Chapter 11 #2
The chalkboard is on the side wall. The carafe is on the front counter. Eleven minutes go by before the bell rings again, and I use them to flip to the third page of the binder and write three more lines and tuck the half pencil back into the apron pocket at my right hip.
At 2:30 I step outside with the small rag for the front window, because the salt fog has left its print on the glass at about the height of somebody’s palm and I want it gone.
The plywood across Main isn’t plywood anymore.
The plywood came down Friday. What’s across Main now is a green and white sandwich board propped open on the sidewalk in front of the chain’s construction site, and it says, in chalk doing its level best to look like our chalk, COMING SOON: OUR LIMITED EDITION SIGNATURE DRINK.
The chalk is too clean. The board is too clean.
I wipe my window. My hand keeps moving while I read.
I let the board fill my eyes, and nothing past it. I put the rag back on the inside ledge.
I take my phone out of the apron pocket and crouch a half foot to get the angle right.
The chalkboard at the top of the frame. The tasting cup in the middle of the frame, empty, beside the carafe on the front counter.
The bronze of the dahlias at the right edge.
I don’t crop Korren’s elbow out of the corner.
The caption I write is three words long.
Then I put the phone back in the apron pocket and let the post sit there and breathe.
Olmar comes by. He doesn’t order. He nods at me, nods at Harsk through the gap to the back, where Harsk has come out of the roaster room and is at the espresso machine with his sleeves still to the elbow, and he stands at the front counter with one hand on the wood beside the carafe.
He looks at the chalkboard. He reads it.
“Maggie,” he says.
“Olmar. Carafe?”
“Hattie sends her hello.” He looks at the carafe again. Then at me. “She’s going to want one of these.”
“I’ll send it Friday with the delivery.”
He nods once. “Alright.” He’s back out the door without having ordered anything at all, and the bell makes its small clean sound on his way, and Harsk at the espresso machine pulls a fresh shot for the man in the gray jacket who’s been waiting two minutes and not minding a bit.
Late in the afternoon I close the binder.
The carafe is two inches lighter than it was at midday.
The dahlias are still beside it on the counter.
The chalkboard on the side wall still says what I wrote on it at six.
My phone buzzes once in the apron pocket and I don’t look at it.
The bell over the door rings, and I lift my chin a beat to meet whoever’s just walked in.
June’s stockroom smells like warm cardboard and scorched register tape.
The card table under the high window holds my laptop, a yellow legal pad, and a Bic pen.
Not the half pencil. That one lives at Finley’s now, under an agreement I never said out loud.
June’s at the front register telling the Eureka transplant in the green raincoat about the new Ann Patchett, and her voice coming through the half-open door has the patience of a woman who likes the question because she likes the person asking it.
The Friday ring is the thin pewter band on my ring finger, oxidized a little along the inside curve. I keep coming back to it. I keep not knowing what I’m supposed to do about that.
My phone’s face up on the card table now, because on Tuesday a buzz landed in my apron pocket and I didn’t look at it.
I’ve looked at it. June texted Tuesday (hey saw something, when you have a sec), with a screenshot from the North Coast Business Journal email blast, then three follow-ups strung across the week, and at the bottom an automated note from the accelerator team about a Friday 5 p.m. portal close I have been pretending with real commitment is not happening.
The press release is up in a second tab. I’m reading it for the third time.
TIDEWATER COAST COFFEE COMPANY is proud to announce the GRAND OPENING of our Teakettle Bay location, Tuesday, November 24, with the simultaneous debut of our Limited Edition Signature Drink: Vrennthala Spice.
A house-tuned single-origin pour with locally-sourced honey notes and an artisanal finish.
Available through the end of the season.
Vrennthala Spice with honey notes, locally-sourced.
Somewhere up the chain of command, somebody whose entire job is to copy a chalkboard did exactly that on a Tuesday, walked the copy four sentences down Main in a green and white sandwich board, then walked it four hundred miles to a press release desk in a corporate office where a person in a Patagonia vest typed artisanal finish without flinching and hit send.
They’re very good, I think. They’re very fast.
I close the press release and open the deck.
Slide nine is the competitive landscape slide I’ve been rewriting in my head since the Tuesday board went up.
The old header read MARKET ENTRY OBSTACLES.
I delete it. I type the new header into the title bar in the title font, then sit with it for a few seconds before I let myself move down to the bullets.
THE CHAIN’S FIRST COMPETITIVE MISCALCULATION.
It lands clean. The press release wrote the header for me. I take down four bullets. Their drink is a copy. The copy came too fast to have been made for this place. The town will read it as a copy by Wednesday. A bet on speed is a bet against a place that measures time in Tuesdays.
I sit back. The slide is good. The kind of good I haven’t written in nine months and a Slack notification.
The carafe is in bullet two. I can’t show that bullet to a single person outside this deck without showing the carafe to him.
The chalkboard line is in the bullets too, quoted, in caps, the period after the second word held.
Korren and Delia and Liana and Olmar get cited under bullet three as the town’s whole apparatus for measuring time.
Slide ten is the photo I took on Tuesday, the chalkboard at the top of the frame, the tasting cup empty in the middle, the carafe and dahlias at the right edge, an elbow left uncropped in the corner.
I still haven’t posted the photo. The photo’s on the slide.
The cursor blinks at the end of the bullet.
My left palm goes flat on the card table beside the laptop, which is the hand I put on a surface right before I say a true thing I haven’t said out loud before, except there’s nobody in the stockroom to say it to but the cardboard and the printer and the half-open door with June’s voice coming through it.
I close the laptop. I leave it at the exact angle a person leaves a laptop at when they fully intend to come back to it in eight minutes.
I touch the pewter band once with my thumbnail. The pewter is cool, and the cool of it sits on my finger like it weighs something.
I pack up. Legal pad into the binder, Bic clipped to the spine, phone into my coat pocket screen down.
June at the register says, “Eight today?” and I say, “Yes,” and she says, “Bring the binder Monday,” and I say, “I will.” The bell over the bookstore door rings as I leave.
It isn’t Finley’s bell. I cross Main with the binder under my arm and my laptop in my bag, the slide title still sitting there in its title font.
Finley’s awning comes into view at the corner. The chalkboard in the window says what I wrote on it at six on Tuesday. The carafe is on the front counter where I left it. I haven’t told him any of it. I cross the street.
The bell over Finley’s door makes the sound it has made twice a day for three weeks.
The chalkboard in the window reads THE QUIET POUR.
HONEY AND PAPER. I come at it from the inside angle.
The carafe sits on the front counter where I left it Tuesday.
The apron lifts off its hook, and the strings find my hands before I think to look.
Harsk is at the espresso machine pulling a shot for a man in a fleece I don’t know. He looks up and nods, and I nod back.
I take the front window on purpose. Across Main the chain has a clipboard out front of its plywood now, a banner half-taped to the doorframe, and a man in a navy parka with a lanyard and the exact smile I already met in the press release headshot.
Forties. Sacramento posture. He sees me through the glass and lifts a hand.
I don’t lift mine. I keep my eyes on his a second longer than the lifted hand was asking for, and then I turn back to the counter.
The carafe is at my elbow. The bell is quiet.
Behind me the espresso machine starts its purge cycle, and Harsk says something to it I don’t catch.