Chapter 14 #2
"How IS Clara?" Mrs. Conley asked, settling into the chair beside Don with the air of someone who'd been waiting for this opening. "She looked so happy the other day. Ed said he hasn't seen her smile like that in years. Since before—well." She waved her hand, editing herself. "Since before."
"She's good," Jack said, tightening a lag bolt. "She's been busy with her art."
"Oh, the drawings! I've always said she's so talented. Ida showed me some of her work once — the little comic with the sailor? Beautiful. I didn't understand most of it, but the pictures were beautiful."
Jack smiled despite himself. Mrs. Conley, summarizing Tidal Lock as "the little comic with the sailor." Clara would die.
"She IS talented," he said. Meant it.
"She takes after Ida, you know. Ida was a wonderful painter before the arthritis.
Landscapes, mostly. There's one hanging in the church entrance — that big one of the harbor at sunset?
That's Ida's." Mrs. Conley leaned closer, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial level that was still audible from across the room.
"Between us, I think the art is what saved her.
After that terrible man. She stopped doing everything — stopped coming to town, stopped eating properly, Tim had to bring her food — but she never stopped drawing.
I told Ida, I said, 'The drawing is a good sign.
People who are drawing are still fighting. '"
Jack's hands slowed on the bolt.
People who are drawing are still fighting.
Mrs. Conley, for all her overbearing nosiness and inability to read a room, had just accidentally said the truest thing he'd heard all week.
The drive back to the lighthouse was long.
Not in distance — twenty minutes, same as always. Long in Jack's head. The truck rattled down the coastal road with Mrs. Conley's cookies on the passenger seat and his dad's anniversary sitting on his chest like something he couldn't cough up.
He parked. Sat in the truck for a minute. Watched the lighthouse through the windshield — the gallery railing he'd repaired, the post he'd sealed, the building that had somehow become the closest thing to home he'd had in seven years.
Then he went inside and pretended to be fine.
Clara was at her drafting table. She looked up when he came in, smiled, asked how town was.
"Mrs. Conley says hi," he offered. Set the cookies on the counter.
"Mrs. Conley always says hi. I think she says hi in her sleep."
He should have laughed. It was funny. Classic Clara — dry, quick, the kind of throwaway line that usually made him grin.
He didn't laugh. Just smiled with half his mouth and started unpacking the lumber.
He felt Clara watching him. Felt her clock the difference — the missing real smile, the missing comeback, the missing version of Jack who would have volleyed something back and kept the rally going.
She didn't ask. Just turned back to her panel.
That night, Jack cooked dinner. But he didn't whistle while he did it — the off-key habit Clara pretended to hate but always smiled at. He made the pasta. He set the table. He ate. He cleaned up.
Then he said he was tired and went to bed early.
He wasn't tired.
He lay in Clara's bed with her grandmother's quilt pulled to his chest and stared at the plaster cracks in the ceiling — the ones he'd planned to patch before winter — and thought about his dad. About Joel.
His dad, who'd built the porch Jack learned to hammer on. Who'd taught him to measure twice, cut once, sand with the grain, never against. Who'd died of a heart attack in his own shop at fifty-four, sawdust still on his hands.
And Joel. Joel, who'd been the good brother. The one who stayed. Who became a nurse, lived ten minutes from home, showed up for Sunday dinners and fixed things around the house and never once complained about the weight of being needed.
Joel, who'd died in a storm three years later. Thirty-three years old. The kind of loss that broke what was already cracked.
Jack had left Lockport six weeks after Joel's funeral.
He'd told himself it was temporary. A trip to clear his head. A few weeks on the road, then he'd come back and help Josie with Mom and figure out what his life looked like without a father and a brother in it.
Seven years later, he still hadn't gone back.
And now Josie was asking him to come home for his dad's anniversary, and his mother was too proud to beg, and Clara was in the next room probably sensing that something had shifted and being too kind to push.
Clara came to bed an hour later. She slid in beside him, her cold feet finding his calves the way they always did, and curled against his back.
"You okay?" she asked, quiet in the dark.
"Yeah. Just tired."
She was still for a moment. Her hand rested on his hip — light, not demanding.
"Okay," she said. "Goodnight."
She didn't push. Didn't ask follow-up questions. Didn't try to fix whatever she could feel was wrong.
And Jack, who should have rolled over and told her the truth — that his dad's anniversary was coming and his sister had called and the grief he'd been outrunning for seven years had finally caught up — did what he always did.
He said goodnight. And he didn't say anything else.
The distance between them was only a few inches of mattress. But lying there in the dark, it felt like it was growing.