The Coffee Salute

Dess

She had not slept.

This was, Dess reflected at ten to seven on Tuesday morning, standing at her kitchen sink in her socks and her oldest robe with a glass of water she had no intention of drinking, an unfair thing to do to a person in her condition. It was one thing to be kept awake by a baby the size of a lime. It was another to be kept awake by a grown man with a lease.

You gave him a deadline, said the dry voice in her head. You held up a sign. You wrote RULE 1 in capitals. What exactly did you think was going to happen?

I thought he'd be embarrassed.

You thought he'd write a letter of apology on cream-colored stationery and slide it under your door.

That would have been fine.

That would have been very fine. It would have been a thing you could put in a file.

She set down the water. Outside the window the street was coming up blue and pink out of the dark, the way it did in December, the sky going from slate to pearl in a thin, sullen sweep. A garbage truck was working its way down Ives with the patient fury of a large animal being forced to eat a salad. The maple at the corner stood bare against the light. The parked cars wore a skin of frost.

And across the gap, in the long window of number 14, a lamp was on.

She had been very careful not to look. She had come into the kitchen with her eyes lowered, like a woman entering a church where an ex-husband was seated. She had run the tap. She had counted to ten. She had put the kettle on and taken it off again, and she had stood with her back to the window and her shoulders up around her ears and told herself in firm, level tones: You are an adult woman. You are not going to look.

She looked.

He was standing at the glass.

He stood very straight, in the lamplight, in a gray sweater, with his hair a little rumpled and his face pale and sharp and hollow-cheeked with the particular shadowed look of a man who has not been to bed. In one hand he held a mug. It was a large, ugly, lumpy mug, glazed in swirls of brown and green, which even at thirty feet she could see had something written on it. He did not wave. He did not smile. He held the mug out in front of him at the level of his chest, quite formally, the way a man might hold a glass at a regimental dinner, and with a slight, grave, unmistakable inclination of the head, he lifted it an inch.

Good morning, said the mug.

It was a salute.

Dess stood motionless with her hand on the faucet.

On the sill beside him, propped against the glass, was a sheet of paper. It was lined yellow legal paper, torn from a pad, and on it, in the neat upright hand she'd come to know from the card, was a message in black ink, clear enough to read across the street:

EXPLANATION: I AM A TENANT.

—T.

And below that, in smaller letters, as an afterthought:

(I HAVE A LEASE. I HAVE NOT BROKEN ANY RULE. I WOULD LIKE TO DISCUSS.)

"Oh my God," said Dess aloud. "He wrote it in parentheses."

She picked up her phone and photographed him through the glass. She did it without thinking. Then she looked at the photograph, and at the mug, and at the formal tilt of his head, and burst out laughing so suddenly that she had to grab the counter.

It's not funny, she told herself. It's a threat. It's a man who has bought a flat in order to watch you. It's the beginning of a Lifetime movie.

But the mug said WORLD'S OKAYEST UNCLE.

She could read it now, in the brightening light. White letters on brown glaze, wobbling, childish, irretrievably sincere. It was the single least likely object she could have imagined in the hand of Theron Wexcombe; and the fact of it, the sheer unreasoning domestic wrongness of it, the sense of a man in an expensive sweater clutching a camp-craft mug as if it were a sword, undid something in her chest that thirty minutes of righteous indignation had been carefully holding together.

"Fine," said Dess, to the empty kitchen. "Fine. Fine. You want to discuss? We'll discuss."

She put on her boots.

…

The front door of number 14 was opened, before she could knock, by a very small old woman in a flowered housecoat and fuzzy blue slippers, with a face like a walnut, a pair of enormous round glasses, and a plate of what appeared to be custard tarts.

"Ah!" said the old woman. "Ela chegou."

"I'm sorry?"

"You are the girl."

"I—what girl?"

"The girl from across." She stood back, with a sweep of the plate, and ushered Dess into a hallway that smelled powerfully of floor wax and cabbage. "I am Mrs. Ferreira. Come. Come in. It is cold. He is upstairs. He has been awake since two. I heard him walking. Back and forth, back and forth, like a bear." She leaned in confidentially, and Dess caught a whiff of cinnamon and Vicks. "He is very sorry."

"He's what?"

