Chapter 2 Sixty-Three Days

I have a rule about customers who come in after midnight. They are lonely, lost, or lying. Occasionally all three, if they've had a bad week. At eleven fifty-eight on a Tuesday in early October, my café held one of each. A law student asleep on her textbook, lost A man in a rain jacket eating lemon cake as if it owed him money, lonely. And Tunde, propped against the espresso machine, telling me about his love life lying; he had said "it's casual" three times Three years after the ceremony, with one loan and an unreasonable amount of cinnamon behind me, Zee's was mine: nine tables, a temperamental grinder, and my mother's nickname over the door. After midnight, Zee's has its own weather: low lamps, the tick of the cooling grinder, the smell of burnt sugar and rain on wool. I love it. It is also, for a person who counts exits, a very exposed way to live. I knew where all three exits were. Front door, back door, and the window above the dish sink, which I had measured and decided I could fit through if I exhaled. I don't recommend this as a personality, but I'm alive. "Okay, but listen," Tunde said. "Ife's boyfriend delivers dry cleaning to the Okafor estate." "I don't care about the Okafors." "I'm not saying you do. I'm saying the dry cleaning is piling up. Nobody's picking it up. Nobody has seen Idris in two months, and I would like it on the record that I would be fine with either outcome." "Tunde." "Moving on. Moving. On." He zipped his mouth, held it for four full seconds, and then hummed the wedding march. I threw a dish towel at him. For the record, I did not care about the Okafors. I had spent three years not caring about the Okafors. It was a full-time job and I had become very good at it. I never said his name, not once, not out loud. If you don't say a thing, it can't walk into the room. At four minutes past midnight, I was wiping down the counter when something behind my ribs switched on. A hum. Low, faint, steady. The exact note I had spent three years convincing myself I'd imagined. I stopped wiping. Tunde stopped talking. He looked at my face, which is how I knew it was bad, because Tunde looking at my face means he has put down his drink. "Don't you dare," he said softly. "I wasn't going to do anything." "You just went the color of oat milk." The bell above the door chimed. I had rehearsed this moment. I want that on the record too. In the shower, on the bus, once, memorably, at the DMV. In every version I was cool as stone and said something devastating. In the real one, I said nothing at all, because my mouth had forgotten it was a mouth. He looked terrible. I would like to be gracious about it and I can't. He had lost weight he did not have to lose. His coat hung off him like it belonged to a bigger man. There were shadows under his eyes dark as thumbprints, and beneath his brown skin there was a gray cast, the color of a candle just before it goes out. He held the door frame as though the door might leave. And at his collar, just above his open top button, there were lines. Black and branching, fine as roots, crawling up from somewhere beneath his shirt. Behind me the law student woke up. "Are you closing?" "Yes," Tunde said instantly. "For you, with love. Sir, the lemon cake is on us, please go." They went. Tunde flipped the sign to CLOSED, then planted himself beside me with his arms folded and a milk frother in one hand like a very small sword. "Tunde," Idris said quietly. "It's good to see you." "Don't you good-to-see-you me. I will end you with this frother." "Tunde," I said. "It's fine." "It is not fine." "Go to the back." He looked at me for a long second. Then he pointed two fingers at his own eyes and then at Idris's, and withdrew exactly eleven feet, to the pass-through, where he leaned against the wall holding the heaviest tray we owned. "We're closed," I said. "Your sign says open until two." "The sign is wrong." "I see." He didn't move. Nobody threw him out. I'd like to say that was shock. That's the polite answer. The true one is that three years of hating someone becomes its own kind of intimacy, a shape you wear so long it fits, and I was not ready to take it off with an audience. "What do you want, Idris?" Behind me, Tunde murmured to nobody, "Is this a threat or a status update?" I didn't turn around. His name tasted like a coin I had forgotten I was holding. "I'm not here to ask you to forgive me," he said. "Good. That's a short conversation." "I know." His voice was lower than I remembered, and rougher, as if he had been using it very little. "I came because I'm dying, and I thought you should hear it from me." I waited for the part where he said he was joking. But Idris was not a man who joked. He had a sense of humor the way some people have a spare tire: technically present, rarely deployed. "That's not funny," I said. "No," he agreed. "It isn't." He undid two buttons, slowly, like a man who expected to be stopped. I didn't stop him. The black lines didn't start at his collar. They started low on his ribs, a single dark mark I had last seen being dragged across a white shirt, and from there they had spread. Across his chest. Around his heart, thick as a fist, in a pattern like a tree in winter. As I looked, they pulsed once, slowly. And behind my own ribs, exactly where I had felt the tearing three years ago, something throbbed in answer. I had imagined this mark. For three years, in the worst hours, around three in the morning, I had wanted it to hurt him. I had pictured it burning. I had never once pictured it growing. "That's the Refusal," he said. "It doesn't end. It feeds. My wolf first, then the rest." He did up the buttons with fingers that weren't quite steady. "You didn't know what you were doing. I don't blame you." "Don't." It came out sharper than I meant. "You don't get to be generous with me." A long pause. "No," he said. "I suppose I don't." I put both hands flat on the counter so he wouldn't see them shake. My mother's ring pressed into my thumb. In the corner of my eye, Tunde had stopped pretending not to listen. "How long?" He didn't hesitate. A man who had counted every one. "Sixty-three days. On the night of the Blood Moon, the Refusal finishes. You'll be free of me, completely." His eyes held mine. "I won't be anything at all." For a moment the room went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. I thought of two hundred and eleven people holding one breath. I thought: he's lying. The thought arrived very fast and felt a great deal like a prayer. Silence. The grinder ticked as it cooled. "If you're here to make me feel something," I said, "you're three years late and you picked a bad night." "I'm not asking you to feel anything." He said it plainly, almost gently. "I made a choice for you once without asking. I won't do that again. You deserve to decide with all the facts. That's all I came to say." It was the first honest thing anyone from that family had ever said to me, and I hated how badly I wanted to believe it. "Sixty-three days," I repeated. "Sixty-three." Something moved in his face, almost a smile, almost not. "I counted." I almost told him. I count things when I'm frightened, too. The hum behind my ribs, silent for three years, had not stopped. It was getting louder.