Chapter 28 Tessa #2
Walt's is on the corner of Federal and Ellsworth. It is a single-story brick unit with a flat roof, shut since before I moved back to this city. The lettering is still on the glass in a green that used to be a different green.
He always slows down there. He has done it since October. He does not stop. He does not look at it for long and he does not say anything. I have never once asked him about it.
He slowed. I watched him slow.
And then Eli stopped fully, in the middle of the pavement with my daughter asleep on his shoulder. He was looking in through the window with his head on one side.
"Eli?"
"How many covers is that?"
"How many what?"
"Covers. Seats." He moved along the glass. "That's a twelve-seat counter and, what, six booths?"
"Six," Beckett said.
"Six booths, twelve at the counter. Forty-eight if you're honest about it." Eli put his free hand up against the glass to cut the reflection. "That's a good number. That's the number where you don't need four in the kitchen."
Nobody said anything for a second.
"The Tennyson place sold," Eli said, to the window.
"Since when?"
"Since the ninth. New guy's in in September. He's fine, he's keeping everybody. He offered me the manager thing. I said I'd think about it."
"And?"
"And I've been thinking about it. Tessa, I'm twenty-three next month. I've been behind somebody else's taps for six years."
Then he stepped back off the glass and said, "Anyway," and started walking. That is my brother's entire emotional vocabulary in one word.
I looked at Beckett.
He was not looking at the diner. He was looking at Eli's back. Then he looked at me and did not say anything at all. There was something all over his face that he did not put away fast enough.
Neither of us said one word about it the whole way home. I'm not going to be the woman who decides a thing in a room by herself and comes back and announces it.
But I filed it. I stood there and watched two men look through the dark window of a shut diner. Both of them saw the same warm room with the lights on in it. I put it in a drawer in my head and closed the drawer gently so nobody would hear.
We got home at half nine. Eli went. Willa went down at ten and stayed down.
I came out onto the porch at about eleven with two mugs. He was in the chair with his feet on the rail. I put one down beside him and sat on the top step with my back against the post.
Willa was on his chest. She had come up out of the bassinet at twenty to and had not wanted anything at all except an opinion registered. He had gone and got her and brought her out. She was asleep face down on him with one hand out flat on the side of his neck.
Somewhere behind us in the house four kittens went through a room at speed. Bear, on the boards, sighed at the whole arrangement.
And I sat there and noticed the thing. It took me about ten minutes to work out what I was noticing.
I was not listening for the door.
There is an animal in my chest and it has been on duty since I was twenty-two.
It is the thing that hears a truck four blocks away.
It is the thing that got me up at two in the morning in February to stand at the front window when he was late back from the rink.
It is the thing that stood in a gravel lot at ten to two on deadline day pretending to look at a gate.
It has spent ten years tracking exits. It tracks every man in a room and where the door is. It tracks how long it would take him to get to it and what it will cost me when he does.
And I sat there at eleven o'clock at night and it was not doing it.
It has not been doing it for a while. That is the part that got me. There was no moment and it did not announce itself. It just went off duty at some point in the last month or two while I was busy. I have been walking around in the quiet for weeks without noticing.
And in that quiet I can hear something else.
He has been circling a thing for about three weeks.
I know it the way I know a dog is in pain from across a room.
It is in how he stops in doorways. It is in the four or five times he has started a sentence at eleven at night and gone somewhere else with it.
On Sunday he got up in the middle of a perfectly good conversation about a hose.
He stood at the sink for a minute with his hands on the edge of it.
It is words. He is walking around this house at all hours with words in his mouth. Every day for three weeks they have come one step closer. Last night I could feel them in the room like weather.
There is a version of me, and I was her until about March, who would have gone and got them.
She would have said it out loud in the kitchen, all right, say it.
I would rather have a thing early and badly than sit in a house waiting for it.
That woman ran every scene of her life on the principle that the fastest way to survive something is to make it happen on her own schedule.
I sat on the step and drank my tea and watched a man breathe with our daughter on his chest. I did not say anything.
I'm going to wait. He has been carrying it a long way and he does not have the vocabulary. He is going to have to build it out of a marker and a fridge and God knows what else. That is how that man says anything. When he finally gets it out it will cost him more than anything has cost him all year.
So he can have the run at it. He gets to arrive with it.
And in the meantime, with my mug going cold and nobody watching, I said it silently to myself about four times. It was just so my mouth would know the shape of it when it came.