Chapter 11
Susan Vance called on Tuesday morning, while Sunny stood at her kitchen counter with a dish towel over one shoulder and Chloe sitting on her foot, fastened to her shin like a barnacle.
The gallery owner wanted three more pieces for the fall youth wall, if Presley had them, and she’d pay for each the way she’d paid for the first piece.
“I’ll ask her,” Sunny said.
“Don’t ask her to make new ones,” Susan Vance said. “Ask which ones she’s already done that she’d be willing display and also part with. An artist of her caliber will already know what I’m talking about.”
Sunny found Presley at the folding card table she’d annexed as a studio, working a stub of charcoal across newsprint with the absorption of a surgeon. She didn’t look up. Sunny had learned not to make her.
“The art gallery wants more of your work,” Sunny said. “For the show in the fall. Miss Vance asked if you had any you’d let her buy and hang.”
Presley’s hand went still. She looked at the stack of finished sheets weighted under a river rock at the table’s edge: the lake at every hour, the heron in a dozen postures, the twins asleep in a tangle of limbs, a pair of hands on a guitar she’d drawn from the porch steps without anyone knowing she was there.
“She can have these three.” Presley slid them free with care. Then she laid her palm flat over a fourth, the porch one, and didn’t explain herself. “Not that one.”
“Not that one,” Sunny agreed and didn’t ask why.
As she turned away, she had a parenting moment. Presley had just done the thing that was the whole of what she wanted to teach her children. That it was okay if they wanted to keep something back, that not every true thing you made for yourself had to be handed over to other people.
Sunny had spent an entire marriage learning that the hard way. And here was her daughter, ten years old, already holding one drawing back as if she meant to keep it for herself forever.
Sunny drove the three drawings over to Apple Pie Creek, and on her way home, she swung by Main Street in Cobbler Cove to run a few errands. And that was when she felt the change.
Cobbler Cove had been bruised for two weeks, and Sunny had watched it happen like a column of figures that quit adding up, slowly and then all at once.
The out-of-town investigators had come poking into the Shoemacher fire and never quite gone away. Two unmarked sedans sat outside the fire station most days, and men in windbreakers carried clipboards in and out of it. They were unfailingly polite. That was almost the worst of it.
They asked their questions about the barn that had burned five summers ago and wrote the answers on their clipboards, turned over every old grief in the valley like spades turning sod.
The town seemed to have sorted itself into camps, and the dividing line ran straight through the people she’d come to love. At Rose’s the booths had gone quiet in a way the diner was never quiet.
Two ranchers by the window were saying, without bothering to lower their voices, that the Shoemachers were good people and a man’s barn burning on his own land was his own business and the state should go home.
In the next booth Molly Vandyke, one of the WoWS widows, sat with her coffee going cold and her mouth a flat line.
Rose moved between them with the coffee pot and a stoic expression, refilling cups.
Sunny could see, plain as day, that Rose was losing her battle with not saying anything.
Rose also clearly knew she couldn’t out-talk a half a town that had decided it would rather not know the truth.
It was the same everywhere Sunny went. At Pins ’N’ Needles, Charlotte had two workmen in to fix a water line, and they’d carried their opinions in with their wrenches.
Sunny heard Tessa’s voice come down the back hall flat and cool as the cop she’d once been, telling them they could keep their theories or keep their job, their pick.
At Buns & Roses, Grace was boxing a dozen scones for a woman who was explaining to her, kindly, the way you’d explain to a child, that certain people ought to think hard before they went pointing fingers at a sick old man.
And Grace, soft, sweet Grace, had gone a shade of white that meant she would cry the moment the door chimed shut.
To her, Sunny said quietly, “Don’t give her the satisfaction of breaking where she can see it. Don’t give any of them the satisfaction of seeing your tears.”
Grace smiled shakily at her, took a deep breath, and replied, “Thanks. I needed that.”
Sunny merely nodded because she knew exactly what it felt like to be the butt of malicious gossip and scandal. Sympathy or kindness were the things most likely to break any of the widows.
Under all of it, like a smell that had gotten into the carpet, ran the name nobody would say in front of the wrong booth.
