Chapter 28 #2
He finishes the cup. He takes the two bags off the shelf for the Bell House and does not pay for them and we do not discuss it.
At the door he stops and looks back, not at me, at the room.
The full tables and the line and Korren on the stool and Liana on the stool and Delia at the two-top and Maggie coming through the floor with a tray.
He takes it in, a man taking in a thing he has been waiting a while to see.
“Hm,” he says. And goes.
Hattie is in behind him, in the brown sweater she has worn since May, and she does not order anything.
She comes around the wrong side of the counter, not a customer this morning, and she ties on a spare apron off the back hook, and she says, “I have run a front of house for a man who would rather count beans than handle a rush. I know the breed. Put me on the till.” She goes to the till.
Maggie looks at her, and the two of them look at each other and laugh once, the kitchen laugh, and that is the whole of the arrangement.
June comes in after the early rush and does not pretend to be there for coffee.
She has a stack of the loyalty cards from the bookstore counter where she keeps the overflow, and she has a roll of the receipt tape I ran out of last week and did not have time to order, and she puts both on the back counter and says, “I closed the store. WHALES MENTIONED INSIDE, closed, on a Tuesday, because the whales can wait and this can’t.
” She ties on the last spare apron and goes to the door.
She hands cards to the people coming in. The line moves. The room holds.
The tray comes from the teahouse.
It comes in the hands of the boy who sweeps Auntie Voshen’s floor, a half-orc kid of maybe fourteen with his ears red from the cold, and it is the brass tray, the heavy old one, with two pots on it.
The tall one and the short one. Chai with cardamom and clove and a small amount of pepper.
Green tea for the ones who cannot take the chai.
A folded cloth, and a stack of the small glasses.
The boy sets it on the back counter where I show him and he says, “Auntie says,” and stops, because he has forgotten the message.
Then he gets it. “Auntie says it is the wrong direction but it is Tuesday.”
The teahouse is uphill. It is up Pine and over, the wrong direction from a thing that is supposed to come downhill to a table, and she has sent the tray downhill anyway.
The wrong direction, because it is Tuesday, because it is this Tuesday, and the saying of it is Tuesday is the whole of what she has to send with it.
I tell the boy to tell her the chai is going first to Korren.
He nods. He takes a cruller off Garza’s box on the way out and I let him.
The grandmother voice is quiet. She is in the room. She is letting the morning carry her.
I am pouring the chai into the small glasses when the bell rings and Bex comes in.
She comes in fast. She has decided to do a thing and she is afraid the deciding will run out before the doing is done.
She has a tray in both hands, a baker’s half sheet covered in foil, and her hands are not steady on it.
The foil is shaking the smallest amount.
She comes to the front counter and sets the tray down on the wood and takes the foil off, and under it there are pastries, two dozen of them.
The cardamom knots and the small honey things, the ones she used to talk about making, the ones from her own kitchen, not the chain’s.
Hers. They are a little uneven, a thing made at four in the morning with hands shaking.
“I made these,” she says. “Last night. This morning. I couldn’t sleep.
” She is not looking at me. She is looking at the tray.
“I took the job. At the chain. The twenty an hour. I think about it every day, what I did, every time I walk past your door. Harsk, taking it wasn’t a choice.
The money is the money and I had to take it.
” She gets the rest of it out. “I’m sorry. ”
The room does not stop, because the room is a working room and the line is the line, but the part of the room that is the front counter holds still for a second.
Maggie a step off to my left with a tray held against her hip, Hattie at the till not looking up, because Hattie knows when not to look up.
Bex did the same math I did. Sixteen an hour at Finley’s against twenty at the chain is a hundred and twelve dollars a week, and a hundred and twelve dollars a week is rent, is the difference between the months that work and the months that do not.
I would not take less if I were the one with her hands and her account, and I told her so the morning she left, in the only two words I had for it.
I have the same two words now.
“You’re learning,” I say.
