Ash and Turkish Coffee

The tuk-tuk dropped me at the end of a gravel road and refused to go further, which I probably should have taken as a sign. But I'd come five thousand miles to thank a woman properly, so I picked up my bag and walked into the mouth of the hill.

The adit opened like a dark throat in the rock. Somebody had wired a string of bulbs down the tunnel, and at the far end a steel door stood propped open with a fire extinguisher. Ash drifted down through a ventilation grate near the ceiling, fine and gray, clattering on the stone like a quiet little rain. I brushed it off my sleeve before it could settle.

"Hello?" I called into the tunnel.

"Down here. Careful on the rail."

Julie Jarecki was thirty-five the last time I saw her, and she was forty now, standing in a doorway with a starch-stained apron and a look on her face like I was a parcel she'd ordered and half expected to be wrong.

"You actually came," she said.

"I said I would."

"People say that." She wiped her hands on the apron and then, apparently deciding against it, hugged me anyway. She smelled like starch and woodsmoke. "Look at you. You're covered in ash already. Welcome to my palace."

The room beyond the door had been a mine depot once and was now several other things at once. Rescue gear hung on racks along the rough stone walls, ropes coiled neat as intestines, helmets on pegs, a stretcher bolted to one wall. In the corner sat a kitchen nook with a two-burner camp stove and a shelf of tinned things. In the middle of it all was a table under a single bare bulb, four chairs, and one of those chairs had a cushion on it, which told me which one was hers.

"This is where you work?"

"This is where I live and work, technically." She pulled the cushioned chair out and kicked another one loose from under the table for me. "The caving rescue team rents the depot from the province and I keep the gear inventoried and the radios charged. And on the side, I starch things."

"Things."

"Doilies. Doilies, lace collars, altar cloths, the occasional historical costume for the museum in town. There's a shocking market for crisp doilies in this province, Lee. Tour buses. Old ladies. It pays better than you'd think." She said it flat, daring me to laugh, and I didn't, mostly because I'd spent five years wondering what she'd done with her life and the answer being doilies somehow fit perfectly.

"I still owe you for that conference," I said.

"Chiang Mai. God, five years ago!"

"Five years. You cornered half the speakers at that coffee stand and handed me around like a business card you were proud of."

"You looked like you were about to die." She crossed to the kitchen nook and started digging through a crate. "You had just given your talk and you went white as the tablecloth and disappeared behind a pillar. I thought, that man is going to faint onto a regional editor and end his own career, so somebody has to intervene."

"You bought me a drink and stood between me and the room."

"I bought you a ginger tea and told two editors you had laryngitis so they'd leave you alone, and then I made you breathe into your cupped hands for ten minutes. You never told me what set it off."

I watched her pull a copper pot out of the crate. It was old, dented along one side, and the spout had been bent and straightened so many times it had a kink in the middle like a bad straw. She set it on the burner and looked at it with genuine affection.

"My grandfather's," she said, catching my look. "He carried it from Istanbul to Pattani in 1962 in a suitcase with all his other belongings, and then he used it every single morning for thirty years. The spout took a hit during a move and he refused to replace it. Said a dented spout pours a more honest coffee." She filled it from a jug. "So. Turkish coffee. You up for it? It takes a while and it's mostly waiting."

"I'm up for whatever's on offer."

"Sit, then. Don't touch the rope rack, it's organized in a way that looks like chaos but is actually chaos."

I sat. The bulb swung a little in a draft from the tunnel and the ash came down through the grate in slow gray spirals, catching the light. It was, objectively, a strange place to feel comfortable. It was also the most relaxed I'd felt in months.

"So," she said, measuring coffee into the pot with her fingers. "Talk. You flew here. That's not a thank-you, that's a hostage negotiation. What's going on with you?"

"Nothing dramatic. I've been freelancing. It's going fine."

"And?"

"And I've been single for about a year. Dating around. Nothing stuck." I turned my cup on the table. "It's hard to meet someone when your job is asking strangers questions and then leaving."

"That does sound like a bad system."

"What about you? Anybody starchy waiting at home?"

She laughed, a real one, head tipped back. "Nobody. Never married. Never even close, honestly. People ask and I never know what to tell them." She set the pot on the flame and adjusted it. "I like it here. It's quiet. The mine doesn't bother anybody. When there's a rescue I'm useful, and when there isn't I starch doilies and read and drink my grandfather's coffee out of cups nobody else would want. That's the whole..." She stopped and waved a hand. "That's my life. I like it. Some people hear that and look at me like I've failed at something. I haven't. I checked."