"Very, very sorry. I can tell. I know sorry men. I was married to one." She pressed the plate into Dess's hands. "Eat. You are too thin. You are also, I think, in a family way, which is why you are too thin and also not."

"Mrs. Ferreira—"

"Say nothing. I am a woman of discretion." She laid a finger against her lips. "Go up. Third floor. I will not listen. If I hear shouting, I will turn up the television."

She withdrew into an apartment from which a blare of game-show applause was already rising. The door shut. Dess stood in the hall in her boots and her winter coat, with a custard tart in each hand and a sense of having been carried off by a rather benevolent flood.

She ate one tart on the stairs. It was, regrettably, extraordinary.

…

He was waiting at the door of the third-floor flat, which was open six inches.

He had not come out. He had not moved to meet her. When she reached the landing and stood there, panting slightly, with custard on her chin, he was visible only as a tall dark strip behind the gap: a shoulder, a sleeve, one gray eye, and the corner of the ugly mug.

"Ms. Rourke," said Theron.

"Don't."

"I'm sorry?"

"Don't 'Ms. Rourke' me. Don't use the voice." She wiped her chin with the back of her glove. "You've been up all night. You've written a note with parentheses. You've got a mug that says 'Okayest Uncle,' and you're hiding behind a door like a Victorian orphan. I'd like to speak to a person, please. Not a dossier."

There was a pause.

The door opened wide.

She'd expected, vaguely, a bachelor's lair: a leather sofa, a wall of screens, an espresso machine the size of a motorcycle. What she got was an apartment exactly like her own, its mirror, slightly bleaker. A front room with a bare pine floor and a card table and a single chair still wrapped in plastic. A kettle on the counter. A lamp on the floor. A mattress on a metal frame visible through the open door of the middle room, neatly made, with a gray blanket pulled square. A paper map of Narragansett Bay taped to the wall with blue painter's tape. A pair of dress shoes, polished, standing side by side beneath the radiator, like two soldiers on guard.

It was the loneliest room she had ever seen.

"Sit," she said.

"I—"

"There's a chair. It's wrapped, but it's a chair. Sit in it."

"Ms. Rourke, I couldn't possibly sit in a room in which I haven't been—"

"Mr. Wexcombe." She took off her gloves, finger by finger, with a terrible patience. "This is your apartment. You pay the rent. If you require me to invite you to sit in your own chair, in your own kitchen, I will do it. But I would like it noted that this is the single most ridiculous thing that has ever happened to me, including the time I was locked in a freezer at the Dunkin' Donuts on Dyer Street for forty minutes."

"Were you really?"

"That's irrelevant. Sit."

He sat.

He did it with the stiff, precise dignity of a man lowering himself into an electric chair, on the edge of the wrapped plastic seat, with his hands on his knees. The chair crackled. He glanced down at it with faint alarm. She watched his jaw tighten, and understood, with a small, treacherous lurch, that he was trying not to laugh.

"There," she said.

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. Explain."

…

"I would like it understood," said Theron, "that I have followed your rules."

"Have you."

"To the letter."

"Then you won't mind going through them."

"Rule one." He ticked it on his fingers. "I do not come to your building. This is not your building. I have not entered number thirteen. I have not stood on its steps. I have not parked outside it. I have not sent a driver, a car, a card, a courier, or a basket. Rule two: no money. I have offered you none. I have had none delivered. If a single dollar of mine has entered your account, you may report me to the proper authorities. Rule three: I have not contacted your mother, your friends, or your employer. I have not asked anyone about you. Rule four—" He hesitated.

"Rule four."

"I am not permitted to be sad at you."

"Correct."

"I am not being sad at you. I'm being—" He searched for a word. "Adjacent."

"Adjacent."

"I am doing my sadness thirty feet away, in private, in a room you can only see if you look."

"Which I did."

"Yes. Through no fault of mine." He lowered his hand. "And Rule five: I tell you the truth when you ask me a direct question. So, Ms. Rourke. Ask me."

She stared at him.

It was, she realized, a trap. A very mild, very gentle, very honest trap, laid by a man with the coldest hands in Rhode Island and the mildest manners, and she walked into it like a lamb.

"Why are you here?" said Dess.

"Because I do not know how else to be near my brother's child without breaking any rule you've set."

