Chapter 4: Rhea at the Counter

The lunch rush broke the way it always broke, not cleanly, more like a tide pulling back in chunks. Rhea wiped the pass with the side of her hand before she reached for the cloth, because the cloth was two feet away and the grease on the stainless was already thinking about setting. The dishwasher kicked into its second cycle under the counter and the whole bar hummed a half-tone flatter for thirty seconds. She caught the stranger's tab off the reader on the way past. WARD in block letters, card approved. She keyed it out.

He was at the door by then, one hand on the glass, the other folding the receipt into his jacket pocket. She did not watch him leave. She had watched him enough while he ate, which was not much; four seconds of looking in, and she had him sorted. Thin the wrong way. Jacket older than he was by a year or two. Sat like a man who'd been in worse rooms. Tipped like someone with something to prove or something to give away, she wasn't sure which and didn't care to parse it now. Three times the bill. Exact, not rounded. She touched the cash under the reader with two fingers to make sure she had counted right the first time, and she had.

Hardware store question. *The nearest one.* Not *a good one.* Men who asked it that way were either buying nails or buying the kind of thing you did not want to know about, and either way it wasn't hers.

She slid the cash into the apron pocket without separating it out and moved on.

The HVAC clicked above the door, its every-forty-seconds tick, the one that had been an every-ninety-seconds tick last winter and was getting faster the way a bad heart got faster. She refilled the sugar caddies along the counter, two at a time, because the lids came off easier if you braced one under your wrist while you worked the other. The third one stuck. She tapped it against the underside of the counter in the spot where the laminate was worn pale, and it came loose. Her hands knew where the pale spot was. She did not look.

Jem was at the far end of the counter, eating a bowl of the soup he always ate at two, the paper folded in quarters the way he always folded it. Seventy-something, retired from something he never explained, three times a week same stool. She topped him up from the half-pot without asking.

"Thanks, dear."

"Mhm."

She cleared the four-top by the window. Two plates, a glass with lipstick on the rim, the small pile of crumpled napkins people made when they didn't know where to put their hands. The vinyl on the booth was cold against the back of her forearm when she leaned across to grab the last plate. The window over the booth had the afternoon film on it already, that slick pale haze the kitchen blew out the vent and the cleaner couldn't quite get off. In the greasy light it made the street look softer than the street was.

She took the tablet off the peg by the prep station and thumbed it awake. The labor schedule for tomorrow came up with a crack across the top right corner bisecting Tuesday. Two call-outs. She sighed through her nose and did not bother to fix them yet. The dry-goods shelves in her peripheral vision were still the way she had left them last Thursday: panko forward, flour pulled left, the olive oil she used twice an hour at eye level instead of the weird middle shelf where Dale kept putting it back. Alphabetical was a joke somebody played on people who didn't cook.

"Rhea."

"Mm."

"Rhea."

Jem had set his spoon down. He was watching the wallscreen TV over the coffee station, where a man in a too-clean jacket was saying something she couldn't hear over the dishwasher, and then the trailer she'd seen fifty times cut in again, muted. A landscape she didn't recognize, green going violet at the edges. A sword she was not going to pretend to care about. The Zenith logo. *T-17* and change, down in the corner.

"Put a deposit down yesterday," he said.

"On what."

"Capsule rental. Franchise out by the 580. Week at a time." He tore a sugar packet with his thumbnail. "Figured. You don't get many more firsts."

She laughed, because he had said it like a man who wanted her to laugh, and because the laugh was cheaper than a real answer. "You're going to fall asleep in there and miss the whole game, Jem."

"Probably."

"They going to feed you."

"Tubes."

"Jesus."

"Seventy-four, dear. Not a lot left on my list."

She topped him up again even though the cup was still three-quarters. The sentence sat on the counter between them in a shape she did not particularly want to pick up. She wiped the counter on either side of it. The dishwasher kicked down and the bar hum went back up its half-tone, and she took the dirty glasses from the four-top to the back and ran them through. When she came out he had gone back to his paper.

*You don't get many more firsts.*

She heard it and put it somewhere she put things she wasn't going to think about yet. She had a whole shelf of those. Alphabetical, she thought, and almost smiled at nothing.

Dale came out of the back office at three with the look on his face he got when he wanted something. He had a clipboard, which was a bad sign, because the clipboard was where he hid the thing he was actually going to ask. He braced himself against the pass, which was wet, and she did not warn him.

"Rhea."

"Dale."

"Big favor."

"No."

"You don't even know—"

"Double. Tonight. No."

He looked pained. "Marcy's kid's sick."

"Marcy's kid's been sick Tuesday of every week this month."

"I know."

"Then don't schedule Marcy Tuesday."

"I'm asking."

She wiped the pass under his elbow and he moved his elbow without looking at why. "I'm off at six. I've been on since five. You want me here at midnight and you're going to ask me to open tomorrow."

