Chapter 6 #2
"Buying supplies. Coffee, batteries, one of those notebooks he likes, the black ones.
" Sally was watching her carefully now, the way a person watches someone carry something breakable down a flight of stairs.
"He said he's staying on a while longer.
The research with Melissa, the structures book, all that.
Said the Gulf had more to it than he figured and he's not done. "
Not done. Her hand had found the bracelet.
Her thumb moved over the smooth pieces, the way it always did, the soft green glass and the milky white worn down by forty-five years of the same nervous thumb.
Sea glass and silver wire. He'd made it for her the summer they were young and certain, and she'd worn it through every single day she'd been neither of those things anymore.
A reminder of promises kept, she told people, when they asked. It was true. She just never said which promise, or who she'd kept it to, or what it had cost to keep.
Sally's eyes went to the bracelet and then, kindly, away.
She didn't say anything. She never did. Sixty years of friendship, and Sally Morris had never once made Winnie explain the bracelet.
That was a gift Winnie had never properly thanked her for.
Never would, because thanking her would mean talking about it.
"More to it than he figured," Winnie said at last, light as she could make it. "Well. He always did chase a thing past where sensible people stopped."
She looked out the window at the sun that had broken through the morning clouds and spilled across the water. "We talked, you know. Not too long ago."
"And?"
"And nothing. Just talked a bit."
"Winnie."
"I'm fine, Sally."
"I didn't say you weren't."
"You were about to." Winnie made herself let go of the bracelet and pick up her coffee. The not-touching-it was harder than the touching had been. "I'm glad his book's going well. Melissa's good for it. Her pictures are something."
Sally looked like she wanted to push. Winnie watched her decide not to, watched the decision cross her friend's face and settle, and was grateful for it.
"Fine," Sally said. "We'll leave it." She broke a cinnamon roll in half and didn't eat either piece. "Tell me about your new one, then. The writer. Sea Glass."
That, Winnie could do. That was a relief, even, to turn toward someone else's trouble. "Fiona."
"She came by the store the other day. I about had to chase her down to make her take a biscuit." Sally frowned. "She's a sad one, isn't she? Underneath all that polish."
"She is."
"Lonely-sad. Not grieving-sad. There's a difference."
"There is." Winnie looked toward the dark cottage across the courtyard, the drawn curtains, the woman behind them who'd no doubt been awake half the night the way the wall-up ones always were.
"She tells everyone she's fine. Says it the way you'd say a password.
And she watches the couples like it hurts to. "
"And there's a husband, supposedly." Sally said supposedly like it had gone sour on her.
"Traveling, she told us at the fire pit.
Well, I've been watching. No calls that put a light in her face.
No counting down the days. A woman with a man out on the road talks about him, Winnie, if only to complain he's never home. This one goes quiet every time."
"I noticed that too," Winnie said.
"And one more thing, then I'll hush." Sally set her cup down.
"When I made her take that biscuit, I had her hand in mine a second.
There's a band of pale skin right across here—" she ran her thumb over her own ring finger "—where something sat a good long while and doesn't anymore.
You don't get a mark like that from a husband who's only off traveling. "
Winnie had seen it herself, that first night by the fire. The bare hand, and the habit the hand hadn't lost.
Sally looked over the top of her glasses. "What do you suppose it is? What's that woman hiding?"
"I don't suppose anything. It's not mine to suppose. But she's carrying something heavy, and she's carrying it alone, and I know how that goes. You carry something alone long enough, you forget you're allowed to set it down."
"Listen to who's talking." Sally's lips rose in a quick smile.
"I heard myself."
Sally laughed, and the heaviness lightened in the kitchen a little, the way it did when the two of them got going. "So what are you going to do about her?"
"Nothing. You don't do anything with a woman like that.
You don't fix her and you don't corner her.
" Winnie thought of all the ways she'd watched this same shy animal bolt before.
Melissa when she'd arrived at the cottages.
Emily after that, then Cassidy. Each of them sure the cottages were just a place to hide, until the cottages quietly became a place to heal instead.
"I leave the porch light on. I try to feed her.
I ask nothing and wait for the day she decides on her own she's tired of being alone. "
"And in the meantime you keep an eye on her."
"In the meantime I keep an eye on her."
Sally pushed back from the table, gathering her basket, leaving the cinnamon rolls because she always left whatever baked goods she brought, that was understood.
She paused with the towel in her hands, looked at Winnie with something soft and knowing, built on more than sixty years of friendship. "You always do," she said.
Then she was gone in the same gust she'd come in on, the door swinging shut behind her. The kitchen settled back into its early quiet, with the smell of cinnamon lingering in the air.
Winnie sat a while longer. She finished her coffee.
She looked at the cottage across the courtyard, dark and shut.
A lonely woman behind a drawn curtain. Then she looked down at the bracelet on her own wrist, a lonely woman behind a kept promise.
The two of them might have more in common than either would ever admit out loud.
She got up and rinsed the cups. There was a lighthouse to mind, a town to watch, and a new tenant to leave alone the right amount. Which was its own kind of work.