Chapter 17
Maggie
It’s late on a Thursday afternoon and the rain came in over the headland an hour ago and decided it likes it here.
The chalkboard out front is a smear of chalk and water at the edge of the sidewalk, where his palm crossed it to wipe the day’s menu before it ran on its own.
The carafe is empty. Bex left. Voshen’s two clay pots from Wednesday’s split run sit stacked clean by the sink, and the garnet on my right ring finger says it’s Thursday, which means we’re three days into the ren-keva counter-launch and I’ve been keeping a private tally about it nobody asked me to keep.
Tuesday, Korren came in before the rain and started a sentence about the chalkboard he didn’t finish.
Wednesday, Harsk was on the back-counter phone to Veshar in a register I could hear all the way at the front and couldn’t understand one word of.
Thursday, the chain across the street still hasn’t pulled its sign, and the leaving-it-up says plenty.
I’m at the bar and he’s wiping the wand, and the shop is the particular empty it gets fifteen minutes after the door’s been locked, when the closed sign is the only thing on the glass and the rain is doing the work of telling everyone in town to stay home.
He hangs the towel over the bar.
I don’t get up yet.
“Harsk.”
“Yes.”
“Come up tonight.”
The towel stays where he put it and his hand stays flat on the bar, and his eyes come to me. What doesn’t happen on his face is the small careful filing-away he did on Monday in his kitchen, when his hand stayed open on the wood at the far end of the table and didn’t reach across it.
“Alright.”
That’s it. Alright. The garnet does its small turn around my finger and I swear I didn’t move my hand to make it.
Nonna, I think, somewhere in the back of my chest where the kitchen voice always rises at the smell of warm milk, and for once the kitchen voice doesn’t have a single note of opinion to add.
What I get instead is the warmth, and the rest of it sits where it sits.
He goes upstairs for his coat. The stairs to his apartment make their stairs noise, and I hear him pause at the top a half second, no more, before he comes back down.
The coat is the wool one with the wide collar, and he shrugs into it at the bottom of the stairs.
The size of him in it swallows the whole doorway from where I’m sitting, and I don’t look away from that, because there’s nobody here to perform not-looking for.
“Ready,” he says.
“Lights are off.”
The bell rings once on our way out, and he locks the front behind us. The chalkboard hook is empty for the night. The rain is light enough that the umbrella I left at the bookstore three days ago is exactly the umbrella I’m going to keep wishing I had on every single block between here and Pine.
We walk west.
Six blocks. The streetlight at the corner of Pine still buzzes like it’s got a personal grievance.
His pace shortens at the second block. I didn’t ask him to.
It’s been the same every morning we’ve walked to Voshen’s and back, and I’ve stopped pretending I’m not counting.
The rain’s in his hair by Second and Harbor.
The wet sits on his tusks. His coat sleeve brushes my wrist once between Third and Second, and neither of us makes a thing of it, and the not making a thing of it is a thing all the same.
The bookstore is dark. June’s left the small lamp on inside the window for the back-room cat, like she always does. The side door is mine. I take the key out of the front pocket of my jeans on the bottom step, and I stop in the lit square the streetlamp drops on the brick.
“A second.”
“Mm.”
My apron’s back on its hook at Finley’s, so what I’ve got tonight is the jeans pocket and the cardigan pocket both, the end-of-shift spread that doesn’t belong to any one garment.
I lift each thing out and set it on the flat top of the brass mailbox by the door.
The key to the side door, the brass head still warm from my thigh.
A binder clip. A half pencil with the eraser worn flat.
The receipt from Voshen’s Wednesday pickup, folded twice.
A smooth little stone from the harbor side of Main I have no memory of picking up and couldn’t seem to part with.
A single small silver earring with no match.
A cinnamon receipt from Tuesday with the price torn off. There.
He hasn’t moved off the bottom step. He isn’t watching the inventory. He’s watching the rain bead on the inside of his coat sleeve where the cuff has soaked through. He gives me my own pockets without being asked. I notice. I don’t say so.
I put the binder clip and the half pencil and the receipt and the stone back in the cardigan pocket. The key stays in my hand.
“Up,” I say.
He waits for me to take the first stair.
