Chapter 5
Marisol
My brother calls on a Thursday, which means he needs money.
Eddie has called me eleven times in three years and nine of those were about money and the other two were about a car that was going to make money. He always starts the same way, which is by asking about Mom, for ninety seconds, like a man paying a toll.
"How's her hip?"
"Bad."
"She doing the exercises?"
"Eddie."
"I'm asking about the exercises."
"You've never once known what the exercises are."
"Marisol."
"How much?"
Long pause. That's the tell. Eddie's pauses have a dollar amount in them and you can practically read it off the length.
"Twelve hundred."
"No."
"You didn't even—"
"No."
"It's for—"
"Eddie, I love you, I have to go, there's a person here with a hole in them," I say, and hang up, and go and stand in the supply closet for two minutes with my forehead against a shelf of saline.
There's no person with a hole in them. It's four in the afternoon and I'm at home.
This is my life, and I'd like to say it plainly, because I think if you only saw the parts with him in it you'd get the wrong idea about how much room there is.
Three twelves a week, sometimes four. Nights, because nights pay differential and because I'm good at nights and because after nine years my body has committed to the bit.
My mother, seventy-four, in an apartment eleven minutes from mine, with a hip that needs replacing and an insurance situation that requires a spreadsheet and a lawyer and possibly a séance.
Tuesdays and Sundays are hers. Groceries, appointments, the phone calls I make on her behalf where I use my hospital voice and get further in four minutes than she gets in four weeks.
A brother in Sacramento who is either about to turn it around or about to ask.
And the rest is sleep, badly, in the daytime, with a fan on for the noise.
That's it. That's the whole thing. There isn't a hobby in there.
There was, once — I used to swim, I was actually good, I have a box somewhere — and I want you to understand that I'm not sad about this, I'm just telling you the arithmetic.
There are one hundred and sixty-eight hours in a week and I can tell you where all of them go.
Which is why what happens next is such an inconvenience.
He doesn't come Wednesday.
That's the first thing. Four visits in eleven days and then I say a true thing on a landing and he goes home and thinks about it, like I told him to, because he is apparently the one man in North America who does what you actually say.
Wednesday: nothing.
Thursday: nothing.
Friday I catch myself listening for a bike on Alder at eight in the morning like a woman in a book, and I get so annoyed at myself that I clean the entire oven.
Saturday, Elin Vance texts me a photo of a rune-stone and the message dinner tuesday, i wasn't kidding, also ask him about the coffee machine, it's finally happening.
I write back: what's finally happening
he's LEARNING it
Bear is learning the coffee machine?
there's a diagram Elin says. he drew a diagram. tor has a photo of the diagram. we've all seen the diagram.
I put the phone face-down on the counter and then pick it right back up like a teenager.
why is he learning the coffee machine
The three dots go for a long time.
marisol, Elin writes. come to dinner.
Sunday I take my mother to church and then to the good bakery and then sit in her kitchen while she narrates the neighborhood.
"The Kowalczyks are selling."
"Okay."
"Because of the deck."
"What deck?"
"The deck, Marisol." She waves a hand. "You never listen. Your brother listens."
"My brother lives in Sacramento."
"He listens on the phone."
I let that go, because there's no version of that conversation that ends anywhere good, and because she's seventy-four and in pain and if you take the neighborhood off her she's got nothing but the hip.
At the door she catches my sleeve.
"You're different."
"I'm tired."
"You're always tired. This is different tired." She looks up at me with her whole face, this woman who raised two kids on a cannery wage and one funeral. "Mija. Is there somebody?"
"Mom."
"Because I'm not going to be here forever, and I'd like—"
"You're going to be here forever," I say, "out of spite, and you know it, and so does Ernesto."
"Ernesto," says my mother, with total dismissal, "is a child."
Tuesday dinner at the Ravensworn clubhouse is not what you'd think.
I don't know what I thought. Something with a pool table and a rule about women, probably; I'd built a whole thing in my head out of movies.
What it actually is: twenty-two people, a long oak table, two kinds of chili because Ghost doesn't eat meat, which nobody is allowed to mention, and a folding table on the end for kids where a four-year-old is conducting a war.
And noise. God, the noise.
"You made it," Hal says, and takes my coat like a ma?tre d', which on a man with a president's patch is genuinely funny.
"I brought bread."
"You brought bread," Verse says, appearing. "Look at this. Look at this woman. Eleven years I've been coming to this dinner. I have never brought bread."
"You've never brought anything," says Tor.
"I bring atmosphere."
"You bring a guitar and then you don't play it."
"That's tension," Verse says.
And then Bear comes out of the kitchen with a pot in both hands and stops dead in the doorway when he sees me, and about nine people notice, and I would like to state for the record that not one of them says a word about it, and that this is somehow ten times worse.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey."
"You came."
"I was invited by an archaeologist. There's no arguing with those."
"There isn't," says Elin, going past with plates.
He sits four seats down, which I understand is deliberate, and I spend the entire meal being interrogated by a table of enormous men who want to know about the worst thing I've ever seen.
"Come on."
"No."
"One."
"It's a dinner table."
"That's why it's good," says Rurik, who is holding a fork in a cast.
"Fine." I put down my spoon. "Four years ago. Guy comes in, says he's got a headache. Standard. I'm taking his history. He says, and I quote, 'It started when the crab bit me.'"
"When the crab—"
"When the crab bit him."
"On the head?"