"I wasn't going to ask you to open."

"You were going to ask me to open."

He made the face of a man who had been going to ask her to open. He sighed and looked past her at the dry-goods shelves and latched onto the first other thing he could reach.

"Also the walk-in."

"What about the walk-in."

"It's colored."

"It's organized."

"You've got the dairy on green tape and the produce on orange and the—"

"Proteins on red. Yeah."

"Nobody else knows the system, Rhea."

"Everybody else knows the system. Everybody uses the system. You're mad because you went in looking for buttermilk on the alphabet shelf and it was on the dairy shelf where it lives."

"Alphabet is standard."

"Alphabet is for people who don't have to find anything in a rush." She heard her own voice go thin and pulled it back a half-inch. "Look. I'll stay till close. I'm not doing midnight. Call Reggie. He owes you a shift."

"Reggie."

"Reggie owes you a shift."

"Fine."

He took the clipboard back into the office without looking at her. She heard the door not quite close, the way it never quite closed. The dishwasher was quiet now and the fryer was holding its steady pitch in the back and the HVAC clicked and the bar hummed.

Her phone lit on the shelf under the register. She saw it from the corner of her eye, the landlord name, and she picked it up and read the text without turning it toward the light.

*Rent due fri. Just a heads up.*

The *just a heads up* was the part that did it, every month, because he wasn't the kind of man who sent a heads up to be kind, he was the kind who sent a heads up to start the clock where she could see it. She locked the phone. The lock screen was the picture she hadn't changed in two years, her and her brother on the porch of the house that wasn't her house anymore, Cole's hair too long and his eyes squinting into a sun that was behind her shoulder. He had called at eleven and she hadn't picked up. He'd call again tomorrow. He always called again. It was why she was still here and not in Portland, or Denver, or anywhere else a person with her hands could have gone. She put the phone face-down on the shelf.

A guy came in for a coffee to go and she made it without saying a word to him and he left two singles and the bell over the door rang him out.

She ate at four, the way she ate every day, in the booth farthest from the window with her back to the kitchen and her phone on silent beside her plate. Staff meal was whatever hadn't moved that day, and today it was a cut of grilled chicken that had been sitting since one and a side of the fries the new kid had over-salted. She ate the chicken slowly because the chicken deserved it and the fries fast because the fries didn't.

The TV ran on the wall opposite the booth, muted, subtitles on. A news woman with very even hair was talking over a ticker. Across the bottom, white on red: *INVESTIGATIVE JOURNALIST REOPENS 20XX COASTAL SECURITY INCIDENT — NEW DOCUMENTS CITED.* No names. No pictures of anyone. Eight seconds and it was gone and the ticker flipped to basketball scores, and the news woman's face became a man's face, same hair.

Then the trailer.

She knew the cuts by now. The kid pulling the sword out of the water. The dragon you only saw the back of. The woman in the green cloak who got two seconds and then the logo. The subtitles had never worked on the trailer because it was mostly score. *AETHERFALL ONLINE. 00:17:04:22.*

She looked down.

Her hand was holding the fork. She watched the hand hold the fork for a second. The thin burn scar across the back of it where the fryer had gotten her when she was seventeen, the knuckles a little swollen from the cold dishwater, the nails clipped short the way you clipped them when your job was your hands. The fork moved food to her mouth. She chewed. She was not watching the screen. She was watching herself not watch it.

*You don't get many more firsts.*

She put the fork down and finished the water in the glass instead.

The last two hours of her shift went the way the last two hours always went. Families trickling in for an early dinner, one table that took forever to decide and then ordered the grilled cheese, a trucker who wanted pie and coffee and didn't speak except to ask for the pie and then for the check. She worked the floor and the counter and at five-thirty she started prep-close so it would be done at six and she could actually leave at six, which she almost never did, but tonight she had said she would.

At five-fifty she killed the deep-fryer. The alarm was a flat high tone that lasted four seconds before the unit let it drop, the specific pitch she heard in the back of her head on her days off the way people heard church bells. She wiped the stainless around it. Her knuckles brushed the warm housing and she moved her hand away without flinching.

The drawer at six was off by eleven dollars over. Which was the wrong direction; the wrong direction was always worse than short. Short was somebody palming singles. Over was somebody miskeyed a transaction, which meant the ticket was going to come back on them in a week when inventory didn't tie out. She pulled the tape.

It was the stranger's. Ward. The tip had keyed into the wrong field. She had hit the dollar side instead of the cents field and the system had added a decimal where she didn't want one and she'd corrected it on her second swipe, except the first swipe had stuck in the batch. She backed it out, rekeyed it clean, and the drawer came even. Sixty seconds. Dale would never have seen it; he would have found it at month-end and told her the system was glitchy again.

