Chapter 2: The Mouse

The droppings were behind the bean stack, a neat scatter of them along the baseboard, and Twix crouched with the flashlight from the toolbox and followed the line to a gap where the trim had shrunk away from the wall.

“We have a mouse,” she told Mara.

“We have a shop in a hundred-year-old building. Of course we have a mouse.”

“We have one now. Before, we had a building that could have mice. Different thing.”

She set two snap traps that afternoon, peanut butter, one behind the beans and one along the wall by the mop sink, positioned across the runway and not beside it, and told Nico not to touch them, and Nico, who had been shown the droppings, looked personally offended on the shop’s behalf, which she found she liked.

Nico had a schedule now, in the way weather has a schedule. He appeared most mornings for the deliveries and most afternoons for the boxes, and some days not at all, and no one asked where he’d been because the answer was his. Mara had put him on the pad as a line item that said NICO in her handwriting, and he swept the alley without being told, and had opinions about the recycling situation, and last week he’d fixed the wobble in the condiment station with a folded sugar packet and then, catching Twix watching, done it properly with the toolbox. He knew where the toolbox was. That was the thing that had changed, if you were keeping track of things that changed. He knew where things were.

October had come in cold and stayed. Walt read yesterday’s paper by the radiator and worked the napkin dispenser like a man on piecework. Ellen had received, as expected, in the mail, four tomatoes, individually wrapped in newspaper, of which two had survived. Donna slept her eleven minutes at the corner table with her coat still zipped. The jar sat one hand’s width from the edge, and migrated, and got squared. The fixed table stayed fixed. Twix opened, worked, closed, and walked home, and the shop went on being the shop, which was all she asked of it.

The man came back on a Tuesday.

She was pulling shots for the seven fifteen line when she felt the bus stop change. That was how it registered, not a man, a change, the bench occupied by someone who wasn’t slumped or scrolling or leaning out to look for the 61. She finished the pour, handed off the cup, called the next name, and by then she had him in the left of her vision where the window kept things. Same stance, weight even on both feet. Different jacket, a gray one, still zipped to the throat. The boots were the same boots.

He let the 61 go.

The line moved. She made a cortado, two lattes, a tea. When she looked again the bench was empty, and the crosstown hadn’t come yet, so he hadn’t taken a bus this time either.

Thursday he was at the end of the block, at the alley mouth, for the length of time it takes to tie a shoe, which was what he was doing. People tie shoes. His stayed tied the whole way down the block after, and he never looked at the shop once, which was its own kind of looking, because everyone glances at a lit window. Everyone.

The following Monday he came inside.

Ten forty, the dead pocket between rushes. He ordered a large coffee, paid cash from a folded stack, said no to room for cream, and took the middle table, Ellen’s table, the one that saw the whole room, though Ellen wasn’t in yet to mind. He put his phone on the table and looked at it. The coffee sat. Twix wiped the counter, faced the cups, restocked the lids, and worked her way along the counter’s length doing jobs that needed doing, and every job happened to keep him where the machine’s chrome could hold his reflection.

He was there twenty-five minutes. He looked at the register four times, at the camera above it twice, and down the pass once, a long look, all the way through the open storeroom door to where Nico’s flattened boxes stood in their stack. He never drank the coffee. He left the cup full on the table, dropped a dollar in the jar on his way out, and the door closed behind him.

Twix picked up the cup and poured it out. The dollar she left where it was, because it was Dee’s dollar now and Dee didn’t need to know what it had been for.

That night she closed and, instead of walking home, crossed to the bus stop and stood at the near end of the bench again, and looked. The storeroom light was off this time and the shop stopped at the counter, a till and a case and dark behind them. She turned her head the way he had turned his, once, down the block, and held it there, and from that angle the alley mouth sat waiting at the end of the buildings like a drain.

She walked home the long way, past the alley, through it, in fact, past the recycling and the cart that never moved, and stood at her own rear door and looked at it from the outside. Solid. Bar down, she’d dropped it herself twenty minutes ago. A door was only ever as good as the last person through it.

She told Mara on Wednesday, in the office, with the ledger open between them because Mara listened better with something to hold.

“The shop’s being cased.”

Mara took her glasses off, which meant she was taking it seriously, and looked at her, which meant she wasn’t sure. “Tell me.”

Twix told her. The bench, four times now. The boots. The shoe that didn’t need tying. The coffee that didn’t get drunk, the four looks at the register, the two at the camera, the one down the pass. She laid it out flat and in order, no adjectives, the way you’d read back an inventory.

Mara was quiet for a moment. “He paid for the coffee.”

“So?”

“So he’s a paying customer who sat at a table. Twix, half this neighborhood stands around. The bench is a bench. Men with nowhere to be is what this block produces. The Vietnamese place had a guy stand outside for a month last year and it turned out his daughter worked there and wouldn’t talk to him.”

“He looked at the camera.”

“Everyone looks at the camera. It’s got a red light. People look at red lights, it’s the whole point of red lights.” Mara rubbed the bridge of her nose. “What would you have me do. Call the police and tell them a man drank, no, didn’t drink a coffee? They’d write it down out of kindness. I can’t afford the security company, I looked into it after the break-in on Gorham, the install alone was four figures, and for what, a sticker on the door.”

“I’m not asking you to buy anything.”

“Then what are you asking?”

Twix didn’t have it in words fast enough, and Mara didn’t wait for her to find them.

“Twix. You came up in a house where everyone was casing something. I’m not saying you’re wrong.” She set the pencil down flat along the ledger, the way you set a thing down before you say the one you mean. “I’m saying you might be looking at the last house instead of this one.”

“I know the difference.”

“Do you.” Not sharp. She wasn’t scoring a point. “You’ve squared that stack of invoices twice since you sat down, and there’s nobody on the street.”

Twix looked down. Her hands were on the invoices, squaring the stack to the edge of the desk, one hand’s width in, where the jar went, where everything went. She had not decided to do it. She left them there on purpose now, which was its own kind of answer, and gave Mara no other, because the true one was that she could no longer always tell which of the things she did were reading the room and which were only the shape her hands made when she stood in one. That was not a thing she would hand across a ledger.

“Keep the back barred,” she said finally. “That’s all. Even for the trash run. Knock and I’ll let you in.”

“I always keep it barred.”

Twix looked at her.

“Mostly always,” Mara said. “Fine. Barred.” She put her glasses back on, which meant the conversation was closing. “You’d tell me if this was something else. If somebody was, I don’t know. Somebody you knew.”

“It isn’t anybody I know.”

And that was true, and Mara heard that it was true, and it settled nothing, because the disagreement had never been about the man. It was about whether the world sent notice before it changed on you, and each of them had a lifetime of evidence, and the lifetimes didn’t match.

Twix didn’t argue it further. She just started making changes, none of them large enough to bill anybody for.

She moved the heavy ceramic mugs from the shelf under the pickup end to the shelf beside the register, and told Dee it was to shorten the reach on for-here orders, which it also did. She stopped racking the steam pitchers empty between rushes and kept one on the wand, hot, topped off, the way you’d keep a pot on for tea if you were expecting somebody. The fire extinguisher came out from the cabinet under the sink, where it lived behind the fryer oil, and went onto the open shelf at the end of the pass, in plain sight, because inspections liked it visible, she said, and nobody checked whether inspections cared.