"That's not an answer. That's a shape."

"Yes. Allow me to try again." He drew a long breath. "I am here because I made a mistake at Ansel's office, and you saw it, and I let you carry the cost of it. I should have stopped that memorandum. I didn't. I stood in a room and watched a man hand you a leash, and I did nothing because I was afraid of my mother and more afraid of losing you. I would like not to be a man who does that again."

"That's still not why you're here."

"It's the beginning of why."

"What's the end?"

"The end," said Theron, "is that you are alone. You've chosen it. It's an admirable choice, and I respect it more than anything I have ever seen. But you are thirty, and you are pregnant, and in six months you will be a mother with an infant and a job and a mortgage on a car. And the nearest person who isn't your mother or a nurse is a young man in a sweater with a hole in the cuff, who is, forgive me, in love with you."

Dess's mouth opened.

"I have not been watching you," said Theron hastily. "That is to say, I have not been watching you in that way. I only know because I saw him at Tidewater, through the window, the day of our meeting. He was carrying your tea."

"Gabe is my friend."

"I'm sure he is."

"Gabe is a very good friend and he is not in love with me, and I would thank you not to speculate about my—" She stopped. She pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes. "Oh my God. What are we doing? This is insane. This is the most insane conversation I have ever had."

"I agree."

"You agree?"

"Entirely."

"Then why are we having it?"

"Because you came." He said it very quietly. "I did not ask you to. I left a note in a window. If I had meant to be a nuisance, I would have rung your bell. You came on your own, over the street, in your slippers—"

"Boots."

"—in your boots, and you sat me in a chair, and you gave me an opening. I'm not a fool. I'm aware that it was a kindness."

She dropped her hands.

He was looking at her across the bare room, with the lamplight on one side of his face and the gray morning on the other. He did not look like a stalker. He did not look like a magnate. He looked, plainly and distressingly, like a man who had spent a month alone in a very large house with a mother in mourning and a brother in a drawer, and who was prepared to rent a room with cabbage wallpaper in order to be in the same street as the last warm thing on earth.

"I don't want you here," said Dess.

"I understand."

"I don't want you watching me."

"I'll buy a curtain."

"I don't want you following me to appointments."

"I won't."

"I don't want you to talk to me, unless I talk to you first. I don't want a hello, or a nod, or a tip of the hat. I want to be a person in a window you can't see."

"I can't promise I won't see."

"Then promise you won't look."

"I'll try."

"That's not a promise."

"It's the most honest one I have." He met her eyes. "I would like to be a man who doesn't lie to you. I can't promise not to look. I can promise not to wave."

She stood for a long moment in the middle of the bare floor, breathing, with the radiators knocking and the smell of cabbage in her nose and a tart in her pocket.

"Mrs. Ferreira likes you," she said at last.

"She's a woman of rare discernment."

"She thinks you're sorry."

"She's correct."

"Are you?"

"Yes."

"For what?"

"For all of it." His left hand, which had been lying on his knee, closed into a fist and opened again. "For the card. For the car. For Wade. For the memorandum. For the whole sorry business of a man of thirty-six who has taken forty thousand dollars out of one bank account and four thousand out of another in order to approach a woman who asked him, politely, to stay away."

"Four thousand two hundred."

"I'm sorry?"

"The lease. Six months at seven hundred." She hadn't meant to say it. It was simply the kind of thing her mind did. "Four thousand, two hundred. Not four."

A strange, startled, boyish look crossed his face.

"I stand corrected," he said gravely.

"You also paid a deposit."

"Seven hundred."

"So four thousand, nine hundred."

"Yes, Ms. Rourke."

"Plus a bed."

"Eighty-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents. Including the frame."

"And a kettle."

"Twenty-four fifty."

"You're keeping score."

"I am my own auditor."

"That's tragic."

"I'm told it is."

She laughed.

It escaped her. It came up out of the center of her like a hiccup, loud and sudden and entirely uncontrollable, and she clapped a hand over her mouth, and still it came, shaking her shoulders, making her eyes water. She leaned against the wall. She bent over. She had to put her other hand against her stomach to steady it, and the sight of her own palm on her own coat sent her into fresh gales, and above her, in the chair, the wrapped plastic crackled as Theron Wexcombe, very quietly, began to shake too.

