Full of Him (Keeping It In #5)

1. Clem

CLEM

The window’s still boarded up when he walks in.

I pretend it isn’t. I pretend the cardboard taped across the front of my shop, where my name used to be in nice gold-leaf cursive, is just a thing I haven’t gotten around to fixing yet.

I pretend the brick in a paper bag in my back room is in a paper bag for some reason other than the cops telling me not to throw it out.

I’m five foot two. I run this bakery alone, and the neighborhood has gotten meaner since I signed the lease.

Pretending is what I have instead of a security system.

He doesn’t pretend.

He stops three feet inside the door. Looks at the cardboard. Looks at me. Doesn’t say anything, which is normal. He’s never said anything that wasn’t necessary in the six months he’s been my six AM regular.

“Morning,” I say, because I’m me and I can’t not. “Coffee?”

He nods. He is, honestly, the only man I’ve ever met who can communicate the entire concept of good morning, please, thank you, the usual with one nod.

I have, over the last six months, become fluent in nods.

Mostly his. It’s not a language they teach anywhere.

It’s the most fluent I’ve ever been in anything, which tells you something about me, or about him, or both.

I pour the coffee. My hands aren’t shaking anymore.

They were shaking yesterday at six AM when I cleaned up the glass.

They were shaking last night when I drove home with the cardboard taped on by a guy from down the block who came over with his toolbox because that’s what you do in this neighborhood when something happens.

They aren’t shaking now because I’ve already done all my shaking and there’s nothing left.

Stellan Byrne—I learned his name three weeks in when he handed me a credit card because his cash was in his car—Stellan Byrne doesn’t make me less calm.

He makes me wonder if calm is even the right word for what he is.

He sits at the corner table by the window every weekday morning.

Black coffee. Blueberry muffin. No book.

No phone. Forty minutes of watching the street and then a five-dollar tip on a four-dollar tab and out the door.

I’ve put a smiley face on his coffee cup every single morning since he started coming in. He’s never smiled back. He’s also never asked me to stop, which is its own kind of permission.

I have, somewhere between draws thirty and sixty, started getting weird about it.

Drawing the face is the first thing I do every morning the second I see him pull up at the curb.

I draw it before I pour the coffee. I draw it while he’s still walking through the door.

By the time he gets to the counter the cup is already smiling at him.

I have not asked myself why I do it before he asks.

I have decided not to. I have a lot of decisions like that.

Today I draw the smiley face anyway. I slide the cup across the counter. He takes it. His thumb covers half the face when he picks it up. It always does. I’ve watched his thumb cover half my smiley faces a hundred and twenty mornings in a row.

“What happened to the window?”

His voice is quiet. It isn’t gentle. The opposite of gentle, actually—he doesn’t waste sound. Six months of listening to him order coffee hasn’t told me what to do with him. The only thing I know is that it’s a voice I’ve learned to want to hear.

“Brick,” I say.

He doesn’t move.

“Through the window. Night before last. I came in yesterday and—“ I gesture at the cardboard. “Glass company can’t do the replacement until Friday. Someone insured it for me, which was nice, but the schedule’s the schedule.”

“Who?”

“The glass company?”

“The brick.”

I open the muffin case. I’m so calm about this that I can hear how calm I am, which is its own warning sign. “I can’t actually prove it. Marco. He used to come in. I had to ban him. He, um. He was making people uncomfortable.”

I put a blueberry muffin on a plate. I slide it across.

“Making you uncomfortable.”

It isn’t a question. It isn’t really a comment either. He’s just stating something we both already know.

“Yeah.”

“How?”

The bell over the door jingles. Mrs. Petrosyan from the second floor of the building next door comes in for her cardamom roll and her nine AM.

She’s eighty-one. She’s been my customer since the day I opened.

I serve her without thinking, the way I do everything in this shop—pour, plate, ring, smile.

She pats my hand on her way out. She tells me, in Armenian-accented English, that I look tired.

She tells me to eat. She tells me she’ll be back tomorrow.

The bell jingles after her.

Stellan hasn’t moved. His coffee is still in front of him. His muffin is untouched.

“How,” he says again.

I don’t want to tell him. I don’t know why I don’t want to tell him. I tell him.

“He came in the first time around April. Quiet guy, black coffee, sat at this table by the door. Every day for a couple of weeks. I thought he was nice. He left big tips. Then he started—there’s a way some men start.

” I’m looking at my hands now, not at him.

“Asking when I close. Asking if I work alone. Wanting to walk me home. Standing too close at the counter. The kind of stuff where you’re not supposed to make a thing of it because nothing has technically happened. ”

“Then?”

“Then I told him I had a boyfriend. I don’t have a boyfriend.

He said do you in a way I didn’t like. He came back the next day and didn’t order anything, just stood at the counter and looked at me.

I told him to leave. He didn’t, for a minute.

Then he did. Then he came back two days later, and three times the next week, and on the last visit I had to call the cops. ”

“Who did the cops talk to?”

