Page 104
And underneath all of that, colder and older, was the thing he had been carrying since long before August.
People came to Merrybrook to get well.
Nobody said it out loud, but everybody who had lived here long enough knew it. Rory called the town retentive, and it was, but it wasn’t a cage. People came here broken in some quiet way and the town held them for a while. The coffee and the lake and the pie and the mountains held them. And some of them got well and stayed. And some of them got well and remembered they had a life somewhere else, somewhere with better cell service and a bigger grocery store and people who had known them before they broke, and they went back.
The woman from Billings had gone back.
He had watched it happen. He had told himself that was exactly why you kept a certain distance from the warm temporary things.
Allison had come here after someone who didn’t choose her. She’d told him that much, in pieces, never the whole of it, and he had never pushed for the whole of it because it was hers to tell.
What if the pieces had called.
What if she had laughed like that because something from before had finally said the thing she’d been waiting to hear.
What if he was only the lake and the coffee and the pie. The thing that held her while she got well.
He didn’t let himself finish the thought. He went and restocked the fastener wall instead, and every box went on the right shelf, and he felt worse.
* * *
He took out his phone at lunch.
He stood in the back room among the stacked lumber where Doug couldn’t see him and opened her name and looked at the last thing she’d said to him.
Propane’s good. Friday was good.
He typed Everything okay?
He looked at it. She had already told him everything was okay. Asking again was the same as telling her he didn’t believe her.
He deleted it.
He typed You looked upset this morning.
He deleted that one faster. It made it sound like her face was his business.
He typed Who were you
He stopped.
He looked at those three words sitting in the little box and felt something close to disgust, sharp and immediate, like grabbing a hot pan by the handle. He held down the delete key until every letter was gone. Then he put the phone in his pocket and stood in the cold back room breathing for a minute.
That wasn’t him. He wasn’t going to let that be him.
He sent nothing.
* * *
She texted him at six forty that evening.
He was locking up. He felt it buzz against his leg as he turned the key, and he stood on the dark sidewalk under the hardware store sign in the cold and took the phone out.
Dinner Thursday? I’m making soup, which I’m actually good at. That’s not me being modest, that’s just the truth.
A little smiling face.
He read it standing under the sign.