Ruth Sanger held court at the counter of Rose’s Diner and supplied gossip freely to anyone who wanted it, leaning in, her voice pitched to carry exactly as far as she wanted it to.
Hank had asked her, weeks back, to cool it.
From the temperature of that room, Sunny gathered the asking had not taken.
She stood on Main Street in the hot, summer sun and watched her adopted town coming apart at the seams. The old useless anger rose in her, the anger of having to say nothing while people decided who and what she was and didn’t allow her a single word in her own defense.
Then she went to drop the reconciled books at the mayor’s office and found Bonnie Watson at the end of her rope.
Bonnie’s desk was buried under the town’s whole nervous system: water-board minutes, the volunteer-fire roster, a road-grading bid, a folder marked SEPTIC, COUNTY, and she was pressing two fingers to the bridge of her nose when Sunny walked in.
“Tell me it balances,” Bonnie said, without opening her eyes.
“It balances.” Sunny set the ledger down. “To the penny. You’re the only client I’ve got whose books actually do.”
Bonnie smiled, but she looked like a woman who’d been awake since four AM. fretting about her to-do list.
“There’s a candidates’ forum tonight,” Bonnie said.
“At the Grange. Dale’s Tolliver’s been telling anyone who’ll hold still that he’ll be there.
” She sighed. “He’s good at the glad-handing part, and I’m not.
I can run this town in my sleep. I have been, frankly, since way before Lucas got sick but I can’t stand up in front of three hundred people and tell them how wonderful I am.
It feels like a lie even when it’s true. ”
“But you are wonderful.”
“Thanks. But Dale doesn’t have to tell the truth. He only has to be comfortable.” Bonnie squared the septic folder on top of the road-grading folder with great precision as if she’d rather throw both across the room.
“His whole pitch is that everyone’s tired of hearing about the fire.
And everyone is tired of it. The WoWS most of all.
But we also want to know the truth at last.” Another sigh.
“He tells folks we don’t need to go digging through the ashes.
That we just need and want a little peace and quiet and half the room exhales like he just shut off an alarm.
You can’t argue with peace and quiet. People are too worn down to want anything else. ”
Sunny didn’t answer that because the thing forming in her chest wasn’t agreement. It was a fire.
“I’ll be there tonight,” was all she said.
The Grange hall filled past its fire code maximum by seven. Sunny noticed mostly because counting something was what she did when her stomach was tied in bad knots.
The WoWS had claimed two full rows down front—Rose, Natalie, Molly, and Charlotte. Grace walked in, still a shade pale from the bakery, with Tessa whose arms crossed as her gaze roved the room.
Bonnie’s fiancé, Gray Lawton, stood against the side wall where Bonnie could find him with a glance, which she did every time she looked up from her notes.
Hank came in just as the emcee got the event started with a few Grange announcements. Sunny felt Hank’s presence without even having to turn around. She did look over her shoulder, though, and saw him find a bit of wall in the back to lean against.
Madison and Jack had the whole herd of kids back at the house with Makayla and Presley as reinforcements and a stack of pizzas for hazard pay.
Dale Tolliver took the floor first, and he was good. She had to give him that, even though she hated to admit it.
He was a big, easygoing man in a clean shirt, and he worked the room the way a man works a sale barn with a joke about the coffee, a few people greeted by name, a story about his daddy that landed cozy and warm.
Then he told the crowd that the town had been through enough.
He told them they didn’t need more strangers in windbreakers crawling over their grief and being nosy.
That they needed a man like him who’d lived here his whole life, who knew everybody and their people, who would keep a steady hand on the wheel, and let folks get back to living.
The room breathed out around him, exactly the way Bonnie had said it would. Sunny watched the exhale move down the rows like wind across wheat, and her hands went cold.
Then Bonnie spoke, and she was just what she’d promised: competent, undramatic, a little dry, laying out the unglamorous truth of a town that ran because somebody balanced its books and made its payroll and kept its water clean.
It was all true and none of it landed. Sunny accepted reluctantly that nobody could make three-hundred tired people fall in love with a balanced budget.
And then Dale Tolliver, certain that he had the room, made the mistake Sunny’d been waiting all day for.