Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The front display had been perfectly adequate yesterday.
The fall poetry collection, the Keats and the Neruda and the Mary Oliver, arranged by spine color in a gradient that went from deep burgundy through amber to a pale gold at the end.
She had been pleased with it. She had stood back and looked at it and thought: yes, that's right.
This morning it was wrong and she was rearranging for the third time.
The Keats needed to be further left. Or further right. The Mary Oliver was too close to the edge. The amber-spined ones were fine, but the gold ones—
She moved the gold ones.
She moved them back.
Heathcliff, in his window position, watched her with the expression of a cat who had already formed a complete theory of the situation and was waiting to be consulted.
"Don't," she told him.
He blinked.
"Reorganizing is a completely normal activity."
He turned to face the window instead, which was his version of declining to argue.
Wren moved the Keats back to its original position.
She had been in something last night for which she still didn't have the right word.
She had been in it in the amber lamplight of this exact room while Heathcliff pretended not to watch from the armchair.
And Freddie had held her like she was—Freddie had held her like she was worth holding.
Like the holding was not a transaction or a performance but just something he had decided to do with both arms and full attention.
She was in something with Freddie Gallagher.
She was also in love with whoever had been writing to her. That was real, too. That feeling was real.
These two things were both real simultaneously, and she had no framework for this.
"Right," she said to no one.
Bea arrived at nine-fifteen and knew within thirty seconds.
This was not surprising. Bea had always had the perceptive quality of someone who understood emotional weather systems. She could read a room, read a person, read a silence and tell you what it had been hiding.
It was, Wren had long suspected, why she was so good at graphic design: she saw the thing under the surface and made it visible.
She came through the door with her coat and her bag and a cardboard tray of two coffees from the cart—Freddie's cart, Wren registered this and then registered that she had registered this—and she looked at Wren and she looked at the display and she set the coffees on the counter.
"Tell me everything," she said.
"Good morning to you too."
"Wren."
Wren turned back to the display. Moved the Keats one inch to the left. "Something happened last night."
The sound Bea made was not a word. It was several feelings simultaneously expressed through a single syllable.
"After the committee meeting," Wren said. "He walked me home." She paused. "We kissed. On the pavement."
"Oliver?"
"Freddie."
"Freddie?"
Wren turned to find her with both hands around her coffee cup and the expression of someone experiencing genuine joy while also trying to process at speed.
"And then," Wren continued, because there was more and Bea would know there was more, "he came inside last night. After closing. And we—" She stopped.
Bea waited.
"It was a long conversation," Wren said. "Without very many words."
Bea's expression achieved a new register of delight.
"Bea."
"I'm not saying anything."
"You're doing a face."
"It's just my face."
Wren picked up her coffee. It was her flat white, made exactly as she liked it, and she was not going to think about that right now.
"The thing is—" She stopped. Started again.
"I'm in something with Freddie, clearly, and I don't know what it is yet.
And I'm also still—I still have feelings about whoever's been writing to me.
And those are real, too. And I don't know what to do with two real things at the same time when they're pointing in different directions. "
Bea was quiet for a moment. This was unusual enough to be notable. "How did you feel? Last night. With Freddie."
Wren thought about it. About the amber light and both his arms and the low register of his honest voice. "Safe," she said. "I felt present."
Bea nodded slowly. "And your admirer?"
"He feels…" She looked at the display, not seeing it. "He feels like a warm room from the outside. Like looking in through a window at something you want."
Bea was turning her cup in slow rotations.
"What?" Wren said.
"Nothing."
"Bea."
"I'm just thinking." She looked at the window, at the cart outside, at Freddie's navy awning and the chalk menu board and the precise way the counter was arranged. Then she turned back to Wren. "You know what's interesting about Freddie?"
"He's going to be the subject of this sentence whether I say yes or no."
"He never talks about himself. Have you noticed?"
But he had talked about himself. He'd told Wren some of his story.
