Chapter 1 #2
I don't know how to write down what that look did to me.
I am a person who can write a menu and a person who can write a recipe and a person who can write an Instagram caption that gets four thousand likes, but I am not a writer when it comes to that, and the truth is I have been trying to put words to that look for six years and I have never managed it.
Boone Dalton looked at me on my mama's porch like I was the last thing in the world he wanted to see and the first thing he had ever truly seen and like he was being shown a piece of his own future and like he might cry, and then a switch flipped behind his eyes and he looked away.
He looked at his plate. He looked at the rail.
He looked at my brother. He said thanks, Harp, and he ate his brisket, and he left that night at the regular leaving time without saying goodbye to me directly, and the next time I'd seen him three months later at the harvest festival he had been polite and brotherly and kind and the curtain had been all the way down.
I went back to Nashville that Sunday and cried for two weeks.
I told myself a story, in those two weeks, about Boone Dalton.
The story was the obvious one. The story was: he doesn't feel that way about you, he's your brother's best friend, you imagined it, you saw what you wanted to see, you are a romantic-minded twenty-four-year-old with a heart full of poems and you are reading into a glance, he was thinking about something else, he had heartburn, his mama just died, Harper Kincaid you need to grow up.
I told myself that story over and over until I half-believed it, and then I dated a man named Caleb who played mandolin badly, and then I dated a man named Trent who sold real estate, and then I dated a man named Jesse who turned out to be the kind of musician my brother had warned me about, and in between all of them I came home for Christmas every year and I watched Boone Dalton not look at me, and every year I watched the not-looking-at-me get a little more careful, and every year I let myself believe a little less of the story I'd told myself in those two weeks.
He felt it. I knew he felt it. I had known it the second time I saw him after that porch, three months later at the harvest festival, when he had walked up to say hi to me with his hands jammed in his jeans pockets like he was trying not to use them, and his eyes had gone to my face and away from my face about every two seconds for the whole ninety-second conversation.
A man who feels nothing for you does not have to manage his eyes.
A man who feels nothing for you can look at you.
A man who feels nothing for you is, in fact, distinguishable from a man who feels everything for you primarily by the fact that the first man can look at you and the second one cannot.
Boone Dalton had not been able to look at me for six years.
And now I was coming home for good.
I was coming home for good and I was renting a storefront sixty feet from the Iron Thorn clubhouse where he hung his cut, and I was going to be in this town every day, baking bread and pulling cinnamon rolls out of an oven and being a part of the same small life he was part of, and I was going to have to figure out, finally, after six years of carrying it, what to do with this thing.
I'd made a decision in the U-Haul somewhere around Knoxville.
I'd made it during the third hour of the Dolly playlist. I'd made it watching the road unspool in front of me and the sun catch on the underside of a hawk wheeling over a hayfield, and I'd made it with my hands on the wheel and my heart in my throat and my Big Gulp sweating between my thighs.
The decision was: I'm going to stop carrying it.
I was not going to throw myself at Boone Dalton.
I had some self-respect left, after Joelle and after Jesse and after the bakery in Nashville, and I was not going to come home and make a fool of myself on a porch.
But I was not going to spend the next six years of my life carefully managing my face every time he walked into a room either.
I was thirty years old. I was rebuilding my life from the studs.
I was opening a bakery on Main Street with my own two hands.
I was not going to keep being the girl who quietly, secretly, for half her adult life, had been in love with a man who couldn't look at her.
I was going to bake bread, and I was going to be friendly to him the way I was friendly to everybody, and if he wanted to look at me he could look at me, and if he didn't he didn't, and either way I was going to get on with my own life, in my own town, on my own terms.
I had repeated that to myself for the last forty miles.
I was repeating it to myself again now, standing in the back of a U-Haul in a thin t-shirt that was probably more see-through than I wanted it to be in the June heat, sweating a little under my arms, handing boxes of mixing bowls down to my brother on the sidewalk.
"Briar's here," Cade said.
A car door shut. I heard footsteps and a woman's voice — warm, light, faintly amused — saying "good Lord, Cade, you let her drive that thing all the way from Nashville?
" and another woman's voice answering — a little dryer, a little more direct — saying "Cade made her drive it because Cade thinks moving trucks build character. " I came down the ramp.
There were two women on my sidewalk. The first one was tall and dark-haired and wearing a sundress patterned with little blue flowers and holding a glass jar of cut flowers from her shop the size of a basketball.
The second one was shorter and curvier with hair the color of dark honey pulled up in a bandana and a tote bag full of what looked like fairy lights and bunting.
