Chapter 8
COLT
The coffee is hot. The diner is running.
Joelle moves through the breakfast rush at full speed, brighter than usual, louder than usual, refilling mugs before they're half empty.
She laughs at something Earl says, and the laugh is right on time and right on pitch and completely wrong, in a way that only somebody who's been listening for two years would catch.
I'm the only one in here who can hear that it's a recording of a laugh and not the thing itself.
I did that. I took the real one out of her and left her running the backup.
I drink my coffee.
In substance, Brenna said what Joelle said.
I'd rather be broke and married to someone who was actually present.
I heard it as a complaint about the budget then. I genuinely did. I went and looked at the accounts. I've spent seven years thinking she didn't make sense.
It makes sense now. It took until 6:15 on a Christmas Eve, in a booth, watching a woman I hurt do a laugh that isn't hers, but I finally hear the sentence the way it was said.
Not give more but be here. They were both telling me the same thing and I answered both of them with my wallet.
I finish the coffee. She refills it without looking at me.
I think about speaking. The whole drive over I rehearsed it, which is a thing I have never done in my life, rehearsed words like a man going into a deposition. I open my mouth.
What comes out is: "Good coffee today."
She doesn't look up. She moves to the next table.
I stare into the mug. The twelve men swing chainsaws for a living and go home with all their fingers because they listen to what I say.
I can negotiate contracts with mean pros …
and the best sentence I could find for the one woman who told me, in plain and specific language, that she needed words, was a remark about the coffee.
And I don't even mean it. The coffee is terrible. But if she serves it to me, I’ll drink it forever.
Marie's at the register, sorting receipts. I leave a bill on the table, too much, but I stopped being able to calibrate a tip the morning I left a five-hundred-dollar one, and I walk to the counter.
"Marie."
She looks up, reads my face. She takes her time about it, she does about everything she does on purpose.
"What does she need for tonight?" I say it low, so Joelle, across the room pouring for the Garcias, won't hear. "Not money. Not tables. Not anything I can buy."
It's the first time in my life I've asked that question out loud, the version of it that rules out every answer I'm any good at. Marie hears it.
She studies me. She has the kind of face that gives you nothing until she decides to, and then gives you exactly one thing and not a word more.
"She's got fifty pounds of potatoes to peel in the back," she says. "And she's behind."
I walk past the counter, through the kitchen doorway, into the back. The fifty-pound bag is on the prep counter next to a cutting board, a peeler, and a colander.
I pick up the peeler. I pick up a potato. I start peeling.
The peeler is small in my hand. It's a tool built for normal-sized fingers, not for a hand that's spent fifteen years gripping saw handles and peaveys, and I hold the potato as I hold most things I don't understand, carefully, and without confidence.
The first one comes off in thick strips with half the potato still attached to the peel.
"You're going to lose a finger peeling toward your thumb."
Joelle's in the doorway, arms crossed. Her face wears an expression I can't read, which is new, for two years I've been able to tell her moods across a full room, and right now I've got nothing. Not angry. Not softened. A gauge I can't see the needle on.
She stands there long enough that I understand this is a decision, and that it could go the other way.
The cold from the back hallway slides past her into the kitchen.
I've got the peeler in my hand and I don't turn around to make my case, because I don't have one.
If she tells me to put it down, I'll put it down.
If she tells me to go, I'll go. I used up the last words I had on "good coffee today.
" All I've got left is whatever this is, standing in her kitchen ruining a potato, asking for nothing, waiting to find out if I'm allowed to stay.
She crosses the kitchen in three steps. Takes the potato out of one of my hands and the peeler out of the other, and puts the potato back.
"Away from you," she says, turning the potato in my grip. She sets my fingers, moves my wrist. "Always away. The blade goes away from your body."
Her fingers are on my wrist. She's close enough that I get the coffee and, under it, the shampoo I've known from seven hundred mornings and one evening, and I do not think about the one evening, because I am holding a knife-adjacent object and a man has to have priorities.
She steps back. I peel the potato. It comes off in thick, uneven strips, still too much flesh left on the skin, and the finished article looks like it survived a minor accident.
"Better," she says, in a voice that means it isn't.
She walks away. I peel the next one. It's marginally less terrible. I set it in the colander and reach for a third.
She comes back later, looks at my work, and says, "The last one's worse."
It is. I don't argue. Being told the last one's worse, flatly, no softening, the exact tone she'd use on anybody standing in her kitchen wrecking her potatoes is better than anything kind she could have said.
Kind would mean she'd decided what I was.
The last one's worse means I'm still just a man peeling badly, and the verdict's still open.
After the rush we peel and chop for a while.
Side by side. Three feet apart. She works the onions, I work the potatoes.
Neither of us mentions last night. Neither of us mentions the tables or the check or the booth or any of it.
We don't need to. It's all in the room, stacked against the walls like the folding chairs, and we just work around it.
She reaches across me for the colander, and the inside of her forearm drags along the outside of mine, a quarter-second, skin to skin, and it goes through me like I grabbed a live lead. Every nerve from my wrist to my shoulder lights up and stays lit.
Neither of us moves.
"Excuse me," she says, in a voice that does not sound like excuse me.
"Sorry," I say, in a voice that does not sound like sorry.
She goes back to chopping. My hands aren't steady after that, and the next potato is the worst one yet, I take a chunk of actual flesh off with the skin and have to trim the wound, and she watches me do it without one word, which is worse than if she'd said something, and also, somehow, the most hopeful thing that's happened to me all day.
We don't talk about it. We peel and chop and the kitchen gets warmer and the colander fills up and outside the windows it goes dark on Christmas Eve.
I leave at six. She's still in the kitchen. I peeled thirty pounds of potatoes. She corrected my grip twice. I came within an inch of putting my hand over her hand reaching for the peeler, and I didn't, because I haven't earned the inch back yet, and I know it.
In the parking lot I sit in my truck. My hands smell like starch. My lower back aches from three hours bent over a counter built for somebody a foot shorter than me.
I have done nothing today. No checks. No tables.
No calls to suppliers. Nothing solved, nothing bought, nothing carried in from the bed of a truck.
I peeled potatoes badly, for hours, in the presence of a woman who threw me out last night and let me back in this morning and corrected my grip and told me the last one was worse.
It isn't enough.
But for the first time in seven years, I think it might at least be the right language.