Chapter 30 #2
Hattie has a dish in front of her, a casserole gone gold and dark at the edges, the sweet potato thing she has been getting wrong for four years and has, her face says, got right at last. She sets it on the wood beside my pot, deliberate, the two dishes side by side, and she looks at me.
“Yours,” she says, of the pot.
“Got it right this year,” I say, of the casserole.
That is the friendship sealed, the one I have been six full sentences into across four months of Fridays.
Olmar across the table does the thing with his chin he does, the nod that is half the marriage of a twenty-three-year friendship, and I give it back, and that is the whole of what passes between us.
It is enough. It has always been enough.
Liana is at a small table with someone whose hand she has not let go of since I came in, and she lifts her glass an inch at me and goes back to the someone.
Cal Briskett is in the corner with the thermos against his chest, and when Auntie Voshen passes him she does not offer to fill it and he does not ask, and that is the whole of Cal at a table on a holiday.
Veshar is at a side table.
He has to fold himself to sit at it, taller than me by the inch, and there is a kid next to him, a half-orc boy of maybe four, who has climbed up onto a chair that is too low for the table and cannot get his chin over the edge of it.
The kid is starting to do the thing a four-year-old does when the table is winning.
Veshar does not make a thing of it. He gets a hand on the back of an empty chair from the next table, the tall one.
He pulls it across the floor without a word and lifts the boy onto it.
The boy’s chin clears the wood. Veshar goes back to his plate.
The boy looks at the chair under him like the chair is a thing that happened to him.
Veshar does not look at the boy again. I file it away just like I filed away the hand on my shoulder at the brewery.
There is more roof than company in the man, and he keeps finding the small one in the room without looking like he is looking.
I let it be a thing I will have the shape of later.
Auntie Voshen sits me down at the long table near the pot and she sits Maggie next to me, and Presso, who has come up the hill at some point in the day by means I did not authorize and will not investigate, jumps into Maggie’s lap and turns once and settles, the half ear flat, and Maggie’s hand goes to the cat without her looking at it.
Auntie ladles the ren-voshen down the table herself, and when she reaches me she fills my bowl and does not move on. She stands with the ladle in her hand and looks at me, and the room is loud enough around us that this is a thing between the two of us at the head of the table.
“The pitch,” she says. “When.”
“Sunday.”
“And it is what. The whole town in a room with a screen.”
“Demo day,” I say. “Yes.”
She ladles a measure into Maggie’s bowl.
She is not done. “And she stands up in front of the ones with the money,” she says, “and tells them about Finley’s.
” She looks at Maggie, and then back at me, and the next thing is the thing she has walked all the way around the table to ask.
“And you will not perform for them. The two of you will not put a face on it for the people with the money.”
“No,” I say.
She holds the look a beat. Two scoops, the grandmother says, somewhere under it. Not three. The right amount is the right amount. I have spent twenty-one years thinking that voice meant do not want too much. I am not sure anymore that it did.
“Good,” I say.
The word comes out of me the way alright came out of me in October when she said she would stay through the grand opening.
The same shape of word, almost. But it is not alright this time.
Alright is a thing I let be. This one I have looked at and judged.
She is not going to perform for the people with the money.
She is going to stand up and be the one who walked in on a Tuesday with a binder and no plan and stayed. Good.
Auntie Voshen hears the difference. She has been listening to me say yes and no and alright across a table since I was fifteen, and she knows the small country between the words better than I do.
She does not smile. Auntie Voshen does not waste a smile where a look will do.
She sets the ladle down and lays her hand flat on my head for one breath, the same touch she gave Maggie.
Then she takes it back and goes on down the table with the pot.
When the bowls are down and the room has its mouth full, Auntie comes back from the kitchen with the other tray.
It is the ren-keva. The spiced honey bread, the warding bake, the small dark loaves she makes for the children at Vrennthala and hands to every kid that passes in a fox mask or a heron mask in the lantern walk, the bread that goes to the kids first, always, the bread Maggie and I prepped at the teahouse and at the back of Finley’s a month ago with the flour going everywhere.
She has made it again, extra, for today, because the tradition does not end at Vrennthala.
You bake the warding bread once for the children in the dark of October and you bake it again at the table in November, and you hand the warding forward into the year, to the table, to the ones at the table, the gift passed hand to hand so the year has something good in front of it.
She carries the tray down the long table and the kids get theirs first, like always, small hands reaching over the edge. Then she comes to where Maggie sits with the cat in her lap and the silver ring on the wrong day, and she puts a piece of the ren-keva in Maggie’s hand.
Maggie takes it. She had one of these from my hand on a bonfire night in October, the first of the night, before any child reached me, and she understood that night what it meant for me to put it in her hand first. She has it again now, from Auntie Voshen’s hand, the warding handed forward, and she knows this one too.
She does not perform a face for it. She holds the bread and she looks at it and she looks at Auntie, and the corner of her mouth does the thing it does that is not a smile but is the precursor to one, the held thing, and she says, “Thank you,” small, and Auntie Voshen says, “Hm,” and moves on down the table.
That is the whole of it, the bread handed by a hand she knows, the year given something good to sit in front of.
The table is loud and full and the bowls go around and the lamb goes down to the bone.
Maggie eats with the cat in her lap, her shoulder against mine, the same lean she gives me at the machine.
The chipped silver ring catches the light when she reaches for the bread, the worn band she wears on Tuesdays for the deliveries, on her middle finger on a Thursday, on purpose, for a reason she has not told me, and I have stopped needing the reason.
The clay pot is in the center of the wood between Hattie’s casserole and Auntie’s bread, empty now to the broth at the bottom, the cinnamon of it still in the room.
The fog breaks on the harbor side near the end of it.
It happens all at once, like the marine layer that lifts off the water whenever it decides to.
The Light comes around from the point. It finds the front window of the teahouse and lays itself across the glass, across the samovar, across the floor where the kids are.
A long pale sweep. Then it goes, and nine seconds later it comes back.
The same beam I have counted against off my own front window for fifteen years.
Up the hill now, in a room I have not eaten a Thanksgiving in for longer than that.
The back window turns flat gold, November dusk falling early over the oven, brass tray, and herbs Auntie hangs to dry.
Through the front the Light comes again, and the room holds both, the gold at the back and the pale sweep at the front, and Maggie’s hand is on the cat and her ring is on the wrong day and the bread is in her other hand.
I count the beam, eka, and the gold holds at the back, and I do not finish the count.