"He seems to know a lot about you. He knew you were going to Oliver's vet visit before you'd mentioned it. He knew how you took your coffee before you'd told him."
Wren opened her mouth. Closed it. "That's just—" She considered this. "Some people are like that. Observant. It's just how he is."
Bea looked at her with the particular expression she wore when she was giving someone time to hear what they'd just said. "Is it?"
The word sat in the air between them, mild and specific and not quite willing to be dismissed.
Wren set her coffee down on the counter. She looked at the display, which was still wrong. She looked at the window, where the cart was visible in the morning light, already busy, a woman in a red coat accepting a cup with both hands.
There was a thing that wanted to be thought, at the edge of her mind; a shape that hadn't fully resolved yet, an outline she could sense without being able to see clearly.
She approached it and then didn't approach it, the way you didn't look directly at something faint because looking directly made it disappear.
She picked up the Mary Oliver. "I'll think about it," she said.
Bea received this with the grace of a woman who had won the exchange without pressing the advantage and turned to hang up her coat.
Oliver came in at half-past eleven, which was later than his usual visit.
He explained before she could ask that he'd had another long night at a farm out past the ridge and had come directly from there to his office and had approximately four hours of paperwork sitting on his desk waiting to be given his full attention.
"I just wanted to stop in," he said, looking slightly hollowed around the eyes with the handsomeness of a man who functioned well on insufficient sleep. "See if the Fitzgerald box set had come in."
"It's in the back."
She went to get it. She was aware, in the abstract, that she should have been watching him.
That this was prime investigative territory.
That Oliver, after a long night, was Oliver with his guard down.
That if he were going to let something slip about letters and feelings and the contents of his doorstep, this was exactly the kind of unguarded arrival in which it might happen.
She got the box set from the back room and brought it out and set it on the counter in front of him.
She was thinking about whether Freddie's copy of whatever he was currently reading was still turned face-down on the shelf at the back of the cart, and whether she'd ever actually seen him take a book out, and the specific way he'd held her hand for a few seconds in the lamplight of the shop like he was making a promise he wasn't yet certain he could keep.
"These are beautiful," Oliver said, turning the box in his hands.
"Aren't they?" Wren came back to herself. "The textile covers are new. Fitzgerald approved them herself, apparently."
"Incredible career." Oliver set the box down and looked at her with the mild, comfortable attention of a man who genuinely liked the person he was talking to. "How are you?"
"I didn't sleep particularly well."
"Store running you ragged?"
"Something like that."
He nodded, accepting this.
He never talks about himself. He seems to know a lot about you.
Wren rang up the Fitzgerald. Oliver paid, tucked the box under his arm, and said he was heading to the office, that he'd be buried in it until evening. He said goodbye to Bea, who was shelving in the back, and pushed out into the morning.
The door closed.
Outside, through the window, a figure in a slate-gray jacket moved behind the cart counter, precise and unhurried, handing a cup to someone Wren didn't recognize. Freddie didn't look up.
She found that she was thinking about Oliver.
Not about Oliver's hands, or Oliver's visits, or the evidence board in the back room with its Post-its and its circumstantial threads.
About one word, said quietly, in a voice she had come to know the register of.
About the specific weight of both arms, and cedarwood and espresso, and a man who had walked on the street side of the pavement without being asked.
She picked up the Mary Oliver from the display where she'd set it down.
She found, for the first time in weeks, that the shape of her mystery admirer in her mind was slightly—not gone.
Not gone at all. But less vivid than it had been this morning, the outlines softened, like a drawing in the rain.
Like something that was not disappearing but was being gently and persistently displaced.
She couldn't have explained why.
She put the book in its correct place. She could see it now: the right place, the display suddenly making sense in a way it hadn't all morning. She stood back and looked at it.
"Better," Bea said from behind her.
"Yes," Wren said.
She looked out of the window. At the cart. At the navy awning and the chalk board with the blocky letters and the broad shoulders of the man behind the counter who was not looking at her and who, she was realizing, had never needed to look directly at her to prove he was paying attention.