Chapter 13 #2
I lower the binder onto the one small empty corner of the prep table with no flour on it, because the binder is work and the prep table is his, and I am not setting one down into the mess of the other. The binder stays closed. The binder is going to keep staying closed.
I walk around to his side of the table.
I keep my eyes off his hands. I look at the bowls instead.
Eight done, one in progress, a row of small glass jars behind them labeled in his block-letter pencil.
The third jar from the left has the chipped lid, and the unchipped ones are November’s.
Less is forgiven, more is not. I don’t say it. I’ve known it for two hours.
“Show me,” I say.
He turns the open jar so the label faces me.
Our forearms aren’t touching. They’re about an inch from not touching, with the flour on his arm sitting in the space between us, a small dry powdered field.
He smells like clove and warm flour and, under that, the cedar of a shirt that’s been folded in a drawer, and the whole long day of work.
The honey on my thumb is between us too, on the binder cover where I set it down, and there is no good reason for that to land in my head and it lands anyway.
He reads the label out loud, low, like he reads to himself when he’s checking his own count. “Ren-keva. Tonight, eight are done and one is still open.”
His eyes go to my hand.
Not to the binder. To my hand. His eyes catch the silver on the index, the silver on the middle, the gold on the pinkie, and the slot on the right ring finger where the metal isn’t. He doesn’t say a word about it. His chin tips.
He picks up the small measure. “Hold this,” he says, and hands it to me without looking, because he’s already reaching for the next jar, and the side of his thumb passes the side of mine on the handoff, dry through the flour, and stays for the length of one breath, and is gone.
So I hold the small measure.
I am standing closer to him than I have ever stood, closer than the two-top last night, closer than I’ve ever stood at the counter, and the top of my head comes to the line of his sternum and my work boot is an inch off his.
He reads the next label out loud in his back-room voice.
The words aren’t for me. I hear all of them anyway.
He stops reading.
I don’t look up at him. I keep my eyes on the label. I don’t need to look up to know his head has come down a fraction of an inch toward mine, because the air against the part in my hair changes.
I rise onto the toes of my work boots, just to see the next label. That’s the official reason and I’m sticking to it.
We don’t cross.
The clove’s in the air between us and the flour’s on his forearm and the honey’s on my thumb and the silver stud on his collar catches the kitchen light. He doesn’t move. I don’t move. The small measure in my hand has nine grams of November clove in it and I’m holding it dead level.
“Maggie,” he says.
“Yes.”
He sets the next jar down.
It lands on the prep table with the soft sound of glass through a layer of flour, because the flour is between every surface in this room and every other one, including the side of his thumb that crossed mine on the handoff and the dry powder on his forearm that is the entire inch between us that is not touching.
He doesn’t move his hand back to his side.
In the space of one breath the small measure in my hand still has its nine grams in it, and the nine grams haven’t moved either.
The part in my hair has the warmth of his breath on it now, lower than it was half a second ago.
My boots don’t come down. Hold the measure, says the small dry voice that has taken it upon itself to supervise this. I hold the measure.
He stoops the rest of the way down.
The space he takes is the space my body never gave him permission to take and has been holding open for him anyway. His breath comes first. Clove and flour. Then his lower lip, careful against mine, and last the tusk.
The tusk lands at the corner of my mouth, not the front, the corner of the lower lip, where his tusk has lived for fifty-three years and where his mouth has long since learned to find a smaller mouth without doing it any harm.
My thumb finds it because my thumb has been waiting for it, the pad of my thumb against the smooth ridge at the edge of the tusk, learning the shape of it.
The bone is the temperature of the rest of him.
It’s smoother than I thought it would be, with the smallest catch where the curve begins, and the honey is still on my thumb, transferring.
His mouth tastes like honey, a thin sweetness at the corner where my thumb was. His tongue catches the trace before he can think to. The small sound he makes against me isn’t a word.
The small measure in my hand stays level.
I’m not even thinking about it. Twenty years of bodies in kitchens have taught my hand that nine grams of clove on a metal spoon stays nine grams of clove on a metal spoon while the rest of the body is off doing something else.
The clove stays put. The clove is the witness.
Of course you held it, the dry voice says.
It’s sardonic again, in a way it hasn’t been since this morning.
Something has snapped back online in me. I don’t stop kissing him.
His apron is against my sweater. The brown canvas with the flour all over it lands at the line of my collarbone, because his chest isn’t at mine, his chest is at my forehead, and the canvas comes down to where the strap crosses my collarbone instead.
He’s worked the prep table all afternoon and his weight comes through the canvas like a body that’s been at it, steady, no rush in it anywhere.
Twenty pounds of him into the inch of me and twenty pounds of him deliberately not into the inch of me, both at once, his weight back on his rear foot and his hand at my jaw doing the carrying.
His hand is at my jaw. His other hand finds my hand, not the one with the measure, the one without it, the right one, the bare one, the slot. His thumb passes over the metal that isn’t there.
