Chapter 10
The bell over the door at Harbor Brew gave a bright little jangle, and the smell hit Fiona all at once. Dark roast. A hint of cinnamon underneath it. The good kind of warm that made a person forget it was ninety degrees outside.
She'd walked past the place a dozen times. Today she'd finally gone in, mostly because the bookshop was three doors down and she had a theory. A man like Marty Fuller would never turn down coffee he hadn't paid for.
The shop was small and bright. Nautical bric-a-brac covered the walls.
A bulletin board by the register sagged under three layers of flyers.
And in the corner, a cluster of older women had claimed a table, and they went quiet the moment she stepped in.
Quiet in the particular way a room goes when it's just been talking about the person who walked in.
"Well, look who finally wandered in." The woman behind the counter had a dish towel slung over one shoulder and a grin that took up most of her face. "I was starting to think you didn't drink coffee."
"I drink an alarming amount of it," Fiona said.
"Knew it. You've got the look about you." She wiped her hands on the towel. "Jan. I'm always here. And you're the writer out at Sea Glass."
It wasn't a question. The old reflex pulled tight inside her, the same one that woke up every time a stranger knew her business before she'd offered it.
"Word travels," Fiona said.
"Honey, in this town word doesn't travel. It teleports." Jan pulled a cup off the stack. "What can I get you?"
"Two coffees. Both black."
"Two." Jan's eyebrows lifted a friendly notch. "One of those wouldn't be headed three doors down, would it?"
Fiona kept her face neutral. "It might."
"Mm-hmm." Jan started pouring. "Marty Fuller doesn't let just anybody bring him coffee. He's particular. Some folks'd call him a snob. I won't, on account of he tips." She slid the first cup across the counter. "So. How long are we keeping you?"
"Through the fall. For now." And suddenly she realized she was planning on staying for a while. When had that happened?
"For now." Jan repeated it like she was tasting it. "Sally said you came down to write something. Big and important, she figured, the way you keep to yourself."
"Sally figures a lot."
"Sally's right more than she's wrong." Jan capped the second cup. "What is it you write? Anything I'd have read?"
There it was. The same question, the one Fiona had a whole drawer full of answers for. "Probably not," she said. "Nothing you'd know. Some nonfiction and some pieces in magazines." Two pieces.
"You'd be surprised what I know." Jan set the second cup beside the first. "And the mister? He coming down to join you, or is he the leave-her-be-while-she-works type?"
The lie was already slipping out before she thought about it. "He's the leave-her-be type."
"Smart man." Jan said it easily, and the easiness was the worst part. "Most of them want feeding and fussing the second you sit down to do a thing for yourself."
"Most of them do." Fiona reached for her wallet. "What do I owe you?"
"First one's free. Welcome to town." Jan waved her off before the wallet was even open. "The other one you can pay me for next time, once I decide if I like you."
"And if you don't?"
"Then you'll owe me double, and I'll still serve you." Jan grinned. "Go on. His coffee's getting cold, and a cold cup of coffee is no way to impress a grumpy bookshop owner."
Fiona gathered both cups and pushed back out into the heat. Behind her, before the door had even closed, the corner table started up again, low and busy. She didn't catch the words. She didn't need to.
Marty looked up when she came through the door and looked back down again, then looked up a second time when he registered the cups.
"You weren't wrong about Jan," Fiona said, setting one on the counter in front of him.
"I was not. I always tell the truth." He took the coffee like it was evidence in a trial. "What did she get out of you?"
"How long I'm staying. What I write. Whether there's a husband." Fiona blew across her own cup. "She'd have had my blood type if I'd stayed another minute."
"The Harbor Brew toll. You pay in answers." He took a sip and made a small approving sound. "Black."
"You're not a cream-and-sugar man. It would ruin the whole grim professor thing you've got going."
"I'll have you know I'm multifaceted."
"You quote Faulkner and have a back room full of books no one will buy."
"Same thing," he said, and almost smiled.
She'd meant to drop the coffee and go. That had been the plan, the way five minutes had been the plan at the fire pit, the way one quick look at the bookshop had been the plan a week ago. Then she found herself easing onto the stool by the counter, the way she had the last two times.
That was how it started. The visits.
She didn't decide to make a habit of him.
It just happened the way water finds the low spot.
She'd surface from a morning of staring at Hank Carson standing in his alley, and the cottage would feel too small, and her feet would carry her into town.
Coffee from Jan. The walk down the block.
Stepping inside, and Marty glancing up over his glasses, and the slow roll out of an hour she never meant to give away.
Jan caught on fast. By the third visit she had the second cup poured before Fiona reached the counter.
"Tell him I said the lemon poppyseed came in," Jan said, capping it. "He pretends he doesn't have a sweet tooth. He's lying."
"Everybody in this town is lying about something," Fiona said.
"Now you're catching on." Jan slid the cup over with a wink.
Some afternoons there were customers, and she'd browse the shelves while he rang them up, watching him be patient with a tourist who wanted the new thriller everyone was reading.
He'd order it for them without a word of complaint.
He saved the complaining for her, once the door had closed and the buyer went back out into the heat.
"You're a fraud," she told him after one such transaction. "You smiled at that woman."
"I smiled at her money. There's a difference."
"You like people more than you let on."
"I like the idea of people," he said. "It's the specifics that wear on me." But he said it watching her, and she chose not to examine that.
They argued about books, mostly. It was the safest ground she had.
"Welty understood that the whole world lives in one front porch," he told her one afternoon, hunting a volume off a high shelf. "She didn't need a body in an alley. She needed a woman shelling beans and something she wasn't saying."
"That's a mystery," Fiona said. "You just described a mystery."
