Timothy Hallinan - The Fourth Watcher

“One cake?” Rose says behind him. “All this for one cake?”

“But what a cake.” The whir of the grinder fills the room. Silently counting to twelve, Rafferty reaches up into the cabinet with his free hand and takes down a box of coffee filters. He drops the box to the counter and uncaps the coffee grinder. “Perfect,” he says, studying the grind. He opens the box of filters and pulls out a nest of tightly clustered paper cones. As always, the edges are stuck together. He ruffles them ineffectually with his thumb, trying without much hope to separate a single filter from the clump.

“You were going to say something,” Rose says, her eyes on his hands. The lowered lids make it hard for him to read her expression. The towel is brilliantly white against the dusk of her skin.

“Yes.” He manages to pry free a little clot of four filters, a minor triumph. He lets his hands drop to hide the palsy that seems to have seized control of them. “I was.”

“And you had a present for me.” She tilts her head to one side, watching his fingers fumble with the filters.

“After coffee,” he says, crimping the paper edges to loosen them. They are almost karmically inseparable.

“Is that my present? In your pocket?”

He meets her eyes and feels his face grow hot. “Yes.”

She purses her lips. “Not very big.”

“Well, it’s. . no, it’s not very big.” His fingers feel like frozen hams, and the filters are resolutely glued together. His mind is suddenly a large and disordered room with words piled randomly in the corners like children’s toys. “I mean, it’s not-but you said that already-and it. . it’s. .”

“Let me.” Rose crosses the room, all business, and takes the filters from his hand. She slips a nail under the edge and separates the bundle into two. Then she places the top two filters, still stuck together, between her lips and closes her mouth. When her lips part, the filters come apart neatly, one stuck to each lip, and she removes them and extends them to Rafferty. Each of them has a dark red lip print on its edge. “The answer is yes,” she says.

He has the filters in his hands before he hears her. “It is?” is all he can think to say. He stands there, a coffee filter dangling from each hand, the box with the ring in it exerting a supergravitational weight against his right hip. “It really is?” He has to push the words around the soft, formless obstruction in his throat.

“I know what I said when you asked me before,” Rose says, and now her eyes are on his. “I remember every word I said. I’ve remembered it a thousand times. I’ve walked to work, I’ve shopped for dinner, I’ve cleaned apartments, I’ve cooked food remembering what I said, trying to find the place where I should have said something that wasn’t about me, about my family, my life, my problems, me, me, me. I was terrible to you. If I’d just stopped talking for one minute, if I’d just stopped being frightened that I’d eventually get hurt, I would have said yes.”

“Ahh, Rose,” Rafferty says.

“I told you we were a million miles apart.”

“We were.”

“The only way you could be a million miles from me,” Rose says, “would be if I were a million miles from my own heart.” Her eyes go to the filters in his hands. “Just show it to me. Put those things down and show it to me.”

“Right. Show it to you.” He sets the lipsticked filters on the counter, watching his hands from a distance, as through a thick pane of glass. Feels the cool cloth of the robe against the back of his hand as he reaches into his pocket, feels the plush of the box under his fingertips, but all he sees is Rose, although he doesn’t even know when he looked over at her, and then his hand comes into the bottom of the picture with the box in it, and she holds his eyes with her own as her long, dark fingers take the box and close around it.

“It’s going to be beautiful,” she says without looking down.

“It has to be,” he says. “It’s for you.”

She puts her other hand over the box, cupping it between her palms. “Everybody wanted to marry you,” she says. “Every girl in the bar. They looked at you and they saw a house and a passport and money for life. And so did I.”

“Most of my competition was a hundred pounds overweight.”

“Stop it. Just once, let someone say something nice about you.”

“Sorry. Thanks.” He can barely hear his own voice.

“But those girls didn’t love you,” Rose says. “I didn’t love you either. I didn’t even want to love you. I didn’t want to tell myself I loved you if what I really loved was the house and the passport. I stopped working because of you, did you know that? I told myself I stopped for me, but I didn’t. And after I stopped, I talked myself out of you a hundred times. Sometimes my heart hides from me. It took everything, Poke. It took a long time, it took months of being with you, it took Miaow, even, seeing the way you are with Miaow, but I love you.”

“And I love you,” he says helplessly. The words hang in the air with a kind of phantom shimmer, a tossed handful of glitter. Rose looks at him in a way that makes him feel like a developing Polaroid: Out of the infinite potential of nothing comes a specific human face, with all its weaknesses and limitations. When she has his face in focus, or committed to memory, or transformed into what she wanted to see, or whatever she was doing, she looks down at the box and opens it.

The ring has three stones-a topaz, a sapphire, and a ruby, none of them very large. “The sapphire is your birthstone,” Rafferty says. “The ruby is mine.” It sounds puerile and silly as he says it. “The topaz was my guess at Miaow. Now we can change it, make it a ruby and two sapphires.”

“The family,” Rose says. “In a ring.” She tilts the stones toward him. “Miaow between you and me.”

“I guess,” Rafferty says, wondering why he never saw that.

“Poor baby,” she says for the second time, but her tone is very different. “You want a family so badly.”

“I want to put a fence around us,” Rafferty says. “Something to hold us together.”

Rose says, “We’re not going to fall apart. I won’t let us.” Her face is very grave. She raises the box to him, and he takes it and removes the ring and wraps the warm smoothness of her left hand in his, and slips the ring onto her finger. It sticks at the knuckle, and he pushes at it, and she starts to laugh and chokes it off, and then raises her finger to his mouth so he can wet the knuckle with his tongue. The ring glides over her knuckle. His arms go around her, and she fits herself to him, pressing the length of her body against his. Then she laughs. “Peachy is going to be so happy,” she says.

“Peachy can wait,” he says. “I want to make love with you when you’re wearing the ring.” He starts to lead her to the bedroom. “And only the ring.”

“Make the coffee first,” she says. “I think we’re going to need it.”

“Right.” Back at the counter, he glances down at the filters with her red lip prints on them, then takes the two that are still stuck together and drops them both into the basket. He upends the grinder into them.

“What’s wrong with the ones I got for you?” she asks.

“Nothing at all,” he says, feeling as though he will rise into the air, lift off, float inches above the floor. “I’ll eat them later.”

They are halfway across the living room, sipping coffee, hands clasped, when someone begins to hammer on the door.

"Doesn’t anybody have a goddamned wristwatch?” Rafferty stands there in a robe that has never felt pinker, holding the door open a couple of inches and looking at the two