Two Cups

#345 came in at 7:52, eight minutes early for her.

Her name was Marguerite. He knew that, and it's not a secret. He just filed her under the number, because names slide around and a number stays where you put it.

She was four hundred and six visits old, if you count from the October before last. Two cups every time. A grande chai, no foam, and a tall black tea with the bag left in.

Kanon had the chai going before she reached the register. Hands do that.

"Just the one tonight," she said.

He stopped, though not for long. Four hundred and six times the order had come in two, and now there was a gap in the column, and he was standing there looking at it.

"My husband died nine days ago."

She told that to the pastry case first, and then to him.

Now, he knew what she was waiting for. Everyone does. You say sorry. You let your face go soft. You leave a beat before you talk. He'd learned the face in a bathroom mirror at fourteen, and it hadn't worn out.

"I'm so sorry, Marguerite. Is there anything I can do?"

Her eyes went wet. She patted the counter twice, near his hand.

Correct, then. It felt good in a small way, the way a drawer closes on its track.

What he was actually doing, while she stood there, was the arithmetic. Nine days ago, so the last two-cup order was ten days back. He'd made that tea. He'd made it exactly like the others, and nothing had told him it was the last. You'd think something would.

Standing order, two. Standing order, one. He would have to catch himself reaching for the second cup, probably for weeks, and he didn't mind. It was only a correction.

She took the chai. The bell went over the door.

Savi came out of the back with the clipboard, in time to catch the end of the face and the door closing on it.

Savi was #519 in the record and Savi out loud, and he had never mixed the two up.

"Who was that?"

"Marguerite."

"The tea lady." Savi looked at the door, then at him. "Where's she been? I haven't seen her all week."

"Nine nights," he said. "Her husband died."

He gave it to her the way you give a total. He had logged the nine nights as a trip. People went places in winter, and a regular who went somewhere came back, and he had not wondered further than that. Savi's pen stopped over the clipboard.

"When?"

"Nine days ago."

"And she came in anyway."

"She ordered one."

"One what?"

"One chai. She gets two."

"Okay," Savi said, slowly, as if she were the one doing the arithmetic. "What did you say to her?"

"That I was sorry. I asked if there was anything I could do."

She looked at him a second longer than the answer needed. Then she went to the pastry case and slid the door open and took out the last lemon loaf with a square of tissue.

It was dinner. He had moved it to the back of the case at five, behind the scones, so it would still be there at close, which was not something he thought of as hiding. He opened his mouth, and then he looked at what he had to say, and it did not amount to anything you could say to a person holding a loaf.

Savi rang the loaf up herself. Two ninety-five. She paid it out of her apron pocket, three singles, and dropped the nickel back in the tip jar. Then she went out the door after Marguerite with the bag in her hand and no coat on, into the end of a February night, and the bell went over her too.

He stood at the register. There was a change to dinner. He noted it and moved it to the end of the night, where changes went.

At 8:00 his hand took a tall cup off the stack. That was her minute. Hands do that.

He stood holding it. It was empty. The train came over and the pastry tags shivered in their holders, and he stood there with the cup through all of it.

The bell. Savi was back, pink to the ears, her hands empty, so the loaf had gone somewhere. It had been ninety seconds. He hadn't been counting, and he knew anyway.

She saw the cup. Her face did something he had no label for.

"Teddy," she said.

"What?"

"Her husband. His name was Teddy."

"Okay," Kanon said.

He had made that tea four hundred and six times for a man who now had a name and still no number. He turned him over, looking for a place to put him, and there wasn't one. He set the cup down by the register.

"You did the face," Savi said.

"What face?"

"The face. When she told you. Two seconds, then the eyebrows. I watched the end of it." She leaned on the counter. "You did the exact same one for the guy with the Corolla."

"Which guy?"

"The one who got towed on Roosevelt. In the fall. Two seconds, same eyebrows. I timed it."

"You timed it."

"I had a lot of fall."

He ran back through the Corolla man and found it was true. Two seconds, near enough. He had not known there was anyone in the room keeping it.

"Do it for me," Savi said.

"I'm working."

"There's nobody here. Do it."

He did it. The beat, the softening, the head tilting one degree. He had never done it on request before, and it came out exactly the same.

"Okay," Savi said. "That's worse. That's so much worse."