She looks up at the tray. Then she looks up at me. She had the two words from me the morning she left, and she has them again now, and this morning there is the tray under them, the cardamom knots she got up at four to make and carried down the hill to the door she walked out of.
I do not hire her back. She does not ask.
The chain is where her rent is and we both know it, and neither of us is going to pretend a tray of cardamom knots changes the arithmetic.
The tray is on the counter. The knots are hers.
She made them, and that is half of something. Half of something is not nothing.
“I have to go,” she says. “I’m on at nine. Across the—” She does not finish it. “I have to go.”
“Take a coffee with you,” I say. “The carafe one. On the house.”
Her face does a thing. “I can’t take the—”
“Take it.”
She takes it. She holds it in both hands like Maggie held the first cup in October.
She goes fast, before the deciding runs out.
The bell rings true behind her. Maggie comes off the wall with her tray and bumps my shoulder with hers, once, on the way past, which is the whole of what she has to say about it, and I let the bump land and get back to the chai.
Garza comes in mid-morning with the crullers I did not pick up, because I have not picked them up on a Tuesday since Bex left and I have not had a Tuesday like this one.
He carries the box in himself through the front, like a customer instead of leaving them on the steel table for the route, and he sets them by Bex’s tray on the front counter.
He looks at the two trays side by side and he says, “Busy,” and I say, “All morning,” and he says, “Told you it’d pick up,” and means the chain when he says it, and means he is glad, and takes a coffee and stays.
Cal Briskett is at the door with his thermos.
He has had the thermos for as long as I have known him, the dented steel one, and he has bad opinions about coffee that he has held since before I bought the building.
Opinions about French roast, and about anybody who would put a milk in a coffee, and about the temperature a coffee ought to be served at, which is a temperature no living person serves coffee at.
He stands in the door with the thermos held against his chest, a thing he is not sure he is going to surrender.
He surrenders it. He holds it out across the counter.
I take the thermos. I unscrew the cap. I make him the drip, black, his usual, and I pour it into the thermos and screw the cap back on and hand it back.
He takes a sip of it standing right there, which he does not do.
Cal does not drink a coffee in front of the man who made it, because then he would have to have an opinion about it to the man’s face.
He has the opinion. I watch him have it. I watch him decide not to say it.
“Coffee’s fine,” Cal says.
From Cal Briskett, on a morning that matters, with the chain’s arch across the street and the town in the room, coffee’s fine is the whole of the bad opinions softened down to the size they will fit through a door on a Tuesday, and I take it as it is meant.
“Thank you,” I say.
He grunts. He takes the thermos to the back two-top by Delia and sits down with it and does not open it again, because he has had his sip and made his peace, and the rest is for the boat or the porch or wherever Cal takes a thermos when he leaves a room.
Veshar comes in last, when the line has thinned and the room has gone to the full low hum it gets when the rush has crested and stayed.
He has to duck the lintel, taller than me by the inch, and he comes to the counter and does not order a coffee. He orders the flight.
“The autumn stout,” he says. “The crossover. You have it still.”
I have it still. The beer and coffee crossover we made for the autumn solstice, his beer and my roast married into a thing neither of us could have made alone, the four small pours.
I have kept a case of it cold in the back since the solstice for no reason I would have said to anyone, except that I was not ready to be done with the thing we made.
I bring out the four small glasses on a board and set them in front of him, the stout going from the lightest to the dark, and he takes the first one and holds it up to the window where the Light comes across.
“Good,” he says, after the first. He does not put his hand on my shoulder this morning like he did on the delivery route Saturday.
He is in a room full of people. The hand belongs on a quiet brewery floor, not here, and he knows it.
But he stays. He drinks the flight slow, all four pours.
He watches the room. The staying is its own kind of hand on a shoulder, the kind a room can hold.
Something for later. The autumn stout. The case in the back. The man at the counter with the flight and the careful hands and more roof than company. There is a thing in it I do not have the shape of yet. I let it be a thing I will have the shape of later.