CHAPTER 12 #2
I looked at the board. The five-by-seven, proportional, captioned, inside the sequence. My best work this year, placed where Mae had decided it belonged—not where it would have the most impact, but where it would tell the most truth.
"It's a better photograph at that size," I said. And meant it.
Mae studied me the way she studied anything she was deciding to trust—full attention, no safety net. Whatever she was looking for, it was going to be something she could verify.
"All right," she said. Settled.
She picked up one end of the board. "Help me carry this down. And then you're buying me breakfast at Ridley's, because I haven't eaten since yesterday and I want the corner booth."
The corner booth at Ridley's had a window facing Main Street. Half of Laurel Creek walked past it on Saturday mornings. Mae knew that.
We angled the board down the stairs, loaded it into her back seat, and she looked at me across the roof of her car.
"We're not driving separately and pretending this is a coincidence," she said.
"I'll follow you."
She got in her car and I followed her onto the road toward Ridley's with the windows down and the Saturday morning coming in warm.
Ridley's was half-full. Saturday crowd—couples with newspapers, farmers in from the early run, two women in hiking gear splitting pancakes by the window.
The corner booth was open. Mae slid in on the window side without hesitating, and I sat across from her, and Carol came over with coffee before we'd touched the menus.
"Well," Carol said, looking between us with the particular radar of a small-town waitress who has been tracking developments. "Together this morning."
"He's buying," Mae said. "Eggs over easy, wheat toast, and tell Ray the bacon was burnt last Tuesday."
Carol looked at me.
"Same. Minus the complaint."
Carol left. Mae wrapped her hands around the mug and looked out the window at Main Street doing its Saturday morning thing—a man walking a dog, a woman carrying flowers out of the shop two doors down.
"Sandra's formal letter comes in two weeks," Mae said. "Claire files Monday. After that, the committee review is procedural."
"Okay."
"Which means there isn't another emergency after this." She looked at me now, not the window. "No board to rebuild. No panel to prep. No Diane calling at six-forty. No image package to redirect." She took a sip. "The project part of this is over."
I understood what she was doing. She was telling me the scaffolding was coming down—the practical reasons, the emergencies that had put us in the same rooms and the same Friday nights.
All of that was finished now. What she wanted to know was whether I'd still be sitting here when the structure around us was gone.
"I know," I said.
"You do better when there's a reason to show up."
That landed. She wasn't wrong. I was good at useful—arriving with the right prints and the backup plan she hadn't asked for. Being needed had let me stand next to her without either of us having to name what that meant.
"I'm not giving you a project," she said.
"I'm not asking for one."
"So what, you just show up?"
"If you'll have me."
Mae's mouth did something complicated—something less controlled than her usual almost-smile, something that flickered before she caught it. She looked at her coffee. Looked back up.
"The eggs take eight minutes," she said. "You should know I get this booth for at least an hour on Saturdays. I read the Weekender. I make notes. It's not social."
"Sounds terrible."
"It's efficient. And you're not allowed to talk through the Weekender. And you're not allowed to order the French toast, because it takes twenty minutes and holds up the table."
She slid the menu across the table toward me.
A small gesture. Mae-sized. But she'd just told me what her Saturday mornings looked like and carved out a space in them, and she'd done it by handing me the rules, which was how Mae gave you anything—by handing you the terms and letting you decide if you could live with them.
I could live with them.
Carol came back with the plates. Mae inspected hers with the same focus she'd given the board at seven fifty-three this morning, found it acceptable, and picked up her fork.
Through the window, I saw Diane's car pull into the angled parking out front.
Gary was in the passenger seat. They were arguing—Diane's hands moving, Gary's head tilted at the angle of a man who believed he was being reasonable.
She got out and walked into the bakery next door without waiting for him. He followed her in anyway.
Mae had seen it too. She watched them disappear through the bakery door and looked back at her eggs.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You were going to."
I picked up my coffee instead. Mae ate her eggs. The corner booth held the two of us the way Saturday mornings hold people—easily, with coffee and daylight and nowhere urgent to be.
She pulled the Weekender up on her phone, propped it against the salt shaker, and started reading. After a minute she frowned and turned the phone so I could see it. Regional events calendar. Maple Falls had posted their fall market dates two weeks ahead of schedule.
"They're trying to get ahead of us," she said.
"Is that a problem?"
"It's an opportunity." She turned the phone back. "I'll have a plan by Monday."
I ate my toast. Mae read her Weekender. The morning came through the window warm and unhurried, and every few minutes she'd say something sharp about a county zoning decision or frown at the screen, and I'd listen or not and it didn't matter, because she wasn't performing and I wasn't auditioning and this was just Saturday, the first one after the excuse ran out.
Mae looked up from her phone. "You're still here," she said. Not a question. Close, but not.
"Still here."
She held my eyes for a beat longer than she needed to. Then she went back to the Weekender, and I went back to my coffee, and the morning kept going the way mornings do when you've decided to stay.