Chapter 26
Harsk
The roast is done. A Sumatran, the slow one.
He wants the slow finish, and he gets it.
I pull the cooling tray, run it down, bag it at the half, six small bags for the route tonight.
The back of the house smells like it always smells.
Deep roast and the cardboard of the burlap and the cold that comes up the alley when the door is cracked for the vent.
The chalkboard is not the first thing this morning.
Most mornings I write it before the open, in the dark, so it is the first thing the street reads when the street wakes up.
This morning I wrote the roast first and the board second, and I do not have a reason for the order that I would say to anyone.
The body wanted the work in its hands before it wanted the chalk, and the body has been deciding the order of things for a week.
The board is out front where it goes. The letters are too tall for the board. They are always too tall for the board.
TODAY: SECRET CARAFE. NAMED.
Under it, in the same hand, smaller, the price in pencil at the corner. Above the price, a line I wrote back onto the board a week ago in the dark and have written every morning since.
THE QUIET POUR. HONEY AND PAPER.
The carafe is on the front counter. The unlabeled glass one, the one I have brewed into for fifteen years, set at the right end of the wood by the till in the rectangle of clean a shade off from the wood around it.
The place she stood every morning with the binder under her left hand.
I brewed the nine ounces. The lid is on. The carafe is full.
I do not look at the carafe longer than I look at the till.
The La Marzocco holds at nine bars where I left it last night. The grouphead is warm to the back of the wrist. I run the morning’s first shot to clean the line and the shot is good, twenty-five seconds, crema the color of brown butter, and I dump it down the drain like I dump it every morning.
“Morning, you,” I say, to the machine.
Presso is on the back counter. The half ear is up. She is watching the alley door, which means there is nothing to watch. That is the only kind of morning I want today, the kind where the thing to watch is a door no one is at.
The chain across Main has its arch up. Green and white balloons in the dark, the lights off still, the banner rolled and waiting on its frame for a morning that is three days out. I do not read the banner. I have not read the banner all week. I know the count without reading it. Three days.
I get the cups down for the open.
Korren is at the door at six.
I have the cup poured before the bell finishes ringing, the drip black, the double pour, bloom and then the main.
He’s taken it this way for fifteen years.
He comes to the counter. He drinks the first half standing.
He sets a five on the wood. I do not see it.
He does not leave it. We have done this eight thousand times.
He looks at the front counter.
He does not say anything about the front counter.
The nod he gives me when he turns to take the window bar is a beat longer than the nod he gives me every morning, the chin down and held a half second past where it tends to come back up.
His eyes go to the carafe in the rectangle of clean, and then to me, and the nod finishes.
That is the whole of what Korren has to say about the carafe being back on the front counter where it sat for six weeks and then did not.
He takes the window bar with the harbor in front of him.
The morning runs like a Saturday runs. The early walkers.
Two of the timber crew in after Korren, both with the drip, neither of them talking.
A woman with a stroller who wants the decaf and gets the same beans.
Garza’s order I do not pick up on a Saturday.
Bex used to, and Bex is gone, and on Saturdays it is just me, so the crullers wait at Garza’s until the route.
The steamer hits its ninety-second release.
The bell rings true each time the door moves, and once, when the door does not move and no one is there.
Presso resettles in the back. I do not turn around. I know what the bell is for.
Olmar comes in.
He comes for the bean check on the Friday route, except the route is tonight and the check is now.
Olmar likes to put his eyes on the week’s roast before he carries it.
He has liked to for twenty-three years. He will tell you it is about the bag.
It is not about the bag. He’s six foot eight.
He fills the doorway like he fills every doorway, slow and certain.
By the time he reaches the counter, I have the cup down. Dark roast, no sugar.
“Saturday,” he says.
“Early for the check.”
He drinks. He looks at the carafe on the front counter like Korren looked at it, except Olmar does not have Korren’s economy. Olmar looks at a thing and then looks at me and lets me see him having looked.
“How is she?” he says.
I do not answer right away.
I wipe down the section of counter that does not need wiping. The cloth goes over the brass trim and the brass trim is clean and I run it over again.
“I have not seen her,” I say.
Olmar sets the cup down.
“Tell her the thing,” he says.
“What thing?”
“You know what thing.”
The steamer releases. The pressure goes out of it in the long hiss it makes, ninety seconds on the dot, and the sound fills the space where I am not saying anything.
Presso comes off the back counter and crosses to the front, low, the half ear up, and sits at the end of the wood by the carafe, which she does not do, which she has not done since the week the front counter went bare.
I watch the cat sit by the carafe. Olmar watches me watch the cat.
The grandmother voice has been quiet for a week.
She is in the room how she is in the room, the photo at my left shoulder, the brown sweater of her folded in the drawer upstairs.
She does not say anything for a long moment.
Then how she comes back only when she has something, not before.
Say it, boy. She does not say what. She does not have to.
She lets me get the rest of the way there myself.
I count, the old count, the one she taught me on a wood stove inland at the count of four.
Eka. Vha. Treh. The fourth is there, close now, closer than it has been in a long time.
I do not say the fourth. The fourth is the word, and the word is hers and mine and not for a Saturday morning over the bean check.
The name is not the word.
The name I can say.
“Maggie,” I say.
It comes out of me low and plain, the two syllables I have held under my own hand for nine days. First time I’ve said it aloud since that morning when I stood at this counter and told her please. She went. The door did not close behind her.
It costs more than I thought it would. My breath goes shallow above the apron knot.
But it is out, in the air over the wood.
The saying of it does not take anything back and does not refile anything.
It is just her name in the room, which is a thing the room has not had in nine days, and the room is better for it.
Olmar does not smile. Olmar is not a man who smiles at a thing like this. He nods, once, like he nodded the day I told him about the filing six years ago on his porch with the snow on the rail, the alright nod, the nod that carries a thing for you.
“Good,” he says.
He finishes the cup. He takes his two bags off the shelf, the Bell House’s standing order, and he does not pay for them because he never pays for them and we do not discuss it.
“Tonight,” he says, at the door.
“I’ll have it bagged.”
The bell rings true behind him.
The route runs west to east on Fridays, except it is Saturday and the route runs anyway. The bags are roasted and the businesses are open, and a thing roasted on Saturday does not keep until Monday to be carried.
Garza first. I park the Toyota in the alley behind the bakery and carry the bag in through the back.
Garza has the crullers boxed on the steel table, the trade we have done for years, my five pounds for his box, no money either direction.
He says, “How’s business?” and I say, “Slow,” and he says, “It’ll pick up,” and means the chain when he says it. I take the box and go.
Veshar’s brewery is second.
I carry the bag in through the roll door that is up in the afternoon for the delivery trucks.
Veshar is at the tanks. He is a big man even by the measure of us, taller than me by an inch.
He crosses the floor, wiping his hands on the rag at his belt, and takes the bag.
The four-pack of autumn beers is set aside on the rail where he always sets it. I take it.
We do not say much. We have never said much.
Veshar wants the same thing I have always known he wants, the want of a hand that is just a hand, and I have known it about him for years without either of us saying so.
The trade we do is part the bag and part the four-pack.
Part of it is that his hand brushes mine at the handoff and I do not pull mine back.
This time he does not take his hand back to his side.
He puts it on my shoulder.
The hand is broad and it is heavy, and it sits on the top of my shoulder where the muscle is.
He does not say anything. His eyes are on the floor between us, not on my face, and the hand stays a long four beats before he takes it back.
Then he picks up the empty pallet behind him as if the hand was never anywhere, and he says, “Good roast this week,” and I say, “Sumatran,” and that is the whole of it.
I carry the four-pack out to the Toyota.