the woman says, and means it the polite amount.
“Thank you,” I say, and my contractions stay short and the half-step up doesn’t come, and I don’t miss it.
I walk down the stairs from the hardware store into the afternoon with a clipboard’s worth of fee paid and a deck that’s come around to the right thing and a week of bus stations behind me, and the long slant of the light is on Main Street like it’s been undoing me since October, and today it does not undo me. Today I walk in it.
The back armchair finds the spring under my left thigh and I sit down on it anyway, with my phone and the list I made on the walk back. The list is four names. I’m going to call all four of them and ask all four of them the same thing.
I start with Delia, because Delia’s the easiest and I need an easy one first.
“Marchetti Flowers,” Delia says, in the voice of a woman who’s answered the phone the same way for thirty years and would not change it for a fire.
“Delia. It’s Maggie. From Finley’s.”
A pause that’s not a cold pause. “I know who you are, cara. I sold your Nonna’s people flowers before you were born, I’d wager.” Which is not true and is the nicest kind of not-true. “What’s wrong?”