Chapter 7 #2
"I let exactly one person into this in two years," Dave said, and here, for one sentence, the level thing thinned, and something underneath showed through, and he hated it, hated that Albert got to see it.
"One. I built the whole place so I'd never have to, and then you came in with your six croissants for other people and your — and I let you.
Against every single thing I know. And you were on the drawings the whole time.
" He laughed once, no humor in it anywhere, a sound Mabel would tell him weeks later she'd never quite forgotten.
"I put my hand over yours on that bench and told you slow was the trick.
I made you a coffee this morning and told you not to get used to it.
Get used to it." He set the cloth down, squared it to the edge of the bench out of two years of habit, and looked at Albert, and made his face do nothing, which was the hardest thing his face had done in a long while.
"So that's my answer to how this goes. It doesn't. You should go.
You'll want to be sharp for your meeting. "
***
Albert took off the sweatshirt.
That was the thing Dave hadn't planned for, the small domestic horror of it — Albert reaching down and pulling Dave's gray sweatshirt over his head, the one he'd come down the stairs in an hour ago warm and rumpled and happy, and folding it, carefully, the way Albert did everything, and setting it on the counter next to the flyer with his own name on it.
Standing there in his thin office shirt from yesterday, undressed back down into a stranger.
"I'm not going to build it," Albert said.
Quiet now too, wrecked, but steady, and there was something in it Dave would have listened to on any other morning, some new spine in the set of him.
"Whatever happens with us — and I hear you, I hear what you're saying, you don't have to believe a word out of my mouth right now.
But I'm not going to build the thing that erases this.
I decided that before I walked in here. I just wanted you to know it from me. "
On another morning Dave would have heard it.
That was the hell of it — the part he'd turn over at three a.m. for weeks: there was a new steadiness in the way Albert said it, the sound of a man who'd finally found something he wanted badly enough to fight for.
It was the exact steadiness Dave had spent four months coaxing up out of him — what do you want, ask me for the thing you actually want — and here it was at last, aimed true, and Dave was already too far inside the closing to reach back for it.
He'd priced the man at zero. You didn't reopen a position after you'd walked.
It was the first rule Dave ever learned, and the only one that had never once, in forty-five years, actually served him.
"Okay," Dave said, because it cost nothing, because he didn't believe him, because believing him was the thing that had gotten him here.
"Okay," Albert echoed, and waited one more second — one more of his not-quite-leaving seconds, the ones Dave used to wait out at 6:15 like a small gift — and then he went.
The bell over the door did its bright ordinary sound.
Through the fogged glass Dave watched him stop on the sidewalk where he always stopped, the dark shape of him standing a beat too long in the fog, and Dave did not go to the door, and did not knock on the glass, and did not do any of the things a different man might have done.
He wanted to. That was the thing he'd carry — not that he didn't feel it, but that he felt all of it, the whole animal pull to cross the floor and throw the bolt and drag the man back in out of the cold and say the true thing.
He stood there and let the wanting go past him like a train he'd decided, a long time ago, not to be on.
He reached over and turned off the front lights.
The shop dropped into the gray. On the other side of the glass the shape that was Albert stood another moment in the dark and the fog, and then moved, and blurred, and was gone toward the train, and the corner was just the corner again, empty, the way Dave had spent two careful years making sure it would always be.
***
Mabel didn't say anything for a long time.
She unfroze from the register and moved around the shop doing small unnecessary things, giving him the room, and Dave went back to the bench and picked up the dough that had been proofing through all of it, indifferent, still rising, still on its slow schedule that no human misery could rush or stop, and he shaped it because it was six-fifteen and the shop opened at six-fifteen and forty loaves don't care.
"You know that boy's telling the truth," Mabel said finally. Not unkind. Just flat, the way she said the things she meant. "About not building it. You know that."
"I don't know anything about that boy," Dave said. "That was the whole point of him."
"You've been alone in this shop two years," Mabel said, not moving toward the door, "and I watched you like it — or tell yourself you liked it — and then for four days I watched you be a different man.
Lighter. You hummed. You don't even know you hum.
And now you want to tell me the boy who did that to you is a con artist because a corporation put his name on a flyer.
" She folded her arms. "I buried a husband, David.
I know the difference between a man who lied to me and a man who was scared to tell me something.
So do you. You're just choosing not to, because the second one you'd have to forgive. "
"Open the door, Mabel."
"I'm opening the door." But she held his eye one beat longer. "You're allowed to be angry. God knows — six weeks is six weeks, and he should've told you the first morning. So be angry. But don't you dare use it to climb back down into that hole and call it dignity."
Dave didn't answer that. He shaped a loaf.
He shaped the next one. Mabel let it be, because she'd said her piece and Mabel never said a thing twice, and she turned the card in the window to the side that said nothing and unlocked the door, and the two of them worked the morning in a silence with a different weather in it than their usual — and every time the bell went, Dave's head came up before he could stop it, and every time it wasn't Albert, and every time some part of him he'd have sworn under oath he shut off two years ago dropped another inch into the cold.
The nurse came in off her night shift, silent as ever, and pointed at the country loaf and paid in exact change and nodded once, and for the first time in two years Dave was grateful for a customer who wanted nothing from him but bread and a nod.
He could do bread and a nod. He did bread and a nod all morning, on autopilot, while the fog burned off and the ordinary Tuesday assembled itself around the hole where the last four days had been.
There was still a rye on the back rack — from two nights ago, the night Albert learned to shape, dark and unsellable and set aside out of a habit that had lasted exactly one turn of the calendar.
Dave took it down at noon. He did not save the heel for anyone.
Upstairs, on the windowsill, in the one good spot that got the morning light, a drawing of his own hands sat where he'd put it, and Dave already knew he wasn't going to be able to make himself throw it away, and hated that too.