Chapter 1 #2
He nods, but not at me. He nods at the milk steamer, like the two of them have an understanding.
I set a five on the wood counter. He makes my change with the attention-elsewhere economy of a man who’s worked a counter longer than I’ve done anything at all, then slides the coins back.
I push them toward the tip dish. He pulls the shot and dips the wand.
The steamer hisses, the milk climbs the inside curve of the pitcher, and then he cuts the wand, taps the pitcher twice against the mat, swirls it, and pours it into a small white cup with a green stripe at the rim, laying a leaf into the top in maybe four seconds without watching his own hands.
Then, instead of handing it across to me, he sets the cup down on a saucer at the corner of the counter and turns back to the machine to wipe the grouphead.
So I pick it up myself, both hands, the ceramic warm right down in the bone of my thumb, and I drink.
The first sip is milk and foam and the espresso underneath and the cardamom waiting down in it where it’s been the whole time, soft and clean.
My eyes close for half a second. “Oh,” I say, which I did not plan to say.
He doesn’t answer. The shoulder I can see doesn’t move at the oh, and that’s fine.
That’s exactly what I’d have asked of it.
I carry the cup to the window bar and sit on the stool farthest from the door, binder under my arm, the older orc at the corner just inside the right edge of my vision.
I open the binder flat on the wood and I put nothing in it, and I drink.
The older orc turns a page and lifts his green mug without looking up from the paper, then sets it back down on a coaster worn smooth by years of exactly this.
The cardamom in my second sip holds at the back of my throat.
I think about telling myself I haven’t had Nonna’s cake in nineteen years, and then I decide that thread can wait for an afternoon when I haven’t already cried in a Corolla.
I ordered the flat white I told the committee I’d order, I think, which is true, and which only I will ever know.
The light through the front window has gone pewter, the color a coastal town turns at noon in October when the marine layer is high but won’t quite break.
Through it, the HELP WANTED card does its slow yellowing in the lower right pane, the letters reversed from where I sit, black marker on white card, the same too-tall, no-flourish hand as the chalkboard.
I read it backward through the glass, and I think about it exactly once, and then I put it where I put things I’m not ready to argue with.
Across the room the older orc folds his newspaper and carries his mug to the counter.
The man at the machine takes it and sets it in a bus tub.
The older one heads for the door, and in the half second he passes my stool he doesn’t look at me, and somehow the not-looking is the considerate kind, the kind a person does on purpose because looking would be a comment.
The door opens, the bell rings, the door closes, the bell rings again softer on the way shut.
Somewhere in all of that, I’ve finished my coffee.
So I close the empty binder and carry the cup and saucer back to the counter, and he looks up.
It’s the first real look since oat, half a second of it, brown eyes, and the look lands somewhere in my chest. “Thank you,” I say, and my pitch comes out closer to my own this time.
“Mm,” he says, which is an alright, and he takes the cup.
The latch gives, the bell rings, I cross the threshold, the door closes behind me, the bell rings again on the close.
From out here the card is in the lower right pane the right way around now, facing me.
I stand on the sidewalk in front of Finley’s with the binder under my arm and the cardamom still sitting at the back of my throat, and I read it one more time.
The room at the Sea Wisp Inn is beige with a brown bedspread and a print over the headboard of a fishing boat at a dock I’ve never stood on.
The whole room reads like a Yelp review that begins clean, but.
The light through the window has gone gold, and I’m sitting on the edge of the bed in my fleece with the binder open across my lap and cardamom still ghosting the back of my throat.
I haven’t eaten since the almond pack at the rest stop, and my stomach has lodged a complaint I’ve decided not to act on yet.
The binder’s open to the divider I labeled in February, COMPS, and the page after it is the printed list of three shops, two crossed out and the third wearing a blue checkmark and the word interesting in my own handwriting from before I’d ever walked in.
I don’t amend the note. I leave the pen in the rings.
When I look up, the window faces Main Street straight across the gravel lot.
Through the glass, past where the flatbed and the green and white plywood were this morning and aren’t now, the front window of Finley’s holds the card in its lower right pane, catching the slant light so it reads as a small white rectangle from here.
I can’t make out the letters at this distance, and I don’t need to.
The chipped silver ring on my middle finger taps the wood of the bed frame once.
There’s a whole list of things I never told the man behind the counter.
My name, for one. What I used to do for a living.
What I’m driving back down to settle on November 29.
The fact that this binder is the thing I’ve been carrying around for nine months like it might hatch.
He didn’t ask after a single piece of it, and somehow that’s the part I keep turning over.
I’ll think about it tomorrow, I tell myself, and for once the sentence doesn’t show up with any snark to keep me company.
The ring taps the bed frame again. The card is still in the window. I leave the binder open.