Chapter 4
ELIAS
Lunch was on the west lawn, and Hallie was telling the ferry story.
I'd heard it start from twenty feet away, where I was pretending to review the band's stage plot with a man named Dex who tunes guitars and radiates calm.
You can hear it when she gets a table: the sound changes key.
She was doing the ferry captain's accent, and then she was doing her own voice doing the accent badly, which is the move, the one where she hands you the joke and mocks herself for making it in the same breath, and the whole table went over like bowling pins.
Her mother. My— Her father. Two aunts, the cousin, a bridesmaid I hadn't met.
Lauren laughing with her whole face, schedule forgotten in her lap.
Eleven managed rooms, and I had forgotten what she does to a table.
That's not true. I had catalogued what she does to a table and shelved it somewhere ventilated.
Twelve rooms now. This morning at breakfast made twelve: her hand light on my shoulder blade for the half-second, my name in her mouth wearing its Sunday clothes, if Sunday were a word either of us still used.
"You good?" Dex asked.
"East run of lights is fixed," I said. "Don't let the bass amp near the string rig."
The afternoon was errands, which is to say the afternoon was Theo.
He drove the golf cart like a man committing insurance fraud and narrated the island the whole way, here's where Lauren wants the send-off, here's the reef you can snorkel if my uncle doesn't get there first, here's the turn where he'd nearly put them in the hedge on Monday.
My best friend is forty-one years old and the happiest I have ever seen him, and roughly every four minutes he said something that landed on me like weather he couldn't see.
"Remember when Hal catered my thirtieth out of the truck?
" This while hauling a case of wine into the pavilion.
"The transmission died on the bridge and she frosted cupcakes on the shoulder of the interstate.
Cops came. She fed the cops." He laughed at it, a decade and change fond. "God, you two used to be a riot."
"She fed the cops," I said. "I remember."
I remember. I'd held the box lids down against the wind and watched her charm two state troopers out of a tow fee, powdered sugar to her elbows, and thought: whatever rooms I run for the rest of my life, let one of them have this in it.
"Anyway," Theo said, already three subjects on, "you need a date for this thing, man. Priss is right. It's getting weird."
"It's not getting weird."
"Six years, E." He said it light, no freight on it at all, stacking wine. "You work, you board-meeting, you leave every party by ten. I'd set you up but Lauren says I have the taste of a raccoon."
Here is what I did not say to my best friend on an island three days before his wedding: that there has been no one.
Not a date he'd count, not a night he wouldn't. Six years.
It isn't penance, exactly: penance implies a term, a number you're working down, and I'm not working it down, I'm just not able to want anyone who isn't her. I stacked the wine.
"Raccoons have excellent taste," I said. "Everything they take is shiny."
He was still laughing when Lauren appeared with a question about the send-off, and I got fifteen minutes alone in the pavilion office with the vendor list, which is where the day had been headed all along.
The email was from the accountant, subject line dry as ever: MP: consent item, lease renewal.
Batch: the bakery's landlord was renewing commercial terms, and the market had moved, and the new number was a number that would make her wince across a spreadsheet at midnight, because I know exactly how she sits with a spreadsheet at midnight, or knew.
Marlstead holds the building through the kind of structure that bores anyone who looks at it, which is the point.
The instruction took one line: renew at current terms, five years, absorb the delta.
It's the third time I've papered it this way: early, every time the market twitched, years ahead of any expiry, so the number under her never moves and she never learns what the block is doing.
The accountant will paper it as the landlord being old-fashioned.
The landlord, as far as anyone in that building knows, is a retired couple in Scottsdale who love a stable tenant.
Year two, her lease had been the thing that nearly killed it.
I'd heard it from Theo secondhand, Hal's stressed, the bakery's month to month, some investor came through, thank God, and he'd never asked which god, because the story held the way stories hold when everyone in them wants them to be true.
Quarterly consent items. A roof, a rent, a walk-in compressor two winters ago, a delivery van's transmission, of all the poetry.
She built every loaf of it herself. The bakery is hers, the hands are hers, the name on the awning is hers. All I ever bought was the weather.
Approve. Confirmed. The small green tide.
I was closing the laptop when the phone lit. MAGNUS. The name sat on the screen doing what it does, which is nothing, loudly: my father has never called to ask about the wedding, and the wedding is the only thing happening this week that I'd take his call about.
Renewal season. Celeste's father getting sentimental about signatures. The old machinery clearing its throat across four hundred miles of water.
I declined it, and went to find out what a send-off is.