It was the first time she'd heard him laugh. It was low, rough, rusty, a sound that seemed to be coming out of a long-locked cellar, and it startled her so much that she stopped.

He had put his hand over his eyes.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I'm so sorry. I haven't—it's been a long—"

"I know."

"I don't do this. I'm not a man who does this."

"I know."

"It's the kettle."

"It's twenty-four fifty."

He laughed again, helplessly, and wiped his face with the heel of his hand, and when he took it away, his eyes were red. She looked at him and saw the whole of the long month go over his face like weather: the funeral, the clocks, the drawer, the envelope, the dead boy, the scorched grief, the stubborn terrible hope. She saw all of it in a second, and felt it go into her like a splinter.

Count your fingers, she told herself.

She counted.

…

"Here are my terms," said Dess.

She was sitting on the edge of the card table. It sagged. She did not care. She had taken out her phone, and a pen from her coat pocket, and a napkin from the custard tart, and she was writing on the napkin in a swift, small hand, the way she did when she was trying not to think.

"You can stay."

"Thank you."

"I'm not done. You can stay because I cannot, as a practical matter, throw you out. You've paid. You have a lease. Mrs. Ferreira has taken a liking to you. If I called the police, they would ask me what law you'd broken, and I'd have to say none, and then they'd ask if you were harassing me, and I'd have to say with a mug."

"That would be a difficult case."

"It would. So. You stay." She wrote. "Condition one. You don't speak to me unless I speak first. In the hall, on the stairs, on the sidewalk. You don't say good morning. You don't say hello. You are a stranger who lives across the street."

"Understood."

"Condition two. You don't give me food."

"Mrs. Ferreira will—"

"Mrs. Ferreira is exempt. She is a force of nature." She underlined it. "You don't give me food, or flowers, or bags, or boxes, or books on parenting. No gestures."

"No gestures."

"Condition three. You tell me the truth." She stopped writing and looked at him. "I mean it, Theron. When I ask. And I'm going to ask. I'm going to ask one thing now, and you're going to answer it, and then we'll never speak of it again unless I raise it."

He went very still.

It was the stillness she had seen in the café: the closing of the shutters. She leaned toward him, across the sagging table, and looked directly into his face, and said, without any particular emphasis:

"Is there something you haven't told me?"

He didn't answer for a long time.

Down in the street, the garbage truck had moved on. The low sun had come over the rooftops and lay in a long gold stripe across the pine boards, catching the dust, catching the edge of his shoe. Somewhere below them, faintly, the game-show audience applauded.

"Yes," said Theron.

She had known. She'd known it the way you know a step is missing in the dark. But the plain one-syllable weight of it still struck her in the chest, and she sat very still, holding the pen.

"Is it about the baby?"

"It concerns the baby. Not its health. Not its safety."

"Is it about me?"

"It will affect you. It's not a threat to you."

"Is it about money?"

A pause.

"Yes."

"Whose?"

"Please." It was almost a whisper. "Don't ask me that today."

"Why not?"

"Because I haven't found a way to say it that doesn't make you feel bought." He lifted his eyes. They were very gray, very tired, and for the first time he looked, quite unmistakably, afraid. "I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to say it's nothing. It isn't. But I am asking, as a favor, which I have no right to ask, that you let me find the right moment. And I swear to you—on my brother, and on that mug—that you will hear it from me and from no one else."

"When?"

"Before the baby kicks."

The words fell between them like a dropped coin.

She remembered, with a sudden, vivid, ludicrous clarity, a dark highway at the Massachusetts line, and her own thumbs on a screen. You'll be the first to know.

"That's three months," she said.

"Eleven weeks, by my calculation."

"You've been calculating."

"I've made a spreadsheet."

"Of course you have."

"It has a tab called 'If Yes.'"

Her mouth twitched, in spite of herself.

"Dess," said Theron, and it was the first time he had said her name, and they both heard it. "I know that I am asking you to trust a man who has given you every reason not to. I'm not asking you to like it. I'm asking you to allow me the time. And if at any point you decide you cannot bear the waiting, you have only to say it. One word. And I will tell you everything, and you may do with it exactly as you please."

She looked at the napkin.

She looked at the pen.

