Chapter 18 #2
The middle stops go quick. Voshen, the forehead down to her and the almond tin back in my hand.
Delia’s bag through the side slot, the lemon coming through the steel.
Garza, and Linnea’s pie tin into the tote.
June at the bookstore door, three inches and gone.
Hot tomorrow, she says, and the lock clicks, and none of them is the stop my chest is walking toward.
One bag left.
Pine runs uphill from June’s, the same grade I have walked for fifteen years, and tonight the grade is steeper because of where it ends. The bag is light on my left arm. The lamps come on at the corner of Pine and Third, and the fog is moving down the hill above the harbor against them.
The Bell House at the top, cream and green through the dusk, the porch light already on. The geraniums in the flowerboxes are leggy still, the boxes not cut back yet. Olmar will get to them when the rain has decided what it’s doing.
The gate is unlatched. I lift the latch and let it down soft on the catch.
The kitchen window is yellow against the dusk, Olmar at the sink with his hands at a cutting board I can’t see from the gate. The knife moves once. He sees me, and he doesn’t lift the knife, only lifts his chin toward the porch.
The swing at the south end is empty. The paperback Hattie reads on it on Fridays is face down on her canvas jacket, but she isn’t on the swing. The kitchen window is the one light, the kitchen door behind it the other, and the pair of nods this house gives me is going to be a single one tonight.
Three steps up, the boards remembering 1889 under my weight, and the last bag is out of the tote and in my hand by the time the kitchen door opens.
“Olmar,” I say.
“Harsk. Tea’s hot.”
The bag weighs once in his hand. He looks at me, then down the porch toward the swing where Hattie isn’t, then back at me.
“She’s at Voshen’s. The clipboard.”
“Mm.”
He steps back, and the kitchen door comes open three inches more. Garlic and lemon and rosemary on steel. The smell has been the same smell on this porch for twenty-three years, and tonight there’s the small extra of a sourdough on a board.
He sets the bag on the counter inside. The kettle is on the back burner, and he pours two mugs, one with the chip at the rim. He drinks from the chipped one and hands me the plain. The mug is hot through the wall of it, and I take it.
We go to the swing at the south end. He sits, I sit, and the chain creaks at his weight, not at mine, as it has every Friday for four months now. The fog is moving up the hill below the railings.
We drink. The swing chain ticks under his weight, and the Light beam comes around on its nine.
“Tell me about Maggie,” he says.
The chain creaks once.
“She’s good.”
“Mm.” He drinks, and he looks at the chip on his rim and not at me. “She at the till today?”
“Yes.”
“Bex on?”
“Yes.”
“And the chain?”
“They put a placemat at Dottie’s.”
“Mm.” He turns the mug a quarter inch. “How much?”
“More than twenty above October.”
He looks at the geraniums and not at me, the mug staying at his knee.
“You told her,” he says.
“Yes.”
“The number.”
I don’t answer for a beat. The fog moves up through the railings, and the Light beam comes around.
“No.”
He drinks. He doesn’t turn his head.
“Why?”
I let it sit. The grandmother voice has been quiet since Monday at three and is quiet now. What is in my chest is the chair at the desk in the back room, the notebook, the page with the box drawn on it, and the number above the box she didn’t see.
My jaw works once.
“Because the number was bigger than I wanted it to be.”
“Mm.”
“And she was working twenty-five at week three. I didn’t want to put it next to the twenty-five.”
“Mm.”
He turns the mug another degree and sets it on the rail and puts his free hand flat on his thigh.
“Tell her anyway,” he says.
I don’t answer.
He lets me not answer. The swing creaks at his weight again, he drinks, and the Light beam goes around once more.
The fourth count arrives in my chest as she taught me, the lip first, then the breath, then the sound, and the sound doesn’t come out of my mouth.
The count stays where it is, with the number.
The grandmother voice is at my left shoulder for the first time in five days.
Two scoops, boy. Not three.
I drink. The chip on his rim catches the lamp.
“She has been carrying her piece alone,” he says.
“Yes.”
“It is heavier carried alone.”
“Yes.”
“You know this.”
“Yes.”
He drinks again and sets the mug at the rail and stands. He doesn’t say bring her.
“The geraniums are going Sunday,” he says.
“Alright.”
“Bring the shears if you come up.”
“Alright.”
The mug goes back to him, and he weighs the chipped one once in his palm and nods at the kitchen door behind him. The door is open three inches still, the kettle ticking. He goes in, and the door closes soft on the latch.
I am on the porch a beat longer than I mean to be. The swing chain holds. The fog is up to the railings now.
The walk down Pine is full dusk, the lamps on, the fog at my hip and my shoulder and the back of my neck.
The grandmother voice walks the four blocks with me and doesn’t say anything else.
The placemat number has moved up out of my chest and into my mouth, where Olmar put it, and it stays there the whole way down.
Finley’s at the corner, CLOSED in the window. The chalkboard has Maggie’s chalk over my pencil where she changed ALSO YEMENI to ALSO COSTA RICA TOMORROW at three. I read it once and don’t touch it, and I go down the alley and up the back stairs where the boards remember me at four and at seven.
The carafe is on the front shelf where Maggie left it at noon. I pour the last cold inch into the sink, rinse it, and put it back. The lid goes on a quarter turn past where it sits.
I don’t loosen it.