The stairs to my apartment are narrow, and he has to angle his shoulders to take them.
The third stair creaks and the seventh creaks too, and I’ve lived above this bookstore for nine weeks and stopped meaning to fix what can’t be fixed.
The door at the top is the one with the brass knob that’s always cool, no matter the weather, holding out for a colder season.
Metal slides home; the lock turns with a soft click.
Stepping into the kitchen, I realize he’s never stood in it before.
The harbor window on the long side throws its small wet square of light at four in the afternoon in rain, the thing I’ve anchored my whole sense of being here to.
The window’s never closed all the way at the top, and the cold slips in along the sash even now.
The small desk under the window has a drawer.
The binder lives in it, latched. I don’t look at the drawer.
I don’t steer him toward the window either.
I take my coat off at the hook my hand has been going to for nine weeks, and my hand goes there now.
He stands in the kitchen.
He’s too tall for my ceiling by a head and a hand. The light over the table is the kind Nonna would have called a sensible light, plain shade, sixty watts, on at the cord. The kettle on the little stove is cold. The chair I’ve been sitting in alone for nine weeks is the one nearest the window.
“Maggie.”
“Yes.”
He says my name low and unhurried, the same care he had Monday in his kitchen with the half foot of wood between us, and what I do with the back of my left hand on the counter is the press-flat I’ve done at every counter that’s ever held a thing I wasn’t ready to say out loud.
My palm flattens against the cold counter.
To my right sits the garnet. Rain streaks the window.
I have a whole inventory going and not one of the things in it is going to come out of my mouth.
My palm stays flat as I look up to find him already looking back, and I don’t say a word. He’s come up the stairs after me and he’s standing in my kitchen, and that he came up at all says the whole thing without my help.
“Other room,” I say.
“Yes.”
I don’t give the kitchen window a glance, and I don’t give the desk under it one either.
The drawer’s latched and the drawer is staying latched.
The bedroom’s at the back of the apartment, past the short hall where the floor goes from the painted wood of the kitchen to the older planks of the original build, and I move toward that hall like I’ve moved toward the back room of every kitchen for twenty years: the body knows there’s a door at the end of the corridor and the body is on its way there while the head busies itself with something else.
He follows. Of course he follows. The boards under his weight do a deeper sound than they do under mine, the give of the joists all at once something I can hear like I never have in all my time above June’s.
The hall light is the brass sconce June left me when I took the place.
I don’t turn the kitchen light off behind us, and the light from the kitchen comes after us into the hall in a pale strip across the floorboards.
The bedroom door is open. It’s always open. There’s never once in nine weeks been a reason to close the door to a bedroom I sleep in by myself.
I go in first. He follows. The doorframe catches him at the shoulder. Not a hard catch. A doorframe catches a man who’s been angling through doorframes since he was sixteen. He does it without comment, the same way he ducks the back-room door at Finley’s a dozen times a day.
My bedroom.
The bed is the brass-frame double Auntie Voshen sold me out of her back-of-the-teahouse storage for ninety dollars and a Tuesday morning’s help washing her front windows.
The headboard has a small chip in the brass at the top of the right post. The quilt is one I didn’t bring from SF, the one June dug out of her grandmother’s hope chest when she heard I had the bed and nothing to put on it.
Two pillows, one flatter than the other because I’ve been sleeping on the flat one.
A reading lamp on the little painted nightstand.
The book on the nightstand is the paperback I bought off June on Day Three, the one I read three pages of a night, because at three pages a night I won’t finish a book in November and I’m not ready to be a woman who’s finished a book in November.
He doesn’t say anything about the room. He looks at the ceiling. His eyes check the ceiling, just like they checked the chalkboard he wrote. The ceiling is the last thing they reach. Before it: the bed, the window, the nightstand, the small painted dresser that came with the place.
The ceiling is too low for him.
He doesn’t duck. The fixture above the bed is the milk-glass shade June called probably original, and he’s a hand and a half clear of it, and a hand and a half is all the generosity the geometry of this room has in it to give.
“Mm,” he says.
It’s a quiet sound, and it isn’t a complaint.
“You’re tall in here,” I say.
“I am.”