She looked, last, at the man in the chair, who had not moved, who sat perfectly erect with his hands on his knees and the plastic wrapping crackling around him, waiting for her verdict with the patient, terrible courtesy of a defendant.

You've been lied to your whole life by men who were very good at it, said the dry voice in her head. This one isn't good. This one says "Yes" and goes pale. This one tells you the thing is there and asks you not to look.

Is that better, or worse?

It's different, she thought. I'll have to see.

"One word," she said.

"Yes."

"Any word."

"Any."

"I'm going to choose a very silly one."

"I would expect nothing less."

"Chicken."

For a long moment he regarded her gravely.

"Chicken," he said.

"If I say chicken, you tell me everything. That minute. That second."

"On my honor."

"Whatever it is."

"Whatever it is." He inclined his head. "And in the meantime, I'll be across the street, not waving."

"And not looking."

"And trying not to look."

"Fine." She wrote the final line on the napkin and signed it, with a flourish, and held it out. "Sign."

He took it. He read it, with that dreadful careful attention of his, finger under each line.

1. T. stays (lease). 2. T. does not speak first. 3. T. gives no food/gestures (exc. Mrs. F). 4. T. answers direct questions truthfully. 5. T. tells D. THE THING before first kick. 6. Safe word: "chicken."

Signed: O. Rourke. Signed: ________.

He took the pen from her fingers. His hand brushed hers. It was cold. It shook very slightly, and she saw, for the first time, that it was not nerves; it was something older and quieter, a thin continuous tremor like a plucked wire, and he saw her see it, and his face went blank.

"It's an old injury," he said.

"I didn't ask."

"No. You didn't." He bent his head and signed, in a firm upright hand: T.C. Wexcombe. Then, below it, in smaller letters, after a moment's thought: (chicken).

She took the napkin back.

She folded it in four, and put it in her pocket, with the last custard tart.

"I'm going to work," she said.

"Of course."

"I'm going to walk down the stairs and across the street, and I'm going to go into my house and get my bag. And then I'm going to go to the bus. And you are not going to say goodbye."

"No."

"And you are not going to watch me go."

"I'll look at the wall."

"The map."

"The map is very fine."

She went to the door. She put her hand on the knob. She stood there with her back to him, in the thin gold light, and found, to her annoyance, that she could not quite open it.

"Theron."

"Yes."

"The mug."

"Yes."

"Is it—" She swallowed. "Did Kit make it?"

A pause.

"When he was eleven," said Theron. "He hid it. I found it yesterday."

She did not turn around. She stood there with her hand on the doorknob and her eyes on the cracked pine panel, and she thought of a boy with a plane and a grin and a whole bright life ahead of him, and of the green suitcase, and the hundred and twelve dollars, and the kind of love that makes a thing out of clay for a brother who will make a face.

"It's an ugly mug," she said.

"It's the ugliest I've ever seen."

"Keep it."

"I intend to."

She went out. She closed the door behind her very softly.

Halfway down the stairs, she sat down on the fourth step and put her face in her hands, and breathed, for one full minute, with her eyes shut. Mrs. Ferreira's television blared faintly up through the floorboards. Somewhere above her, a man was looking at a map.

Then she stood, and wiped her face, and went across the street to get her bag.

…

That night, at her kitchen table, under the lamp, she took out the blue notebook and the pencil.

Across the street, in the long window of number 14, a figure sat at a card table, writing. He did not look up. He had, she noted, bought a curtain; it hung half-drawn, a thin gray cloth that did nothing at all.

She ruled a line.

Under Dess gave, she wrote: One napkin. One tart. A great deal of patience. Rule 6: "chicken."

Under Dess received, she sat for a long time, tapping the pencil against her teeth.

One tenant, she wrote at last. Cost: unknown.

She looked at it.

Then, below it, smaller, in the margin, where she kept the things she did not want to admit, she added a third line.

Sincere. (?)

She closed the notebook.

Across the gap, the tall dark figure at the card table lifted a lumpy brown mug, and held it a moment in the light, and set it down. He did not wave. He did not look.

She turned out her lamp.

In the dark, she lay awake for a long time with her hand on her stomach, listening for a sound that would not come for eleven weeks, and found that she was not, for the first time in a month, afraid.