"You don't seem like you've failed at anything."

"You're the first person who's said that and sounded like they meant it." The water started to murmur. She stirred the coffee with a small whisk, watching it the way my mother watched stock pots, patient and a little suspicious. "Tell me about the panic attacks. Are they still happening?"

"Less. I know the exits in every room I walk into. That's most of the battle."

"Five years ago you didn't know that trick with the hands. I taught you that."

"You did. I use it constantly."

"Well." She smiled at the pot instead of at me. "Then you've paid me back already, haven't you. You didn't need to fly across an ocean."

"I needed to see it," I said. "The place. You, in your place. I've thought about this depot before I knew it existed, if that makes any sense."

The coffee began to foam. She pulled it off the flame twice, let it settle, put it back, the way you're supposed to. She had two glasses and one small chipped cup and she gave me the cup and kept the glass, and when the ash came down harder for a moment, pattering on the table between us, she didn't even glance up.

"Gravel from the fire pit up top," she said. "The vent pulls it through. You get used to it. Sometimes I set my cup out and let it dust the coffee, very rustic."

"You're serious."

"Absolutely not. I brush it off like a normal person." She sat down across from me, tucked one leg under herself, and looked at me over the steam. "Okay. Confession time. When you emailed last month saying you were coming to Sukhothai, I read it four times."

"It was three sentences."

"It was three sentences and I read it four times." She sipped and grimaced at the heat and drank again anyway. "I've wondered for five years whether you'd remember me at all. People from conferences, they fade. You were the one who faded on my end last, which annoyed me."

"You remembered the panic attack in detail."

"You were funny, mid-attack. You kept apologizing to the pillar. Who apologizes to architecture?" She laughed again and I felt something in my chest loosen that had been tight since the airport. "Drink your coffee, Lee. It's honest coffee, dented spout and all. And then I'll show you the rest of the depot, including the part where I keep the starched things, because there's a piece in there I've been meaning to show somebody for two years and nobody's ever been interested."

"What kind of piece?"

"A chong kraben. Old one, sheer cotton, museum quality. Starched within an inch of its life." She shrugged like it was nothing. "You'll see."

The ash came down soft between us and the coffee was bitter and sweet at once, and I thought, distantly, that I had made a very good decision flying out here, though I couldn't have told you yet how good.

We finished the coffee and she took my cup and turned it over in her hands, frowning at the grounds like they'd lied to her.

"Come on," she said, standing. "Storage room's through here. Try not to trip over the rope bags, they breed when I'm not looking."

The back room was long and narrow, carved straight into the rock, shelves on one wall and hanging racks on the other. Starched things hung everywhere in clear garment bags. Doilies. Collars. Altar cloths folded flat. It smelled like... no, it didn't smell like anything, which surprised me. I'd expected a laundry. It smelled like stone and cold air and, faintly, coffee.

"There," she said, and pointed.

She pulled a garment bag off the rack and unzipped it with the care of a surgeon. Inside was a length of cloth, long, wide, a soft brown that caught the bare bulb and went almost gold. She held it up and it moved like water.

"Chong kraben," she said. "Cotton so fine you can see through it. Probably a hundred years old, maybe older. A collector in Lampang asked me to stabilize it and then never came back for it. His loss."

"It's beautiful."

"It's also starched within an inch of its life, which is the problem. It holds a shape now. Like a grudge." She draped it over her arm. "Here's the thing. You can't really appreciate a piece like this hanging up. You have to see it worn. How it falls. How the light goes through it."

"Uh huh."

"And nobody's worn it. Two years it's hung here and every volunteer I've asked has looked at me like I asked them to wrestle a monitor lizard."

I saw where this was going about four seconds before she said it.

"You're about forty-two and reasonably limber," Julie said. "Try it on."

"Me."

"You."

"Julie. It's museum quality."

"It's my storeroom and I'm the only museum here. Ash falls on it every day through the vent. It's already got provenance, might as well have a story." She was already unwinding it from the hanger. "You wrap it around the waist, pleat the front, tuck it, roll it. It's not complicated. Take your trousers off first."

"Take my..."

"Well you can't wrap it over trousers, it'll look like a sack of rice. Boxers are fine. I'm not looking." She turned around, then turned back. "Okay, I'm looking a little. For fit purposes."

The ash picked up just then, a fine dry rain through the grate overhead, ticking on a metal shelf. I stood there with my coffee buzz and my panic-attack exit map running in the background and thought, what the hell. I'd flown five thousand miles. I could take my trousers off in a mine.