She put the tape back in the drawer. She did not think anything particular about having caught it.

At two minutes past six she hung the apron on the hook by the office door and told Dale she was out, and he grunted without looking up from the schedule he was still not going to fix, and she went through the swinging door and out the front. The bell over the door rang.

Outside the air had cooled. The sky over the main street was the kind of high flat blue it went in the minutes before it started to really go dark, and the windows of the shops opposite had caught it and were sending it back in dull squares. She stood on the sidewalk and breathed in through her nose for the first time in nine hours.

She turned to go.

Through the diner window, over her shoulder, the TV was running the trailer again. The sword, the dragon, the cloak. *00:16:48:11*. The subtitles were still not working.

She looked at it, not for long, maybe three seconds, and started walking.

Her phone buzzed in her apron pocket, which she was still wearing under her jacket because she had forgotten to hang it. She pulled it out as she walked. A push notification from an app she had not opened in months. *ZENITH CAPSULE RENTAL — WEEKEND SLOTS STILL OPEN AT YOUR NEAREST FRANCHISE.* She almost swiped it away.

She stopped walking.

She was under the awning of the pharmacy two doors down. The pharmacy had been closed for an hour. The light from inside was the one security light over the counter and it made a long yellow rectangle on the sidewalk she was standing in. She stood in the rectangle and opened the app.

The franchise two towns over had a weekly slot at the lowest tier. She scrolled down to the price and looked at the number, and she looked at it for longer than she needed to because she was not actually reading it, she was waiting to see if her hand was going to put the phone away. Her hand did not.

*You don't get many more firsts.*

*Nobody else knows the system.*

*Three times the bill. Exact.*

None of those were the reason. She knew they were not the reason. She did not know what the reason was, and she noticed she did not know, and she noticed that noticing was also not the reason. The phone was warm against her palm. The plastic case had a chip on the corner where she had dropped it last winter. The rectangle of pharmacy light held steady around her feet.

She tapped *Reserve.*

The screen went to a spinner. She waited. The spinner was maybe two seconds and felt like longer and was followed by a green check and a confirmation number and a line of smaller text saying her card on file had been charged, and the number under the line was not small. It was not catastrophic either. It was the cushion. The cushion she kept in checking for the month Cole's car broke down, or the month the heater did, or the month the landlord did his *just a heads up* and meant the clock was really running this time.

It was gone.

She stood in the yellow rectangle with her phone in her hand and felt the thing that came up in her chest, which was not what she had thought it would be. It was not joy. It was not relief. It was something flatter and hotter and closer to being angry, angry at who she could not have said, angry at the specific fact that doing a thing for herself felt like picking a fight with something. She breathed in through her nose again. The heat did not go away. She did not need it to.

She locked the phone. She did not tell anyone. There was no one to tell. Cole didn't need to know, and Dale would find out when she called off Tuesday night, and there was nobody else.

She started walking again.

Two blocks down, past the feed shop and the shuttered bakery, the maglev platform showed through the gap between buildings where the old lot had been cleared last year, and the platform's big board was running ads on its rotation. A Zenith ad came up as she was passing, the same open hand she'd seen on the billboard on the freeway a hundred times, palm up, the faint shimmer. Different copy now. She didn't read it on purpose. The countdown in the corner said *T-16* and some minutes she didn't bother to look at directly. She kept walking.

Her building was four more blocks. The stairwell light on the second landing was out again; she went up the third flight in the dark with her key already in her hand.

The apartment smelled of the open window she'd left open that morning. The cat, a gray one with a bent ear, half feral when she got her and still mostly feral, was on the sill, and watched her unlock the door with the flat unimpressed look the cat gave everything.

"Hi," Rhea said.

The cat did not answer.

She crossed to the kitchenette. She did not take off her jacket yet. She opened the bottom cupboard and shook dry food into the bowl, and the cat came down off the sill without hurry, and when the cat was eating she stood with her hand on the counter and looked at nothing in particular for a count of ten.

Then she took the jacket off. She hung it on the chair. She dropped her keys into the chipped ceramic bowl on the table by the door and they made the sound she liked that keys made in that bowl. She closed the window because the night air was going cold.

She sat on the edge of the bed without turning the lamp on. She set the alarm on her phone for eight o'clock, and then, after a pause, moved it to eight P.M. for the next day. The notification from the Zenith app was still sitting at the top of her screen above the lock. *Reservation confirmed.* She did not tap it.

She set the phone face down on the nightstand.

She lay back. The ceiling was the same ceiling. The HVAC in the building ticked its own tick, different from the diner's. The cat jumped up onto the foot of the bed and settled against her ankle and did not look at her.

She had done a thing she couldn't take back. That was the shape of it, in the dark, without any of the other words. She turned it over once in her chest to check, and it held, and she did not turn it over again.

She closed her eyes.