"It is not a mystery."
"There's a secret. There's a person withholding it. There's a reader leaning in to find out." She ticked them off on her fingers. "You've simply got a snob's allergy to calling it what it is."
He turned around with the book in his hand and a look on his face like she'd pinched him.
"Agatha Christie did the front porch and the body," Fiona went on, because she was enjoying herself too much to stop. "Dorothy Sayers gave you the front porch, the body, and a man quoting John Donne over it. You can sneer all you want. You've read every one of them."
"I have not read every one of them."
"You've read most of them, and you liked them, and it keeps you up at night."
He set the book down a little harder than he needed to. "Sayers had a classical education. That's different."
"Oh, it's only literature if they went to Oxford for it."
"I didn't say—"
"You were thinking it."
He opened his mouth. Shut it. Pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, where they would sit forgotten. "Christie," he admitted, like the word cost him something, "had an ear. The plotting was a machine, but the ear was real."
"There. Was that so hard?"
"Excruciating," he said, and this time he did smile, the laugh lines crowding up around his eyes, and Fiona had to look down at her coffee.
She knew this game. A person avoiding the thing they weren't ready to say. She just hadn't expected to be sitting across the board from one who played it as well as she did.
On Thursday it was raining. A gray, warm rain that kept the shop empty.
She brought the coffee in damp, and they settled into their corners. She asked him what she thought was an easy question. How a literature professor ended up behind a register at the edge of the Gulf.
She expected the easy answer. Bad weather up north, a deal on the building, a man wanting a change.
"My wife died," Marty said instead.
Fiona went still.
"Annette." He looked down at his cup. "Cancer.
Six months, start to finish. She was thirty-eight.
" He said it plainly, the way a man says a thing he's said before and survived.
"I went back to teaching that fall. Stood up in front of a room of nineteen-year-olds and tried to explain why a comma in Faulkner mattered. "
"And it didn't," Fiona said quietly.
"It mattered enormously, the week before she got sick.
That was the strange part." He finally looked up.
"I'd spent eighteen years on literary criticism.
Building the case for why this book was serious and another wasn't. And I stood there with chalk in my hand and I couldn't remember why any of it was worth saying out loud. "
She let him continue at his own pace.
"I made it one semester. Then I sold the house and drove until the road ran out." He tipped his cup toward the window, the smeared light, the rain. "Bought a failing bookshop on a feeling. First impulsive thing I'd done in my life."
"That's not nothing," Fiona said. "Driving until the road ran out."
"It felt like running."
"It was running." She said it gently. "Running's allowed. People act like it isn't. They act like the brave thing is to plant your feet and let it all roll over you."
"And it isn't?"
"Sometimes the door's right there, and a sensible person walks through it." She turned her cup. "The detectives I read never run. They stand in the worst room in the house and ask the next question. Book after book of it."
"And you envy them."
"I think anyone would," Fiona said, and steered them off it before he could pull the thread any further.
He studied her then, longer than was comfortable. "You'd know."
"I read a lot of mysteries," she said. "Everybody's running from something. It's the only reliable plot."
He let her have it. That was the thing about Marty. He noticed the dodge, she could see him notice it, and he let it stay there between them anyway.
And that was when it rose up in her, hard and sudden, the urge to put some truth on the counter beside his.
He'd handed her Annette. The whole shape of his grief, the resignation, the running, all of it laid out plainly because she'd asked one honest question.
And she was sitting there with a marriage that had ended in February and a name she'd worn for fifteen years that wasn't even a real person, holding both of them deep inside her.
She could tell him. Drake left me. He met someone present, he said, like I was an absence. The words were right there.
Or the other thing. The bigger one. He'd ordered a few copies of F.
L. Maxwell books and griped about each one of them.
He wanted to meet the author who'd left Hal hanging on book sixteen.
She could put a stop to all of it in a few simple words and watch his face make the whole journey. It's me. I'm him. There is no him.
Her heart went to a double beat at the thought of it. Just the thought of saying it out loud.
"Fiona?" He'd noticed the silence. Of course he had. "Where'd you go?"
"Nowhere." She wrapped both hands around her cup, though the coffee had gone lukewarm. "Just thinking your comma in Faulkner mattered. For what it's worth. You weren't wrong to care about it."
"That's a kind thing to say."
"I'm an occasionally kind person." She made herself smile. "Don't tell Jan. It'll ruin my reputation."
He laughed. The moment ended, soft as the rain on the glass. She let it end, and she hated herself a little for the relief.
The rain had thinned to a drizzle by the time she walked home. Warm even now, the puddles holding the gray sky in pieces along the road.
She'd done it again. She'd sat in front of a good man who'd opened up about the most painful thing in his life, and she'd given him a comma.
A compliment about punctuation. She'd taken his honesty and paid him back in deflection, the same lies she'd been giving everyone since the day she signed the papers.
She didn't even need the lies anymore, that was the thing.
There was no danger in Marty Fuller. He'd already proven that when he shared about Annette.
He'd told her and survived telling it. He'd have done the same with hers.
He almost certainly would have understood, and that was worse, because it meant the only thing stopping her was the same thing that had always stopped her.
She was a coward. She wrote brave people for a living and she was a coward.
Hank Carson would have said it. Hank said the hard thing in chapter nine of every book, looked the witness in the eye, and named the lie. Fifteen novels of a man who told the truth, written by a woman who couldn't manage it over a cold cup of coffee.
The lighthouse came up white through the last of the rain as she reached the cottage. She let herself in, dripping, and stood a minute in the quiet.
"Tomorrow," she told the empty room. "I'll tell him tomorrow."
The room didn't believe her, and neither, if she was honest, did she.