Chapter 20
Harsk
It is Sunday, and the back room is the temperature it gets when the roaster has not run all weekend.
I sit at the desk in stocking feet with my second cup of the morning on the wood in front of me.
I drank the first upstairs at the window that faces the harbor, while the Light beam came around at its nine.
The notebook is open. The page under my left hand is blank, and it is the next page after a page I have not turned back to in six years.
My hand knows where that other page lives without my needing to turn to it.
It has known for six years. The years sit in the breath above the apron knot, and in my lower back fitted to the notch worn into the maroon leather, and in the angle the right shoulder takes when the pencil comes out of the apron pocket.
The pencil is in my right hand. I sharpened it at the kitchen counter upstairs before I came down, on the hand-crank by the toaster, and I gave it three turns and tipped the shavings into the sink like Auntie taught me. Three turns was wrong. The tip has come out too thin.
I set the pencil at the seam of the notebook, and the tip ticks once against the wood. Six turns is what it wants when it is done right, and I gave it three.
The grandmother voice has been at my left shoulder since Friday at six. She does not say anything about the pencil. She is looking at the page.
Eka.
The kitchen above me is quiet. The fridge cycles on, and then the fridge cycles off.
Vha.
The framed photo is at my right above the small shelf. Naskha stands under the awning that was burgundy then. I stand at her elbow at thirty. It is the angle I check without quite looking.
Treh.
The maroon leather is fifteen years of a back fitted into it.
It held my lower vertebrae through a Wednesday afternoon in autumn six years ago, with the fluorescent on and the kitchen clock above the sink reading 2:47 and Presso still small, the afternoon the sentences came out of me in even letters and stayed. I am sitting in the same chair now.
The number on the receipts pinned above the desk is the one I told Olmar on Friday.
I have not told her. It is bigger than the number I wanted it to be, and the shoulders go where they go when a number is in the room that she has not seen yet.
They come down a quarter inch without my permission, and then they go up again.
Olmar said four words on Friday. He said them at the porch swing at the south end where Hattie was not, and the four words were tell her anyway. They have been at the back of my throat ever since.
The pencil tip is still too thin. I pick up the pencil and press it to the corner of the open page. The tip gives. The lead goes into the wood under the paper. I set the pencil down again, the body of it bowed against the binding.
The carafe is at the front counter where she left it at noon yesterday, the lid on a quarter turn past where it sits. I have not loosened it. The grandmother voice does not say anything about the lid either.
I do not turn the page back. I turn the mug in my hand a quarter inch instead. The second cup is half gone. The Light beam comes around again on its nine, and there are two boats out and no others, and the fog is at the windowpane.
Fenra.
The page stays open and the pencil stays where it is, and I drink the second cup down.
The door stays locked, because it is Sunday and I do not turn the sign.
The work happens anyway. I take the grouphead off and lay it apart on a clean towel on the counter, pull the screen, set the dispersion block in the small bowl with the cleaner, wipe the wand and check the tip at the second hole.
By eleven the harbor light is gone from the front window and the fog has given up. The four words sit where they sat at six, not loud, at the place a hand goes when it does not know what to do with itself.
Vha.
The grandmother voice is not at my left shoulder now. She is over at the framed photo, looking at the awning, and she is not saying anything I have not heard before.
It comes when it comes.
The grinder is next. I take the burrs out, brush them, set new ones in, and dose at the same number, and bring the hopper to where I leave it on a Saturday closing. Yesterday’s closing was the one she did with me.
The carafe is on the back counter where she put it at noon. I do not loosen the lid and I do not tighten it.
By a little after two the light has come back at the rim of the harbor-side window, low. Garza walks past on the other side of the street with a paper sack and does not look in, and my hand does not lift off the counter.
I take the chairs down off the two-tops, wring the mop, and the boards take the wet at the grain. The bell does not ring, and then it rings once anyway.
I do the chalk for tomorrow. TODAY: VANILLA CARDAMOM. DECAF AVAILABLE. Block letters on the inside board, propped against the counter for opening, the letters bigger than the board takes, as they always have been.
