Chapter 22
Harsk
Nine at night, and the café has been dark for four hours.
I’m in the back room. I didn’t turn the overhead on. Light from the alley comes through the high window over the roaster, gray going to nothing, and it’s enough to see the desk by. The chair has sat here for fifteen years, and I’m in it, my back against the leather where my back goes.
The carafe is in my hand. I brought it up off the front counter at five.
The lid is still on. I haven’t poured from it.
The brew has gone to room temperature, like it does when it sits past its hour.
I’m holding it because my hand wanted to hold something, and the hand isn’t always honest with me about why.
I count the things on the desk. The receipts, squared, the binder clip on the corner.
The pencil. The notebook. Three things. Eka, vha, treh.
I stop at three, because the fourth count doesn’t come.
Fenra is the word for four, and the word isn’t there when I reach for it, like a step that isn’t there in the dark on a stair you’ve walked ten thousand times and trusted.
I came back in through the alley at five.
I’d walked to the harbor, stood at the rail, walked back, and the walk didn’t do what walks do.
I came in and locked the front and didn’t look at the back counter where her laptop had been.
June came at four. She took it to the bookstore, and I let her without a word.
She was the last person I spoke to today.
The grandmother voice isn’t here.
I want to write that down somewhere so I’ll know it later.
She isn’t here. She’s been in my head since October, since the door opened on a Tuesday and the word arrived in her voice without my asking for it.
She came back after six years of being quiet, came back interested, came back saying look at her, boy, do not look away.
And I didn’t look away. I did the thing she said, and I looked.
Tonight I reach for her, and there’s the place where she lives, and there’s nothing in the place.
Nothing follows.
I set the carafe on the desk and put the lid where the lid goes. My hand is steady, and I’ll give it that. My hand has been reliable for fifty-three years, with one Wednesday exception involving a latch. It doesn’t shake now. I’m glad of that, somewhere far back where I don’t have to look.
I open the notebook. The book falls open on its own.
I’ve opened it to this page twice in two days.
Last night at her table. The night before that, to sharpen the pencil down to where it would write small.
The page is the filing, six years of it, eighty-one words in pencil, the letters leaning forward like I lean them.
I am writing it here so I can stop carrying it in my chest. If she ever comes, she will come.
I am not going to hold the door open any longer.
I read it once. I don’t read it three times, because I don’t have three reads in me.
I take the pencil out of the apron pocket. The eraser is worn to the metal, and the wood is smooth where my thumb has been.
I find the line under the last line of the filing, where there’s white space. I left white space six years ago because the body knew, even then, that a thing this size doesn’t get a crowded margin. I write one line.
I was wrong to want this.
Five words, in pencil, the same pencil, the letters leaning forward like the others.
From across the desk the new line and the old lines would look like one hand wrote them on one afternoon, and one hand did, six years apart, and that’s a fact about the page, and I’m not going to feel something about it.
I put the pencil down.
I read the new line. I was wrong to want this.
It’s true like the filing was true, and it has the same weight in the chest, the small place behind the breastbone where I put things I don’t intend to take out again.
I decided on a Wednesday in the afternoon, sitting in a chair.
The decision held me for six years. That holding was a life.
Then I let it have a glitch. The glitch had a shape: a binder under her arm, a ring that changed color by the day.
I let her in. What I let in was a strategist from the city, turning my shop into one of her slides while my hand sat under hers on her own table.
I’m not angry at her. I want to be, because anger would be somewhere to stand.
She did the shape of a thing, I tell the empty room, in English, because the other voice isn’t here to tell it to. And I helped her do it. I handed her the carafe.
The room doesn’t answer. Presso isn’t on the back counter. She went to the corner behind the roaster when I came in. She hasn’t come out. I haven’t made her. We’re both in here, not coming out together.
I put my hand flat on the open page, and the burn scar takes the white of the alley light. Last night a smaller hand rested flat on the back of mine. It didn’t move. I didn’t move it. A thought started, and I let it stop there.
I close the notebook. The cover comes down on the line, and the line is inside the book now where the filing has been inside the book for six years, set down, left where it was set.
I’ve done this before, and I know how it’s done.
You write the thing. You close the cover, set the book on the desk, and go to bed.
In the morning the burner cycles on at four.
You roast. You open at five-thirty. The work is there, and the work doesn’t ask how you slept.
I stand up. My weight goes even through both feet, like it goes when the notebook is the thing on the desk. The body braces for the notebook still, because the body hasn’t been told.
I put the carafe back on the shelf inside the doorway, the unlabeled glass, the lid on. It lived on that shelf for fifteen years and it lived on the front counter for six weeks, and now it’s back on the shelf, and that’s also a thing that’s done.
The pencil goes in the apron pocket, the eraser end out, where it goes.
In the corner behind the roaster the cat doesn’t move. I leave the overhead off and take the back stairs in the dark. I know which ones hold. The third and the seventh take my weight without my having to look.
Four in the morning, and the burner cycles on.
I’m in the roaster room before the alarm, because I didn’t need the alarm. I woke in the dark and lay there counting the drip of the gutter outside the sash, the fog is in, and I got up. Lying there counting isn’t rest. It’s the work without the work, and I’d rather have the work.
The green coffee goes in the drum. Sumatran today.
The Sumatran wants the slow finish and I’m in no hurry.
The drum turns. I stand at the chamber, right hand near the door I won’t open past sixty degrees, counting the minutes to first crack.
At minute eight it comes, that small dry rain of it.
I’m alone in here with a sound I’ve heard ten thousand times.
No one’s upstairs. No one’s coming up. The count is the only company in the room, and it’s the same one as last night: three, then the gap.
I learned the four as a boy on a wood stove at the inland place, where it went one two three four, and at four the pot huffed and a hand lifted it off the heat and a voice said now.
The hand and the voice are gone, and the four is gone with them this morning.
I don’t chase it. The drum turns.
I pull the cooling tray and run the beans down.
I bag the day’s batch and set it by the grinder, though there’s no route to bag for, because it isn’t Friday.
I wipe the chamber. The chamber door clicks the small click of the new latch, the one I had the locksmith put in twelve years back, and I listen for the click because the body still listens for it.
Half past five. I turn the sign.
The chalkboard is by the front door where I left it last night, blank, the gray smear of last week’s special wiped to nothing. I pick up the chalk and stand in front of the board, holding it in my hand. I don’t know how long. I’m not counting.
I write FINLEY’S. OPEN. in the tall block letters that are too tall for the board.
That’s all I write. There’s no line under it.
For six weeks her name has sat under mine on the board.
She named a thing I never named, and the town learned to read that second line and order off it.
Today the second line isn’t going up. The board has the shop’s name and the word for the door being unlocked and nothing else.
I set it out front. I brace my right hand on the doorframe and prop the door.
Fog rolls in, flat and cold, smelling of the harbor. That’s the morning.
Inside, the espresso machine is awake before I am. The pressure gauge reads nine bars where I left it. I run the first shot to clean the line. It’s good, like it’s always good. I dump it.
There are two empty hooks by the back now.
Mine has the apron on it. The middle hook is bare.
She didn’t take the apron last night. It’s folded on the shelf where she always folds it, just not on the hook.
I’m not going to be the one to hang it. The third hook, by the door, is bare too, because Bex took her apron yesterday morning.
Two empty hooks and one apron that is mine, and a shop that ran on three of us a week ago and runs on one of us today.
I do the math like I do all the math, once, in the chest, and then I put it down.
The bell rings.