"That's what I said! That's the exact question I asked!" The table's already going. "And he says, 'No, on the hand, three weeks ago.' And I say sir, that's not related, and he says—" I have to stop for a second. "He says, 'Are you sure? Because I've been thinking about it every day.'"
Verse actually falls off the bench.
"That's not a crab," Ghost says, from the end. "That's a marriage."
The table comes apart.
And through all of it — through the noise and the four-year-old's war and a man on the floor — I look down four seats, and Bear is watching me with his chin in his hand and an expression I don't have a name for, and when I catch him he doesn't look away.
He just lifts his coffee cup an inch. Like a toast, but smaller.
"How's the coffee?" I ask him, across four people.
"It's excellent coffee," says Hal.
"It's transformative coffee," says Elin.
"There was a diagram," says Tor.
"There was no diagram," Bear says.
"There's a photo of the diagram—"
"That's an artist's impression."
"Bear drew a diagram of a coffee machine," Verse tells me, leaning in, delighted, "with arrows, and at the bottom, in his own handwriting, it says, 'IT IS LOADING. IT IS NOT JUDGING YOU.'"
I help with dishes because I can't not. He dries because there's exactly one dish towel and he got to it first, and everyone else evaporates from that kitchen so fast and so completely that it's practically a coordinated military operation.
"Subtle," I say.
"They're not subtle."
"They are so profoundly not subtle."
He takes a bowl out of my hand. Big hands, careful with it; the third knuckle's got a shiny pink scar over it now that's going to be there for good.
"I thought about it," he says.
"Okay."
"You said think about whether I'm going to say the next part."
"I did say that."
"I thought about it for six days."
"I know exactly how many days it was," I say, "and I'd like you to know that admitting that has cost me something."
He almost smiles. Puts the bowl down.
"There's things I haven't told you," he says.
"I know."
"Big ones."
"I assumed."
"I'm going to tell you," he says. "But I'm going to need to do it somewhere that isn't a kitchen with eleven men listening through a wall."
There's a burst of extremely fake conversation from the next room.
"WE'RE NOT LISTENING," Verse shouts.
"Great," Bear says, not looking away from me. "So the next part."
"Yeah."
"The next part is I'd like to take you somewhere Friday."
"I work Friday."
"Saturday."
"I work Saturday."
"Marisol."
"I work every day, Bear, that's — that's the actual problem with me, that's the whole—" And something goes out of me all at once, standing in a clubhouse kitchen with wet hands.
"I've got three twelves and my mother's Sunday and my brother called Thursday, and there is no slot.
I don't have a slot. I haven't had a slot in about six years and if I make one, something falls over. "
He picks up the towel. Dries his hands. Puts it down.
"When do you get off Sunday morning?" he says.
"Four."
"Four a.m.?"
"That's when the shift breaks. I don't leave till seven, I do notes."
"Where do you go at four?"
I look at him.
Nobody has ever asked me that. I've been doing it for nine years and not one person on this earth has ever asked me where I go at four in the morning.
"The roof," I say.
"The roof."
"Over the ambulance bay. There's a service ladder off the north stair.
It's not — technically I'm not supposed to.
Everybody knows. Nobody says." I shrug like it's nothing, and it isn't nothing, it's the only fifteen minutes in my week that belong to me.
"You can see the harbor. It's quiet. That's all it is. "
He nods, slowly, like a man writing something down.
"Okay," he says.
"Okay what?"
"Okay," says Bear.
And that's the whole conversation, and he picks up the next bowl, and out in the other room somebody drops a chair and Verse says "THAT WASN'T US EITHER," and I stand there with my hands in the water and a feeling in my chest like a door swinging easy for the first time in years.
Elin catches me on the way out, at the coat rack, with the specific efficiency of a woman who has been waiting by a coat rack.
"Okay," she says. "Ten seconds."
"Ten seconds of what?"
"Of me being unprofessional." She hands me my jacket. "How much has he told you?"
"About what?"
"That's my answer, then." She sighs. "Right."
"Elin."
"I'm not going to tell you," she says. "That's not me being coy, it's that it isn't mine and I'd be furious if somebody did it to Hal." She pulls her hair out of her collar. "But I'm going to say two things and then I'm going to go and be extremely normal at everyone."
"Go on."
"One. Whatever you're picturing, it's not that. It's stranger than that. And when he tells you, you're going to have about four seconds where you decide something, and you should know in advance that the four seconds are coming."
"That's terrifying."
"Yes," Elin agrees. "Two. I've known these men eight months. Bear has said maybe nine hundred words to me in total and four hundred of them were about a carburetor." She looks toward the kitchen. "He learned a coffee machine, Marisol. There was a diagram. That man does not learn things for people."
"It's a coffee machine."
"It's a love letter with a bean on it," says Elin, and goes to be normal at everyone.
I sit in my car in the clubhouse lot for a minute before I start it.
The lot looks completely different in the dark with people in it.
Somebody's got a speaker going. Rurik is showing his cast to a woman who has clearly already seen the cast. Tor's standing at the gate — actually at it, actually on it, which after that church meeting is apparently a whole institutional victory.
And through the window I can see Bear at the sink with his sleeves up, doing the dishes for twenty-two people by himself, which is what he does, which is what he has clearly done every Tuesday for nineteen years, because it's a way of being in a room full of people you love without having to be looked at.
Four seconds, she said.
I drive home down the bluff road with the window cracked and the fog coming in off the water and I think: lady, I've already had my four seconds.
I had them in a gravel lot in March, watching a man decide.
I just didn't know they were the four.