Каарон Уоррен - The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror 2018 Edition

Of course Kumiko Mori is the first employee to show up, clear-eyed, cheerful, with a red streak feathering her hair and her signature thick belt accenting a cinched waist her boyfriend likely spans with his hands. “Morning, Mrs. Dias.”

I’ve told her to call me Dorrie. Or Doreen. Old-school, she resists. I should return to my maiden name, Lewis—I’m a custard of Welsh, English, and Finnish—but then I wouldn’t have Alicia’s final name anymore. Bill Dias is of Brazilian and Irish stock.

Kumiko picks up the sign-up sheet at the counter to see how many people want to try a tea ceremony. Zero. Her grandfather is at the ready, should we enlist enough takers. Chanoyu . Sweets served to balance tea’s bitterness. Everything spotless, arranged with flowers. Tranquility, the meaningfulness of nothing-meaning-much: Who in modernity can bear submitting to a breakdown and examination of every action and minute?

I joke about how many entertainments vie for our attention nowadays, and tea ceremonies of painstaking slowness are a tough sell.

Kumiko grins and unwinds the eternity scarf from her neck. It’s autumn; our décor is purple and gilt. She hangs her scarf and coat on the hook in the kitchen as she takes the teapots from the shelf, and she says, “I need to tell you something, Mrs. Dias.”

Why does my heart skip a beat? All the servers eventually leave, but I hate giving her up. Her beauty, grace, and hard work. The faint promise of a ceremony of tea.

“Kumiko?”

But then in barrels Jason, sleepy, mild, a decent waitperson, good with card tricks at the tables while the tea brews. He wants to be an actor. The older man he lives with might be cheating on him. He’s pleasant. Less so is Alex, dragging himself in, a lean practitioner of the faint sneer, eager to convey that he’s primed for better things when he graduates from Columbia. His financial-world parents—he lives with them—encourage his refusal to abase himself with a mice-filled, starter studio apartment. I should fire him, but he keeps his disdain subdued, and it’s hard to find help.

Kumiko unlocks the front door, and hordes on their way to work pour in for cinnamon rolls and croissants to go, and the mothers-at-ease trundle in their squalling children, babies wrinkled as piglets. I feed off the tumult of children, though Alicia was quiet. Why didn’t she bellow and scream when those boys abducted her?

A girl in a fairy princess outfit tugs my apron and says, “I like apricots!”

I kneel to meet her eyes with mine, delighted. “Guess what? I made apricot tarts last night.” All true! I treasure these unexpected little connections as victories.

The mother, a natural beauty in a ponytail, a child herself, says, “Wonderful.”

Then laughs. Because wonderful and wonder belong in wonderland.

I never remember that Alicia would be fourteen now. I live for these girls who come with their mothers, a special treat. They’re joyful in this make-believe realm I’ve made. Throwback to gracious times. Tea, gen-til-i-ty. Bite-sized salmon sandwiches. The pots warmed British-style, loose leaves if you have more time, an extra spoon for the pot. I’m not raking in a fortune, but I’ve kept my nose above water.

Kumiko carries a tray of Earl Grey. More customers sweep in. Morning rush. The walls offer murals of white and red roses, white rabbits. Fish-footmen. A queen, a chorus of humans as playing cards. A caterpillar on a mushroom, hookah in mouth; the college kids flock near that one.

I wave at Kumiko over the tables, the sea of speeding New Yorkers. She does a funny mock-dance of panic. Her red-and-white Wonderland apron is spotless. Crash! A child has dropped her fragile cup; an accident. Kumiko comforts her and sweeps it up. Alex checks his phone until he sees me glaring. Jason’s sleeves are already stained with jam.

My child once found a songbird, egg-yolk yellow, with a head wound, during a walk with us in Central Park. She fed it with an eyedropper at home. Bill and I warned it wouldn’t make it. She insisted that it would, or at least it wouldn’t die alone. She was all of five, one year left to live. She named the birdie “Dodo.” I’ll never know why. Came the dawn that the bird flapped around her room, and Alicia opened the window and chanted, “Go now, go away. Fly! Go on,” though she was in tears.

One night, as a prank, Alicia put crayons in Bill’s and my bed. Her reason was that we seemed so drained she was afraid we were dreaming in black-and-white.

When I ask Kumiko, as breakfast cedes to the lunch crowd—more sandwiches, more tiered stands with savory items on top and petit fours below—what she needed to tell me, she says, “Mrs. Dias, I got that internship at Bellevue.” Her smooth skin suddenly looks like satin balled up in a fist and then let go. “It’s full-time.”

No surprise, really. She wants to be a psychiatrist, and she deserves any portal that opens. Her future is unfurling before her. But as she gently gives two-weeks’ notice, I drop into the chair behind the counter, because the purple room is spinning.

“Hey,” she says. “Hey, Mrs. Dias. I’m so sorry.”

I say I’m glad for her. And I am. I hiss at Alex to get off his phone and stop pretending he can’t see the guests at Table Five waving their arms as if they’re in a lifeboat. For a horrid moment, I imagine unlocking the drawer near the register, extracting my silver pistol, and scaring the dumb grin off his spoiled face.

“I’ll come back with my grandpa if you get the sign-ups for a tea ceremony,” Kumiko whispers, an arm around my slumped shoulder. Jason glances my way as he passes with a lethally large serving of éclairs. What is wrong with me?

There’s work to be done, it never stops; I hug her, flooded with a vision of Kumiko in her late twenties, married, telling a depressed patient in a sea of tears that there are endless reasons to go on. Her office has bronze statues of naked bodies. On the wall is a picture colored by the son I figure she’ll have, a smiling family with a cat, all bigger than their house.

Alex forgets the chutney requested by two grand dames at Table Three for their walnut bread. They declare, in ringing tones, that they did not ask for the jasmine teabags; they want the expensive Tienchi Flower, twelve dollars a cup.

Jason approaches them and says, “Shall I fix that?”

“Someone should!” trumpets one with so much plastic surgery that her nostrils are holes, her head a skull. She seems ready to start throwing the dishes.

“Where is the manager?” asks her friend, wearing an honest-to-God turban with a jewel on it, like the kind favored by fraud magicians who saw people in half.

Am I invisible? Alex stands helpless, a pleading expression trained on Jason for rescue. Much of my tearoom is staring.

“Shall I get their tea?” whispers Kumiko. “Or just kick their asses?”

She does make me smile.

Because she knows what to do without being constantly told, Kumiko sidles into the kitchen, unlocking the cupboard where I store the expensive stuff. I have some Yellow Gold Bud—it sounds like weed—painted edible gold: $120 an ounce.

Turban Lady launches into a tirade about the city falling apart; I gesture at Alex and Jason to attend to the rest of the room, to distract it, as I force myself to coo at the women that we’ll put everything right. Did they know Tienchi Flower—a refined choice!—relieves pain and cure rashes?

They assault me with a barrage of nonsense: Is the water in my Wonderland Tea Shop drawn from the tap, or do I have a proper reverse-osmosis system? Did I bribe some inspector to grant me that “A” grade? Why do so many menu selections start with “M”—mountain mint, marvelous mango, mascarpone, macaroni, moon cakes, and much about melons? Molasses. They suggest I need a haircut. I venture they needn’t be rude. Why is the Duchess on my mural so fatheaded? Why can’t I say what I mean? Why is the clock on the wall five minutes fast? Are the macarons—another “M”—stale? Why are crumbs on their butter knives? Why is my expression blank; why am I trembling?