“Him, but he wasn’t there when they came. They left a card. Said to call if it escalated.”

“And it did.”

“He hung around the corner for a while. Mostly at night.

Mrs. Petrosyan saw him from her window. Then he stopped.

I thought it was over. Then last Wednesday I got a note in the mail slot.

Then on Friday somebody slashed the tire on my bike outside.

Then night before last—“ I gesture again at the cardboard. “Brick. With a note.”

“Saying?”

“Saying he can find me whenever he wants.”

He breathes. Once. In and out. Then he picks up the muffin.

I’ve known this man for six months. I’ve served him a hundred and twenty cups of coffee.

I’ve looked at his big scarred-knuckle hands and the unnerving steadiness of his face and the grey-green eyes that don’t miss anything in this room.

I’ve known he isn’t a pleasant quiet man who likes my muffins.

He’s been something else the whole time, something I couldn’t name.

I haven’t asked him to name it.

I haven’t asked.

I’m not going to ask now.

He eats the muffin in five neat bites. He drinks the coffee. He sets the cup back on the counter, smiley face up, and looks at me.

“Where do you live, Clementine?”

Nobody calls me Clementine. Nobody. Even my mother calls me Clem.

“Above the shop. Studio. Door on the side.”

“Lock?”

“Yes.”

“Functional?”

I open my mouth to say yes. I close it. “It’s old. The frame’s warped. You can sort of jiggle it open if you know how.”

His eyes move to the back hall, where the stairs to my studio are. Move back to me. “I’ll take care of it.”

“My door?”

“All of it.”

There’s a beat where I’m supposed to say something. I’m supposed to say no, that’s okay, or you don’t have to, or I don’t even know your last name, or what does that mean. I open my mouth. Nothing comes out.

He puts a five on the counter. He puts another five next to it. He nods at me—not a smile, just a small acknowledgment—and walks out.

The bell jingles after him.

I stand there with two fives in front of me, a cup with a smiley face I drew, the boarded window behind me, and I think Clem, you don’t even know what the hell you just agreed to.

I also think whatever it was, you said yes.

Mrs. Petrosyan comes back in five minutes later because she forgot her gloves on the chair where she was sitting.

I make her a fresh cup on the house and ask her about her grandson.

I don’t tell her that one of my regulars just used a sentence that I think might mean he’s going to do something to a man named Marco.

Possibly a permanent something. I don’t know.

I don’t ask.

That night I close at four, the way I always do on Thursdays.

I clean the cases and bag the unsold muffins for the shelter on Eighth.

I lock the front door with the half-broken lock that Stellan Byrne pointed out with one glance.

I go up the side stairs. I climb into bed at nine because I have to be up at four-thirty.

I don’t sleep.

I lie on my back and stare at the ceiling.

I think about a man with grey-green eyes who doesn’t waste sound, who has eaten a hundred and twenty of my muffins, who sat in the corner of my shop every morning for six months as if he were waiting for one exact thing.

Who left two fives on the counter today and didn’t ask permission for any of it.

I think about the way he looks at me sometimes when he thinks I don’t notice.

I always notice. I have always always noticed.

I have, in fact, gone home some nights, stood in my own kitchen, put a hand against the fridge, and breathed out slow because of how he looked at me when I refilled his coffee.

I have not told anyone any of this. Who would I tell.

Mrs. Petrosyan, who would invite him over for cake by Friday.

My mother, who would ask if he had a job and then have follow-up questions.

My friend Dani, who would tell me to stop being weird and just ask him out.

They would all be wrong, in their separate ways, because the thing happening between me and Stellan Byrne was never going to need any of us to do anything about it.

He was always going to do it. I always knew that, too.

Around two AM I figure out the obvious part.

He was waiting for someone like Marco to give him a reason.

I roll onto my side. The cardboard window glows faint in the streetlight. The radiator clanks once, softly. The studio is quiet. The neighborhood is quiet. The whole city is quiet in a way that feels like everyone has stopped breathing while a thing happens somewhere I can’t see.

I go to sleep.

When I open the shop the next morning at five-thirty, the cardboard is gone. There’s new glass in the window. My name is back on it in fresh gold leaf. Cleaner than it was before, actually. The kerning is exactly right.

The lock on the side door has been replaced with one that doesn’t jiggle. New brass. The key fits clean.

There’s a small white envelope on the counter inside, tucked under the register, with no name on it. Inside the envelope is a single line in black ink that doesn’t look like any handwriting I know.

Open as usual. I’ll be in at six.

I read it twice.

I make the muffins. The blueberries are good this week—Mrs. Petrosyan’s daughter brings them up from the farmer’s market on Tuesdays. I put the coffee on. The espresso machine warms up with its usual rattle.

I turn the sign to Open at five fifty-five. I stand behind the counter. I wait.

At six AM exactly the bell jingles. Stellan Byrne walks in and locks the door behind him.