Chapter 26 #2
I do not know what the hand was. I know it was not nothing.
Veshar has a big house and not much company in it, and a man can go a long time without being touched and not say so.
He put his hand on me like you set your hand on the one warm thing in a cold room, to know it is still warm.
I let it stay. I would want it to stay, if I were the one with the hand. That is the whole of what I know.
Delia’s is third. She is closing the cooler when I come in, and she has the tea things out, the loose chamomile in the brown bag.
She takes the roast and gives me the bag and says, “He won’t drink it, the coffee, you’d think a man who sells it,” about no one, about everyone, about coffee.
The bronze dahlias in the window are gone full bronze now, the last of the green out of the stems. I say, “Good week, Delia,” and she says, “Cara,” which from Delia is a benediction, and I go.
Then up Pine.
The Bell House sits on Pine two blocks up from Main, cream and green with the wraparound porch, the brass starfish on the green door.
I do not stop. The Bell House is the last stop tonight on the proper route.
This is the afternoon pass, the daylight one, and I take Pine because Pine takes me back toward Main the long way and the long way goes past the Bell House and the Bell House is worth the long way.
Olmar is at the kitchen window. I can see him through the glass at the sink, the garlic and the lemon and the rosemary going in a bowl, the marinade he does on a Saturday, and he lifts his chin without looking up from the bowl, like a man does who has been waiting for the truck to pass and has seen it in the corner of his eye. I nod back. The first nod.
Hattie is on the porch swing.
She is at the south end of it where she sits, the paperback open on one knee, bare feet up on the cushion, the canvas jacket across her knees and the brown sweater she has worn since May.
She lifts her hand off the page and nods at me from the swing, and I nod back.
The second nod. The new one, the one that is four months old now, the one that turned the single nod into a pair the spring Hattie came to sit on Olmar’s porch and stay.
I drive back down to Main with the box of crullers and the four-pack and the chamomile on the seat and one bag of roast left.
It is the Bell House’s, except Olmar took the Bell House’s at the counter this morning, so the bag on the seat is the spare, the extra five pounds I roast on a heavy week.
I look at it at the light on Main, and I do not have a delivery left to make.
I take it to the café.
I park in the alley. I carry the spare bag in through the back, and Olmar is there.
He’s walked down from the Bell House on foot. That’s how he comes when a thing needs his face for it. He stands at the back counter, one hand flat on the wood. He looks at the bag. Then at me.
“Now,” he says.
I hand him the bean sack.
He takes it and sets it on the shelf where it goes. That is not the thing. The bean sack is never the thing. It is what his hands do while the rest of him waits for mine to do the thing he came down the hill to watch me do.
The keys are on the ring on the nail by the back door.
The key to the front door, the alley key, the till key, the key to the roaster cage that I have never once locked.
I have carried them in my apron pocket every day for fifteen years.
I hang them on the nail every night and take them down every morning before the roast, and I have not handed them to another living person in all that time, because there has not been another living person to hand them to.
The close is mine. Locking up belongs to me.
So does that last walk through the dark front of the house, machine off, gas off, back door barred.
It’s the last thing I do every day. The shape of a kind of peace. I have not given it to anyone.
I take the front-door key off the ring. The till key and the roaster-cage key stay with me, in the apron pocket where they have lived for fifteen years.
I hold the front-door key a second. The metal is cold and there is the small worn place on it where my thumb has gone for fifteen years, the brass rubbed pale, and I look at it like I have never looked at it, which is at all.
I put it in Olmar’s hand.
“Lock up at five,” I say. “Machine off at the switch behind the boiler. The gas valve is the red one. Bar the back door, the bar sticks, you lift and then push. The cat eats. The bag is under the desk.”
Olmar closes his hand around the key.
He does not ask where I am going. He does not ask if I am coming back tonight. He has carried the thing I am about to do for three weeks, longer, six years, and he is not going to spend the moment on questions when the answer is walking out his friend’s back door.
“I have got the front of your house,” he says. “Go.”
I take off the apron.
I hang it on the hook. The pencil stub is in the pocket.
I do not take it out. The till key and the roaster-cage key go in the pocket too, with the pencil.
I hang the apron on its hook like every night, only this time it isn’t night.
It is the middle of the afternoon, the close hours off, and I am not going to be the one to make it.
Presso is at the end of the front counter by the carafe.
She watches me come through. Her tail goes flat, and the bell over the door rings once with no hand on it, same as every leak all autumn.
Olmar’s head comes up at the sound. He looks at the bell, then the cat, then me.
