Chapter 28
Harsk
I do it in the dark like every morning, the board out front in the cold off the harbor. The chalk comes out too tall for the board, like always, and I write the first line I’ve written every morning for two weeks.
TODAY: SECRET CARAFE. NAMED.
Under it, smaller, in the same hand, I write the line I put back on the board the week I started reaching back. I have written it every morning since.
THE QUIET POUR. HONEY AND PAPER.
Then I do the thing I have not done on this board in fifteen years. I drop down a hand’s width and I write the other line. The one for today only. I have been not writing it for six weeks because I did not want to promise the street a thing I was not sure the street would let me keep.
GRAND OPENING DAY. WE ARE OPEN.
The letters are too tall. I leave them too tall.
The carafe is on the front counter. The unlabeled glass one, the one I have brewed into for fifteen years, set at the right end of the wood by the till in its rectangle of clean a shade off from the wood around it.
I brewed the nine ounces. The lid is on and the carafe is full.
It has been back out on that counter since the morning I started over, and I have stopped looking at it longer than I look at the till.
This morning I do not look at it at all, because there is a person standing behind it.
Maggie came in.
She came up the stairs in sock feet, boots in hand, the new routine. She tied her apron by the door. Now she is behind the counter at the till with the drawer open, counting the float into the tray, and her scent is in the room ahead of me before I have even looked up.
I have been watching the same thing for two days.
It is quieter on my side now. The two notes are still there, and they are always going to be there.
But they don’t land on me like in October.
That landing sent my hand to the counter to find the floor.
They land soft now, like a thing the body has stopped bracing for.
My hand stays on the counter without finding the edge. The body knows.
The Light comes through the front window.
The fog has broken on the water and the beam swings up Main and crosses the glass, a long pale sweep, and it lays itself across the wood and across the carafe and across the back of Maggie’s hand on the till drawer.
Then it goes. It comes back nine seconds later, and she does not look up from the float.
“Forty in fives, sixty in ones,” she says, to the drawer. “Two rolls of quarters. I want it on the record that I counted it twice.”
“You counted it twice.”
“That’s the record.”
I get the cups down for the open.
The chain across Main has its arch up in the dark, the green and white going up either side of its door and over, the balloons fat and still in the dead air before dawn.
The banner is unrolled now. I do not read it.
I have not read their banner in six weeks and I am not going to start on the morning it is for.
She comes around the end of the counter with the till tray, slots it in, pushes the drawer shut with her hip, and stands next to me at the machine. I am pulling the morning’s first shot to clean the line, the throwaway shot, twenty-five seconds, crema the color of brown butter, and I dump it.
“Morning, you,” I say, to the machine.
“You say that to a machine,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Every morning.”
“Yes.”
She watches the second shot. She does not say anything about the third line on the board, the one I dropped down a hand’s width to write, the one I have been not writing for six weeks.
She read it on her way in. I know she read it, because she came around the counter with her face doing the thing it does when she has decided not to perform a feeling, the small set at the corner of the mouth, the held thing. She is keeping it. I let her keep it.
“5:30,” I say.
“On it.” She goes to turn the sign.
Korren is at the door at 6.
I pour his cup before the bell stops, drip black, double bloom pour.
He’s taken it that way fifteen years. He comes to the counter and drinks the first half standing and sets a five on the wood, and I do not see it and he does not leave it.
He looks at the carafe on the front counter.
His eyes go to the third line on the board through the front window, backward through the glass, and come back to me.
Then he does a thing he has not done in fifteen years.
There is a stool at the end of the counter, the high one by the window, the one I keep there for no reason except that it came with the building and I have never had a reason to move it.
Korren takes his coffee to the stool. He sits down on it.
He sets the cup on the wood in front of him.
He settles his weight. He looks out at the street, at the harbor light coming up behind the rooftops, and does not get up.
He does not get up when he would get up.
He does not get up. He is going to be on that stool, I understand, watching the door of a café across the street fill with strangers and the door of this one fill with the town, for as long as the thing takes.
The being on the stool is the whole of what Korren came to say.
He has stood at this counter for fifteen years, drunk his coffee in the time it takes to drink it, and gone to the timber.
Today he is going to sit. I do not say anything to him about it.
There is nothing to say to it. I get the next cup down.
Delia comes in.
She comes in with the cold on her coat and the brown bag of the loose chamomile already in her hand, as always, except she does not put the bag on the counter.
She sets it back in her coat pocket. She looks at me at the machine and she says, “Make me one of the carafe things, and make yourself a coffee, because you won’t, you have never once in your life made yourself a coffee on a morning that matters, your grandmother would have boxed your ears. ”
I do not have a thing to say to that, because it is true, and because she has put the grandmother in the room.
The grandmother is there as always, the photo at my left shoulder, the brown sweater of her folded in the drawer upstairs.
The voice does not say anything. The voice is letting Delia do the work this morning.
I make Delia the carafe pour. Then I make myself a coffee.
A small black one, which I never do, and I set it on the back counter.
It will sit there untouched, the way mine always does, except this morning I am going to drink it warm, because Delia is going to stand at the front and watch me until I do.
“There,” Delia says. “Cara.” From Delia that is the whole benediction. She takes her cup to one of the two-tops.
Liana is in early for the iced coffee she takes at noon, which is not noon, because the morning is not noon.
“I rearranged my whole day,” she says, sliding onto the second stool down from Korren.
She nods at Korren and Korren nods at her, and she sets her bag on the counter.
“Two surgeries pushed to Thursday. A spaniel with a thing in its ear that can wait a day to be a thing. I am drinking iced coffee in the morning like a person with no sense of time. I will still be here when the lunch crowd comes. I moved a spaniel for this and I want you to know it.”
“The spaniel’s fine,” I say.
“The spaniel’s fine. The spaniel’s ear is going to be a whole conversation Thursday.” She drinks. She looks across the street through the window at the green and white arch and the banner and the man with the clipboard who has come out to stand under it. “Is that him.”
“That’s him.”
“He has a clipboard.”
“He does.”
“At his own party,” Liana says, “he has a clipboard.” She leaves it there, and that is Liana’s whole opinion of the chain, delivered and filed.
The morning runs. The bell rings true each time the door moves, and once when the door does not move and no one is there, and Presso, who is on the front windowsill this morning in the sun and not on the back counter, flicks her half ear at the empty doorway and goes back to the sun.
Maggie works the floor. I work the counter.
It is the rhythm that clicked into place in October, her at the tables and the till, me at the machine.
Except this morning the tables do not empty between fills.
This morning the tables stay full and a line stands at the counter, and the line is the town.
Olmar comes in.
He fills the doorway, six foot eight of him in the canvas coat, and he comes to the counter and I have the dark one down before he asks, no sugar. He drinks half of it standing, like Korren. Then he reaches into his coat pocket.
He takes out the rest of the keys.
The ring. The alley key, the till key, the key to the roaster cage I have never once locked.
He gave the key back Saturday, worn pale where my thumb’s gone for fifteen years.
He kept the rest. He has had them since Saturday afternoon when I put them in his hand and walked six blocks west. He locked up that night, fed the cat, barred the back door that sticks.
He has carried the rest of the ring to my whole life in his coat pocket for three days.
Now he sets them on the wood by the till, beside the carafe, in the rectangle of clean.
He does not make a thing of it. He slides them across the half inch of wood it takes to put them in front of me and he takes his hand back to his cup and he drinks the second half of the coffee, and that is the whole of the handoff. The keys back on the counter where they go.
“Front of your house is yours,” he says. “Bar still sticks.”
“I know it sticks.”
“Lift and push.”
“I know.”