He lost that one, and he knew it. He went over the exchange for the place he'd gone wrong, and the face had been right, and she was looking at him as if it had been perfect, which was the problem. He had no entry for being recorded.

Her eyes went to the cup by the register, and then back to him, and she stopped needling.

"You can just stand there, you know," she said. "If it's a bad one. You don't have to do anything."

"I know," he said, which was correct, and it did not feel like anything.

At 8:25 she took her apron off and folded it in thirds. She had a second job that started at nine, and she had left early six times since Christmas. Seven, with tonight. Glenn's sign was taped to the back door at eye level, laminated: TWO PARTNERS AT EVERY CLOSE. She said nothing about it and neither did he.

She unclipped the keys from her belt loop and held them out. He needed them anyway. Glenn's schedule had him closing tonight and opening at 5:00, and the keys were going home with him either way.

"Text me when the gate's down," Savi said.

"I will."

"Did you eat?"

A train came over. The tags shivered, the tables rattled, and the two of them held their sentences, as you do, until it had gone.

"Yes," he said, under it.

She nodded like someone who had heard. The bell went.

The slow hour belonged to the 7 train and to #763.

#763 had been on the outlet by the window since 4:10. He had one cup of water, refilled four times, and a binder for a civil service exam that was thicker than the exam deserved. In five months he had made one purchase, a tall drip in October, and Kanon counted it as rent. He called Kanon "my guy."

"My guy," he said now, not looking up. "When'd you last take a day off?"

Kanon didn't have to think. He went through the motions of thinking, because it was polite.

"None," he said. "Sixteen months."

#763 looked up. "That's not a number. That's a sentence."

"It's a number."

"You need a hobby."

"I'll look into it."

"Don't look into it. Do it." He went back to the binder.

Kanon logged the remark and found it fit nowhere, so it went on the end.

At 8:40 the door opened for Ramón, who was #214, a venti Pike with room, every Tuesday and Thursday since the spring. Kanon had it poured before the door finished closing. He knew the name and he used it, because that's what the name was for.

"Ramón."

"Kanon, man." Ramón counted out exact change onto the counter. "Cold out there. They say it's going to snow, but they always say."

"Thirty-one," Kanon said.

"See, that's why I come in here." Ramón raised the cup to him like a man leaving a wedding, and went out.

"Hey," said #763 from the window, when the door had settled. "You're good with this kind of thing. Question twelve. A supervisor has to cover forty hours of shifts across five clerks, and one calls out, and—"

"Ten each."

"I haven't even finished the question."

"It was going to be that."

#763 looked at him for a while and wrote something down. "You should take this test."

"I have a job."

"You have a job like I have a window seat," said #763, and went back to the binder, pleased with it.

Between orders he went over the record, which he thought of as rows and columns, and which he did not look at so much as stand beside. The latest entry was #881, a woman with a stroller who'd come in Sunday and apologized to the door. The numbers started at #2. He had never asked why.

At 8:59 #763 closed the binder and unplugged his phone.

"Later, my guy."

Kanon had let him have the whole minute. He always did.

He closed. Chairs up. Milk in the walk-in, oldest to the front. Steam wand wiped, then wiped again. The case had an empty place on the second shelf, loaf-sized, and he looked at it once and wiped around it. The drawer came up eleven cents short, and he let it be, because eleven cents was about the right size of wrong. Mop, back wall to door. Lights off, back to front.

It's the same every night. That's what the order is for.

Outside it was cold, the dry kind that gets into your teeth. He pulled the gate down and tried it twice.

He texted Savi the word he always texted. Down. Above it, the same word stood six times with nothing under any of them, which was most of his phone.

The walk was seven minutes under the 7. Steel overhead and the supports going by like a fence somebody had forgotten to finish. A train came and he walked under it and it didn't change his pace. The bodega at the corner was still lit, with the price of the egg sandwich on a card in the window. Three twenty-five. He read it the way he read all the cards, and kept going. Tomorrow's 5:00 meant a 4:30 alarm, with seven minutes of walking and the gate. If he was asleep by 10:30, that was six hours. Dinner would have taken twenty minutes. He found the six hours and left it there.

Two turns off Roosevelt, and then his block.

Eleven cars on the block. Four windows lit over the laundromat. He had counted them every night since March.

Tonight the numbers were right. He couldn't find the thing that wasn't.

He stopped walking.