He doesn’t say a word. Olmar has lived among us long enough to know a bell that rings itself is not a thing you remark on.
It is a thing the room does when the room knows before the man does.
I go out the front.
The street is doing its Saturday afternoon.
The light is long on Main in November, slanting up the street from the harbor end, gold on the brick and gold on the chain’s green and white arch and gold on the plate glass that will be full of strangers in three days.
I turn my back on the chain. I go west, down Main toward the harbor end, and then off Main where the bookstore sits.
Six blocks.
I have walked these six blocks at two in the morning with my hands in my apron pocket after a night I do not narrate to myself.
I have walked them in my head more than I have walked them on the ground.
June’s bookstore sits on the corner with the chalkboard out front, WHALES MENTIONED INSIDE in June’s hand.
Above the shop is the apartment with the window that does not close all the way at the top.
I have never seen it from the inside. She sleeps under it, six blocks west of where I lock up at five.
The hardware store goes by. The corner where the fish guy parks, gone by now.
The bank with the clock that’s been four minutes slow since I bought the building.
Then the two quiet blocks, and then the one where Main bends toward the water and the light comes flat off the harbor into my eyes. Six blocks and I am there.
The bookstore is closed, the lights off, June gone home or in the back. The side entrance is around on the alley side, the brass mailbox by the door, the stairs going up the outside of the building to the apartment. I have seen the stairs. I have never been on the stairs.
I go up.
The stairs creak on the third step and the seventh.
I don’t know they will until they do. Third step, then seventh.
I’m a large man going up a small set of outside stairs in late light, and my heart is doing a thing it hasn’t done since the door opened in October.
I get to the top, and there is the door.
I put my right hand flat against the frame.
I have braced my right hand on a doorframe every day for fifteen years, the front door of the café, the heavy old one with its own thumb latch.
Twelve years ago a latch took the back of my other hand off a roaster door, and the body learned to keep a palm on the frame.
It does it without me. Now, again, without asking.
My right hand goes flat on the frame of her door, like it goes flat on the frame of mine, and the bracing settles me like it always does. I knock.
Two knocks. The size of knock a hand like mine has to think about so it does not sound like the door coming down.
I count.
Eka. The stairs behind me, the long light, the harbor.
Vha. A sound inside, a chair, feet.
Treh. The latch.
The door opens.
She is standing in it small the way she is small, five foot three of her against the six foot ten of me filling the top of the stairs, her head at the height of my chest. Her hair is down and loose, not pulled back.
A sweater I have not seen. Sock feet on the floorboards.
The scent comes before the sight finishes landing, warm paper and beach grass, the one note from elsewhere a shade fainter today, the one from here closer to the front.
It is the thing my nose made in October, the thing I spent six weeks filing, and the filing never did quiet it.
The fourth count is there. Close. I do not say it.
I say the other thing.
“Maggie,” I say.
She looks up at me.
She does not say anything for a second, and I do not fill the second. The second after a true thing is hers, and I have learned not to crowd it.
Behind her the apartment is small and lit gold from the one west window.
The kitchen is right there off the door, like kitchens are in these apartments.
The table sits under the harbor window, and the cold comes in along the top of the sash even now, even in the gold of the afternoon.
The laptop is open on the table. The deck.
The slide is bright on the screen, a title across it I am too far and too unready to read, and I do not read it.
I read the room around it. That is what I do.
There is a coffee mug on the counter by the sink.
Not one of hers. One of the cracked ones from June’s spare set, the kind you get given when you move into an apartment over a friend’s bookstore with a duffel and not much else, a mug the wrong shape for the hand, still out from the morning, a half inch of something gone cold in the bottom of it.
Folgers, I bet. The wrong coffee in the wrong mug.
I have a thing to say about the coffee. I do not say it.
On the counter beside the mug there is a slip of paper. Even from the door I know the look of a bus ticket, the perforated edge, the cheap printer ink. Face up on the counter. Not pocketed, not tossed, not in use, set out like a thing someone meant to keep looking at.
I take all of it in like I take a room in, the smell first and the sound second and the sight last. The sight is this.
A deck open on the table, a bus ticket on the counter, the wrong mug from a borrowed set.
The whole of a week she has held without me, laid out on the surfaces of a small gold room.
And her in the door in front of it, in her socks, her hair down, looking up.
My right hand stays on the frame.
The light comes flat off the harbor up the six blocks and lands on the side of her face.
She steps back from the door. One step. Her hand comes off the latch and opens at her side. The doorway is wider than it was.