The pencil stub is in the apron pocket, and my thumb finds it and presses the eraser end against the seam. Telling her means opening the page and putting the page in her hand.
None of that gets written down. The board goes against the counter, the cleaning shelf is locked from the alley side, and the light in the back goes off and then the light at the front, when the harbor has gone gray.
I hang the apron at the back hook and leave the pencil in the pocket. The thing is settled in me already, and it is only waiting on the man to act on it.
Say the question, boy.
I climb the back stairs in stocking feet, and the third step gives where it has always given.
Upstairs is colder than it was at six. The kettle is on the burner where I left it.
The grandmother voice says nothing, and the page on the desk downstairs stays open.
I put the kettle on and turn the knob to the second click.
The kettle clicks off at the second click and I do not pour.
The mug is in my hand and the mug is empty. I have been standing at the small counter in the upstairs kitchen for two minutes by the stove clock. The window over the sink is the harbor side. The Light beam comes around at its nine, and the foghorn has been off since four.
The page is downstairs.
I set the empty mug at the rim of the burner and go back down the back stairs in stocking feet, and the third step gives.
The light in the back is off and I do not turn it on.
The desk is where it is. The notebook is open at the page I have not turned back to, and the pencil is at the seam of the binding with the tip still in the wood where I pressed it this morning at the count of three.
I lift the notebook off the desk into both hands. The pencil rolls a quarter inch toward the spine. My thumb stays at the page edge so the page does not slip away under the cover when I close it.
The back door knocks. Two short, then one.
Eka.
The grandmother voice is at my left shoulder again, she has been at the framed photo all day, and she is not saying anything I have not heard.
I cross the back room to the alley door and open it.
Maggie is at the threshold with her hands in the pockets of the navy windbreaker, the hood half up against the wet that has come in since the fog gave up.
Her hair is loose. She is wearing the chipped silver ring tonight, on the middle finger, and the day is wrong for it, because the silver is Tuesday and today is Sunday.
She put it on reaching into the drawer in the dark.
She says, “I came.”
I say, “Yes.”
She does not say anything else. I move my shoulder a quarter inch and she comes in past me.
Her left hand goes to the inside of the doorframe and stays there a second, because she is taking the room before she takes me.
I have watched her do it at every door for nine weeks.
The shoulder roll is in there, and I let it be.
“Upstairs,” I say.
She nods, and she follows me up the back stairs. The third step gives under her too, and she stops on it, looks down, looks up at the back of my head, and keeps coming.
The apartment is small, just two rooms. The kitchen is the one with the window over the sink and the small table I built fifteen years back from a board I bought at the lumberyard on Pine.
The table is a square with two chairs, the stove, the kettle still on the second click, the mug at the rim of the burner.
I move the mug. I pull the second chair out for her. She sits.
The notebook is in my left hand with the page at my thumb. I am standing at the table with it and I have not put it down.
Vha.
Say the question, boy.
I have practiced this six different ways in my head since six on Friday, and none of them are what I say. What I say is, “There is a page in this. I want to show you the page.”
She looks up. The hood is back on her shoulders now, and her eyes are the brown they are at night with one lamp on. “Okay,” she says.
I sit. The chair is always too small. I built the table, but the chair came with the apartment. I lower in anyway. The notebook goes on the wood between us. I open it, and I open it to the page.
The handwriting on the page is mine, six years younger and not different. The pencil has not faded as a pen’s ink would have. Six sentences, eighty-one words, the letters tilting forward. The page is not dated, because I never date entries. I count pages.
I turn the notebook so the page is facing her. The push across is not mine to make, so my left hand stays at the edge of the page where my thumb has been for the last four minutes.
She looks at the page. She does not pick it up.
“Read it,” I say.
She reads it, and then she reads it again. Her left hand comes flat on the wood of the table next to the notebook, the palm pressed down, the fingers spread.
“Six years,” she says. She does not phrase it as a question.