Chapter 12 #2
She looks. The photo is small, four by six, the frame the cherry one Auntie made for me out of the old fence in 1996.
The woman in it stands in front of an older Finley’s awning in the brown sweater that’s folded in the drawer of the apartment above, seventy in the photo where I’m thirty, her hand on my elbow.
“My grandmother,” I say.
Maggie says nothing. The hand around her cup goes a half degree warmer, and she takes the half degree.
“She taught me to brew coffee on a wood stove in 1981. I was eight. The pot was a four-cup Bialetti.” I drink.
“She counted in orcish. She counted to four. At four the pot huffed and she lifted it off the stove, and that was the lesson. Coffee is something you have to be there for. You don’t walk away.
The clock goes unchecked. Counting is what you do. ”
Boy, the voice says, like it always arrives when I’m about to do something I haven’t done.
Look at her.
I look at her.
Maggie hasn’t moved. Her left hand is flat on the table beside her cup, her right hand around the cup, and the thumb of the right hand rests against the small pearl on the thin gold band on her ring finger. She isn’t tapping it. She’s just touching it.
She breathes in, and the exhale runs the smallest fraction longer than the inhale, audible only at six-foot-ten down at the level of the table.
“My Nonna,” she says.
The voice she says it in isn’t the voice she says Garza in, or Liana, or crullers.
It’s flat at the edges and full in the middle, the half step up gone out of it and the smile gone out of the corners.
The word lands like a word lands when a person hasn’t said it in a room with another person in a long time.
“She came from Calabria in 1962. She had one suitcase and the recipe for the sweet ricotta in her head. The kitchen was in Citrus Heights. Yellow linoleum. A clock above the sink shaped like a cat with a tail that swung.” She drinks.
“She made ricotta on Saturday afternoons in a blue enamel pot. Whole milk first. Then the lemon, squeezed by hand into my palms, because she said hands were the only measure she trusted.”
She looks at her own hands. “She called me piccola.”
The word is small in the room. She hasn’t said it out loud in twenty years, and I can hear the not saying behind it.
I don’t interpret. The thing not to say is I am sorry your grandmother is gone, or mine is gone too. The grandmothers aren’t gone like a person who has not had a grandmother thinks they’re gone. I take a drink and let the silence be the silence.
She takes a drink. Her shoulders are still down.
“The sweater in the photo,” I say. “Brown wool. It smells of lavender from the drawer, and there’s still a ghost of the wood stove from the place she lived. It’s in a drawer in the apartment upstairs. I don’t wear it. I smell it on cold nights and put it back.”
Maggie’s chin dips, and her breath goes out slow through her nose. She doesn’t let it become a smile.
“The ricotta is in my hands,” she says. “She never wrote the recipe down. I learned it by watching. I should be able to make it. I have tried eleven times.”
She stops there. She doesn’t say I cannot make it, or the curd separates wrong. The sentence ends at eleven, and the eleven holds.
I take a drink. “Eleven is a number,” I say.
“Yes.”
“Eleven isn’t the count.”
She looks at me. “What is the count,” she says.
The voice on what is the count is hers, the one that’s been sitting underneath the Garza and the Liana and the crullers for nineteen days, pressed against but unread like the wood under the apron knot sits there.
She is asking the question her grandmother taught her.
I don’t have an answer, and I’m not supposed to.
“It comes when it comes,” I say.
The voice that says it comes when it comes isn’t mine. I’m borrowing it. The woman in the photo behind the espresso machine said it to me about ten thousand things over the years, and the words are mine to use now because she gave them to me.
Maggie hears it. She doesn’t ask whose words they are. She has a gift for not asking.
The carafe is between us, and we drink the last of the small white cups.
The light through the front window has dropped a quarter of its blue, and the chalkboard letters across from me go bronze at the corners in the last twenty minutes of a Saturday afternoon.
I don’t get up, and she doesn’t get up. The cups go to half, then to a quarter, then to the saucer mark.
The grandmother voice in my head says nothing. She has said her piece, and she’s letting the rest of the afternoon land however it lands.
I set the cup down, and Maggie sets hers down, and neither of us touches the carafe.
Maggie stands first. She does it like she did the bag of beans on the first morning, no announcement, just the body deciding. The apron is still on. She doesn’t unhook it; the strings hang loose at her hip.
I stand. The two-top is between us with two empty cups on it and a carafe with the lid on.
I lift the carafe by the neck like I lifted it three hours ago when there was still light through the window, and I carry it across the floor.
It doesn’t go back to the front counter where it has lived since Tuesday.
It goes to the back, to the shelf above the small sink, on the right where the four-cup Bialetti sits on cold days.
I set it down. The shelf takes the weight, and the lid stays on.
She’s at the door. I cross the floor to her. She hasn’t picked up her keys yet. They’re in her left hand, her right hand on the latch. The coat is on the hook beside her, and she lifts it down.
I get to her, and my hand goes to the shoulder of the coat as she pulls it on, half a second, the canvas under my palm, and then I take the hand back. She doesn’t look up.
“Saturday,” she says.
“Tomorrow.”
She turns the latch, the bell rings once, the door closes behind her, and the bell rings once more.
I throw the bolt. Through the front window the light has dropped the rest of its blue, and Main Street is going to its lamp color. I watch her get to her car. She doesn’t wave. Before she gets in, she lifts her chin once toward the front window. I lift mine. She closes the door.
I cross back to the two-top, pick up the two empty cups, and carry them to the sink. The carafe is on the shelf above. The lock holds.