Chapter 29 #2
The body settles. His weight comes down by degrees, careful of the rib.
Then he’s on his side with me against him.
The kettle’s cold on the counter downstairs, the coffee cold on the dresser, both cups.
I was right. There will be more coffee. There’s always more coffee. The coffee was never the scarce thing.
“The coffee’s cold,” he says, after a while.
“I told you it would be.”
“You did.”
“I want it on the record that I was right about the coffee.”
“You were right about the coffee.”
I prop up on his chest. The foghorn goes, off across the water, every six. His hand is on the bad side, weightless. The earring is at my ear, and its match is on the dresser by two cold cups.
“I’m making the pie today,” I say. “After we close. It’s my grandmother’s. Apple and cinnamon and a butter crust, not the ricotta, the ricotta is a different thing I haven’t earned back yet, but the pie I can do. The pie I’ve always been able to do.”
“Auntie Voshen will eat it.”
“She had better.”
“She will. She eats the thing in front of her, and tells you what’s wrong with it, and then she eats the rest of it. That’s how you know.”
I laugh into his chest. The slate of it moves under my cheek.
The deck is downstairs at my apartment six blocks west, closed on the kitchen table, the new thesis in it, the one that’s not Finley’s as a brand and is Finley’s as a town’s answer, and the demo pitch is this Sunday, four days from this cold-coffee Wednesday.
He hasn’t looked at the new draft since the first page he read at the bean check, the title and the first sentence, and then put down because the rest of it was mine.
“Show me the demo,” I say. “Before Sunday. I want you to see it before the room does. Most of it is you. I’d like you to see what I made out of you before strangers do.”
His jaw works once before he speaks. I’ve known to wait through the working of the jaw since the night at the two-top with the carafe between us, and I wait.
“After Thanksgiving,” he says.
“Deal. The table first, then the strangers.”
“Alright.”
The word lands like it lands now. It’s the word he gave me my first week, at the close of a slow day, when I said I’ll stay through grand opening and he said alright and that was the whole of it, and I went home to a motel and moved out of it the same week.
That alright was a man letting a thing be true.
Same word. It has grown like the building has grown around us.
This morning it doesn’t mean I will let you.
It means yes. It’s nine weeks older than it was on that slow afternoon, and it’s the same four letters.
He turns the mug a quarter inch on the dresser.
I have it in the bone where I keep everything else.
The coffee is cold. I don’t care. The pie is happening today.
We close at one.
The board out front says it, the thing he wrote in the dark before open, CLOSED THURSDAY EVENING FOR THANKSGIVING.
OPEN FRIDAY 5:30, and the last of the Wednesday people go out into the flat gold coming up Main off the harbor, and I turn the sign, and Harsk does the back, the bar that sticks, lift and push.
Then I go six blocks west to my own kitchen to make the pie, because the pie needs an oven I’m not sharing with a clay pot tonight, and the clay pot is his tonight, the ren-voshen, the lamb and the cinnamon and the clove going in his oven across the evening for six hours like it goes. The pie is mine.
The apartment is cold like it’s always cold, the window that doesn’t close along the top, the foghorn closer here, and I put the oven on and I get out Nonna’s pot, the wide blue enamel one with the chip on the lip, which is not for the pie.
The pie doesn’t need the pot. I get it out anyway and set it on the counter where I can see it, because she’s in the room when I make this, and I like her in the room.
I peel the apples. I do the crust like she did the crust, the butter cold, the hands cold, cold hands, piccola, warm hands kill it, and my hands are cold because the window doesn’t close, so for once the kitchen is doing me a favor.
June comes by at three.
She knocks like she knocks, two and then nothing. She lets herself in; I’ve stopped locking it against her. A paperback under her arm. Flour is the first thing she smells. The pot on the counter is the second thing she sees.
“That’s not for pie,” she says.
“It’s for company.”
She sits at the table where the deck is, the laptop closed, and she doesn’t open it and she doesn’t ask me to. “Are you doing it tomorrow.”
She doesn’t say which it. She doesn’t have to. Thanksgiving at Voshen’s, the door, the clay pot, the words you say at the door of an orc’s home when you bring the meal, the words he said to me at my own table with a blank page between us and didn’t wait for me to say back.
“Yes,” I say.
“Good,” June says, and opens her paperback, and reads at my table while I crimp the edge of a crust with two cold thumbs, and that’s the whole of it, which is the thing about June, that the whole of it is allowed to be the whole of it.
The pie goes in. The kitchen fills with apple and cinnamon and butter. The smell of a back stoop in Citrus Heights, a cat-shaped clock over the sink. I stand at the counter and let it be that smell. June turns a page. The foghorn goes outside the window that doesn’t close.
I walk the pie down to Finley’s in the evening, both hands, careful with a thing I won’t drop.
He’s in the back room closing it down, the clay pot already in his oven upstairs for the long night of it, the cinnamon and clove of the ren-voshen ahead of me on the back stairs before I’m even up them, and we take the pie up to the apartment and we eat dinner standing in his kitchen because neither of us is going to set a table on a Wednesday, leftovers and bread and a thing he heats in a pan.
The deck is closed on the table and the demo is this Sunday and Thanksgiving is twelve hours out and the clay pot is six hours into the dark of the oven.
I empty my pockets at his kitchen counter.
There’s nothing in them, no binder clip, no cinnamon receipt.
The half pencil is on the dresser in the other room with the earring.
The earring’s match is at my ear. The bus ticket I carried since the night I didn’t board it is in the trash at my own apartment six blocks west, where I put it this afternoon between the crust and the apples.
My hand goes to the pocket and comes out with nothing.
I look at the nothing in my open hand. I leave it.
The clay pot is in the oven. The pie is on the counter. The foghorn goes, off across the water, at its own count.