They were both smiling at me. They were smiling at me the way you smile at someone you've heard about for a year and have been waiting to meet.
"You must be Harper," the dark-haired one said. "I'm Briar. I run Bloom , three doors down. Welcome home."
"Nadia," the honey-haired one said. She set the tote bag down on the sidewalk and stuck her hand out.
"I do events at the clubhouse and the diner and just about everywhere else in this town if they'll have me.
Cade said you were taking over this spot and I figured you could use a hand making it feel less haunted. "
I took her hand. I shook Briar's hand. Briar handed me the jar of flowers — white roses and pale pink ranunculus and a riot of greenery — and she said, "First customer of yours is going to be me.
You're going to make my husband's birthday cake.
I've been waiting for somebody to open a bakery on this street for two years. "
I had not had a real friend in eight months.
Not since Joelle had stopped being a friend, which had happened, in retrospect, long before she had stopped being my partner.
I had been alone in Nashville since February in a way that had nothing to do with being physically alone — I had had roommates and neighbors and a yoga teacher and the lady at the corner store who knew my coffee order.
I had been alone in the deeper way. The way where the people who knew you stopped knowing you, and the people who had been your people stopped being your people, and your circle of trust closed down to about three feet around your own body.
These two women were smiling at me on my own sidewalk and they were holding flowers and fairy lights and asking me where to start and I felt something inside my chest crack a little along a seam I hadn't known was there.
"Y'all," I said. "Y'all, I'm going to cry."
"Cry inside," Nadia said, briskly. "It's air-conditioned. We've got work to do. Where's the broom."
The next two hours were a kind of joyful chaos.
We swept. We hauled. We unboxed. Briar set the flowers up on the front windowsill and they made the dusty empty rectangle look, for the first time, like a place a person might want to walk into.
Nadia strung fairy lights along the back counter and across the kitchen pass-through and stepped back and squinted and announced she'd be back tomorrow with more.
Cade carried boxes in and made dumb jokes and ate the cookies I'd brought from Nashville like he was getting paid by the cookie.
Briar told me about the flower shop, and about her husband Silas — Gunner , she called him sometimes, and then corrected herself, and laughed — and Nadia told me about her husband Roman and her work and asked me a thousand questions about Nashville, and I answered as honestly as I could without crying, and they let me skip the parts I wasn't ready to talk about, and by the time the front window had started catching the late afternoon light I had two new friends and a sidewalk full of empty boxes and a storefront that, while still a disaster, had begun the long slow business of becoming something.
Then a motorcycle pulled up.
I knew before I turned around.
I knew because every cell in my body knew.
I knew because there is some animal frequency a person you love walks around emitting into the air, and you can pick it up across a parking lot, across a town, across six years.
I knew because Briar glanced past me and her eyes did a small soft amused thing, and Nadia glanced past me and her eyes did the same thing, and Cade said, "About time, brother," and somebody behind me said —
"Cade told me you were back."
It was the voice. It had always been the voice. Low and warm and slow, with a little crackle of country in it, the kind of voice you could put a child to sleep with if you read out of a phone book.
I turned around.
He was standing in the doorway of my storefront with his hands at his sides and the late June sun behind him cutting his outline gold around the edges, and he was wearing a clean white t-shirt and faded jeans and the same scuffed boots he'd been wearing the last time I saw him, and his sandy blond hair was a little longer than it had been at Christmas, curling at his collar a bit, and his face had that sun-weathered look it got every summer from being outside on his land, and he was looking at me.
He was looking at me.
For one second — maybe one and a half — Boone Dalton was looking right at me, full in the face, without his manners up and without his curtain down.
I saw him do it. I saw him forget, for just a breath, that he wasn't supposed to.
I saw the same look I'd seen on a porch six years ago, only this version of it was older, and tireder, and a thousand miles further along the road, and what it said to me, plain as anything I'd ever read, was oh no. Oh no, here she is.
Then he caught himself. I watched him catch himself. I watched the curtain start to come down.
And I — Harper Kincaid, thirty years old, broke, bruised, two hours into starting over and forty miles into a new private decision — I held his eyes. I did not smile too big. I did not look away. I just held them, soft and steady, the way I had not had the spine to do at twenty-four.
The curtain hesitated.
The curtain stopped, halfway down, and Boone Dalton stood in the doorway of my brand-new bakery with sawdust light around his shoulders and looked at me a second longer than he meant to.
He said, "Need a hand?"
I said, "Yeah, Boone. I do."
He stepped into my shop.
The bee was back. Lord have mercy. The bee was back, and this time, I was not running.