His thumb crosses the silver of the index, then the silver of the middle, then over the bare slot at the ring finger, then to the gold of the pinkie.
He doesn’t say anything about the bare slot.
The thumb has already said it, and my body hears it like the first burr of the grinder on a morning that doesn’t need to be named.
Sunday. It’s the smallest thought in my head and the loudest.
He pulls back a quarter inch. Not all the way, not back to where he was, just a quarter inch, enough that the air comes back between us, enough that I can watch the line of his jaw work once before he speaks, enough that the part in my hair is still close enough to take the breath he draws ahead of the word.
“Maggie.”
It’s the word he’s said to me twice today and ninety times since October, the same word with a whole different gravity behind it now.
He says it like my father used to say my name.
A period, no question, the having said it being most of what he meant.
The rest of what he means is the thumb on the bare slot and the brown apron at my collarbone and the small measure with its nine grams still level in my left hand.
I don’t say anything for the count of four seconds. The small fridge under the back counter hums. Presso is somewhere in the building, asleep or watching, and the foghorn out at the harbor is too far off to reach us in here.
“Yes,” I say.
Not because I’m answering a question, but because the yes is the only word my body has, and because it’s the same yes I handed him an hour ago at Voshen’s table without knowing I’d handed it over. The yes lands in him. The kind of landing that doesn’t close the drawer after.
He doesn’t let go of my hand. I don’t let go of the small measure. Honey from a small jar in Voshen’s teahouse has made its way through three rooms to the corner of his lower lip in his own back kitchen on a Sunday in November.
He looks at the apron. He looks at my sweater. There’s a small powdered handprint on the cream of the wool where his palm came up, five fingers, the right hand, the thumb low. He lifts his hand to brush it off and then doesn’t brush it off. He sets the hand back at my jaw instead.
“You have flour on you,” he says, and his eyes catch mine and stay.
“I traded for it,” I say.
He runs his tongue across the corner where the honey is, slow, considering, like he’s tasting a new bean. “Yes.”
My mouth goes soft before I can stop it, and I catch it happening. There’s no bell to have turned it on for.
He steps back, not away, just enough to give me room to lower the small measure to the prep table without having to contort around the size of him.
I lower the small measure to the prep table.
The clove sits dead level in it, level as it’s been for the entire minute we just spent not at arm’s length.
Nine grams of November sit in my palm, and I don’t tip it or spill it.
The label on the open jar reads ren-keva in his block-letter pencil, and the label could not care less what just happened a foot above it.
He picks the small measure up again with his right hand, the hand that was at the bare slot. He looks at it for a second, looks at me, looks at the nine grams of clove, and tips them, careful, into the open jar.
“Nine,” he says.
“On the dot,” I say.
He sets the empty measure down at the edge of the powdered field on the wood.
His thumb stays on the rim of it longer than it strictly needs to, and the thumb on the rim sits at exactly the height my ring finger is, the one where the ring isn’t, and neither of us looks at his thumb or at my hand. We look at each other instead.
I pick the binder up off the corner of the prep table on my way out.
It’s closed. I didn’t open it for a single one of the four hours I spent in this kitchen, and it did not open itself.
The cover, when my hand goes around it, has one small mark near the bottom corner, the color of honey and flour together, the size of a thumb.
I don’t wipe it off. I tuck the binder under my arm and pull the back door shut behind me with the key I’ve had for three weeks.
The harbor side of Main is dark in November.
The streetlights are on, the second one down from Finley’s is the one that buzzes, and the air is cold enough on the side of my face that the side of my face is warmer than the air.
My boots on the brick are the only loud thing for blocks.
Six blocks to the apartment over the bookstore, and I count them like Harsk would. One, two, three.
Under the streetlight on the corner of Pine the powdered handprint on the cream of my sweater shows white against the wool, five fingers, and I look down at it exactly once and keep walking.
My thumb is tacky against the binder cover, and the pad of it has the temperature of his lower tusk in it, under things my body has decided it intends to keep.
Smoother than I’d have guessed. The honey on my mouth is going, all but gone by Pine and Second, and I find it once more at the corner of Second and Harbor and then it’s gone for good.
Tomorrow is Monday.
The thought arrives and doesn’t ask me to answer it. The alarm before dawn, sharp as the bell that always follows it. The chalkboard already done in his block letters before I get there. It settles in at the side of my brain and stays there. Eight hours.
I cross at the bookstore. June’s window is dark. The chalkboard inside still says what it said this morning. I take the side stairs two at a time, which is one at a time for legs that aren’t mine, and the key turns and the door opens and I’m in.
My hand stays on the inside of the doorknob a second after the door’s shut.
The brass is cool. The ring finger above the knob is bare.
I look at my hand on the knob and the bare slot and the small honey mark on the binder under my other arm.
The bedroom door is six feet to my left.
The box on the dresser has six rings in it, Monday through Saturday.
I take my hand off the knob and set the binder down on the kitchen table, still closed.