Setting 14

The grinder is a Wilfa and the lid is held down with a rubber band, and in nine years Tom has replaced the band twice, both times with a green one, though the shop had other colours.

Eighteen grams. Setting 14. Water off the boil for the count of thirty, which he does in his head at a speed he calibrated once against the kitchen clock and has not checked since. He brushes his teeth in the shower, left side first. He puts on the shirt he laid out the night before. Out of the door at 06:52, the long way round the roundabout because the short way puts him on the wrong side of the light at Commerce.

Then a Tuesday in February, the strap of his bag caught the bedpost and he went down on one knee, and there was no hot water because Nina had run the washing machine, and the beans went across the floor in a fan.

He got the beans up with his hands. Eleven seconds of grinding regardless.

Commerce was dug up. A man in a vest waved him at the river path with the flat of his hand, the way you move cattle.

The path ran alongside the river, and at the end there was a grocery shop with a bell on the door. Eggs at $4 for six, the 4 written over something else in a different pen. Behind the register, coffee in brown bags with a bird on them and a name he had never heard, roast date handwritten on a sticker, $12.

The terminal had no connection and the man behind the counter said it like weather. Tom had a fifty in the inside pocket of his rucksack, folded twice, four years old.

He carried the eggs, two with feathers still on them, and put them on the windowsill behind the monitor, where they stayed all day looking like something that had come from a different life, and he did the thing he does at work, which is a version of what he did in 1997 with better software.

He is 1,142 working days from the pension. He knows the number. He does not tell people the number, because he has heard how it sounds from other men who tell it.

Nina rang at eleven to say his ex-wife had rung her about the boiler at the old house, and that the two of them had ended up talking for forty minutes about the hedge.

The next morning Nina came down while the water was off the boil and asked what he had done, because the whole house smelled of something else. He said he’d found a shop by the river.

She stood there in the doorway with her arms folded and said she liked the new smell.

Fourteen was too fine for these, he thought, and turned the knob back four notches, and left at 06:44 heading for the river.