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She went back to the counter.
* * *
Allison looked around the café.
She wasn’t sure what she was looking for... confirmation, maybe, or distraction, or simply the familiar comfort of a room she’d been finding her way back to for a month now. The couple at table three she recognized. Karen and David, something, she’d met them at the farm stand and forgotten their last name. The woman at the far end of the counter with the book she’d seen at The Brook before, always the same corner, always a different book.
And in the corner booth, in the back of the room, where she hadn’t registered him when she’d come in...
Shane Colter.
Alone. Coffee in front of him, his travel mug, the dented steel one. He wasn’t looking at it. He was looking at the table like someone who wasn’t looking at the table, who was looking at something considerably further away and the table was simply in the direction of it. His hands were around the mug but not quite holding it, resting against it, the way you held something warm when what you needed was the warmth rather than the thing.
She looked away before he looked up.
She looked at her pie.
She thought about nostalgic. About something you used to have, or something you almost had. She thought about the way Shane had said I used to ask myself that in the workshop on Thursday, which had not been an answer and had told her everything.
He was still looking at the table.
The pie of the day was apple.
She picked up her fork.
* * *
It was the best thing she’d eaten in recent memory, which was notable because the cinnamon roll had set a high bar.
It wasn’t the flavor exactly, the flavor was excellent, cinnamon and apple and the good pastry crust, all of it exactly as it should be, but there was something underneath the flavor, or woven through it, that she was beginning to recognize as distinctly Merrybrook. The quality of food made in this town that tasted like more than its ingredients. Like it had been made by someone who understood not just the recipe but the reason for the recipe.
She ate it slowly.
She thought about something she used to have. She thought about the apartment in the city, which she had not missed even slightly, and about Ryan, whom she had been thinking about less and less without noticing, and about the version of herself that had spent two years being available to someone who hadn’t been available back.
She thought about Merrybrook in September, which she had not used to have and had not almost had and was having now, and about the feeling she got on the walk to school in the morning, and about a classroom with a sticky window and a view of the mountain, and about the sound twenty-two kids made when they were all concentrating at once.
The pie tasted like being a little sad and a little hopeful at the same time, which she hadn’t expected and which was, she decided, the most honest flavor she’d encountered in a long time.
She finished it.
She sat for a few more minutes. She didn’t look at the corner booth again. She left what she owed on the table and she said goodnight to Nora and she went out into the cool October air.
* * *
She was halfway home when she took out her phone.
the pie thing is real she texted Lauren.
Three minutes passed. She was almost at Lakeview Lane when her phone buzzed.
I KNOW Lauren replied. do not ask nora follow-up questions she just smiles. did you get the apple
Yes
oh Lauren sent back, and then: are you okay
Allison looked up at the gap in the spruce trees at the end of her street, where she could see Clearwater Lake reflecting the stars, the water black and still and enormous.
