Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
NINA
Ireopen the café on a Tuesday, because Tuesdays are slow and if I’m going to be rusty, I’d rather be rusty with an audience of six than sixty.
However I’ve somehow managed to forget that it’s May and this is Sea Salt Bay, which means families in wetsuits, little kids with salt-encrusted hair, and sand all over my floors.
Is this what grief does to you? Does it blank out memories and knowledge that were once habitual but now are mere flighty thoughts that drift into the air?
Chips watches me from his bed by the counter – the fancy orthopaedic bed Tom brought over this morning, along with his tablets and a bag of food and a handwritten list of his preferences that I’m fairly sure was meant to be ironic but also contained genuinely useful information.
Doesn’t like his water bowl near his food bowl.
Prefers to sleep somewhere he can see the door.
Will pretend to be starving regardless of when he was last fed. Do not fall for it.
‘Your previous owner was very thorough,’ I tell him.
Chips sighs heavily. He’s heard this before.
The café needs work. Three weeks of sitting empty has left it dusty and stale, the air thick with the smell of a space that hasn’t been breathing.
I throw open every window, prop the door wide, let the sea breeze do what the sea breeze does.
Then I start cleaning – surfaces, counters, letting the coffee machine run through its cycle three times until the grinding noise stops and the first shot pulls clean and dark.
My hands remember the order of things before my brain catches up.
Stock check, fridge inventory, the quiet geometry of a kitchen put right.
I’ve been doing this since I was twenty-two, when I took over from Mum and pretended I knew what I was doing until I actually did.
Twelve years. More than a third of my life, measured in coffee grounds and cinnamon buns, and the particular satisfaction of a space that answers to me.
The café comes back to life around me, and something in my chest eases that I hadn’t realised was tight.
By noon, the place looks like itself again. Clean counters, fresh flowers on the tables – just garden roses from outside, nothing fancy – and a new menu board that I spend forty-five minutes on because my chalk lettering has apparently atrophied.
‘What do you think?’ I ask Chips, stepping back to assess.
He lifts his head, considers the board, and puts his head back down.
‘Harsh but fair.’
I flip the sign to OPEN and wait.
Bill and Frankie are first through the door, which is so predictable it’s almost funny.
‘Heard you were back,’ Bill says, sliding onto his usual stool. He’s got his fisherman’s tan and his RNLI polo and the expression of a man who’s been sent on a reconnaissance mission by his wife.
‘Word travels fast.’
‘Word travels at the speed of Dot.’ Frankie appears behind him, already scanning the menu board.
‘She called me last night. Said you’d been spotted pulling up outside, and did I know anything about it, and why hadn’t anyone told her you were coming back, and was there something going on with you and Tom Darcy that she should know about. ’
‘There’s nothing going on with me and Tom Darcy.’
‘That’s what I told her. She gave me one of those looks.’ A staged pause. ‘You know, the inquisition when she looks through her glasses at the end of her nose.’
I roll my eyes and laugh.
‘He brought over the dog. That’s all.’
‘The dog.’ Frankie glances over at Chips, who has lifted his head at the mention of himself. ‘That’s the coast-path dog that Tom rescued from the gorse? Why’ve you got it?’
‘His name is Chips.’
‘Chips.’ He says it slowly, testing it. ‘Tom Darcy found a dog and named it Chips. That’s adorable. That’s disgustingly adorable.’
‘Tom didn’t name him. I named him.’
‘Even better. You named the dog together.’ Frankie turns to Bill, face lit like he’s been gifted an unexpected present. ‘Dot’s going to lose her mind.’
‘Two lattes,’ I say. ‘On the house. Please stop talking.’
‘Can’t stop talking,’ Frankie says cheerfully. ‘It’s my primary skill. How was Truro? How’s your mum? Are you back for good or is this a trial run?’
‘Frankie,’ Bill warns.
‘What? I’m showing interest.’ Frankie’s expression tells the truth. He’s scavenging for gossip like the treasure hunters out on the sand with their beeping metal detectors.
I make their lattes and let Frankie’s questions wash over me, answering the easy ones, deflecting the hard ones, and by the time they leave – forty minutes later, three pastries consumed, enough gossip exchanged to fuel the village for a week – the café feels warm and used and alive in a way it hasn’t for three weeks.
This is what I missed. Not just the café, but the rhythm. The conversations that pick up where they left off, the sense of being woven into something larger. The feeling of being needed for something as small and daily as a latte.
Chips has fallen asleep. I top up his water bowl – away from his food bowl, as per Tom’s instructions – and get back to work.
Tilly comes in at two, with her knitting and her opinions. I’ve been slammed with tourists since Frankie and Bill left.
‘The board looks good,’ Tilly says, settling into the window seat she’s claimed as her own for the past six years. ‘Better than last time. Your Qs have improved.’
‘Thank you. I practised.’
‘On what?’
‘A napkin. Several napkins. I may have gone through a whole packet.’
‘Dedication. I respect it.’ She pulls out her current project – something purple and complicated – and fixes me with a look. ‘You doing all right?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘Hmm.’
‘That’s a very loaded “hmm”, Tilly.’
‘It’s a concerned “hmm”. You disappeared for three weeks. People worried.’
‘I was at my mum’s. People knew where I was.’
‘Knowing where you are isn’t the same as not worrying.’ Her needles click steadily, a rhythm I’ve come to find soothing over the years – the sound of someone who is not going anywhere. ‘Tom checked on your fuchsias every day. Did you know that?’
‘I’ve been informed.’
‘Dot kept count. She has a tally.’
‘Of course she does.’
‘Seventeen visits. Eighteen if you count the time he just stood outside looking at them and then left.’
I pick up a mug and wipe away a smear across its surface.
‘That’s very Tom,’ I say.
‘It is very Tom.’ Tilly’s needles pause.
She holds her knitting in her lap and looks at me directly, the way she does when she’s about to say something she considers important.
‘That boy has been looking after things that aren’t his business for as long as I’ve known him.
Which is longer than you’ve been alive, so I’m speaking with some authority here. ’
I pick up a cloth and start wiping down the counter by the window. It doesn’t need it. My hands need to be busy.
‘I’m just saying,’ Tilly continues, needles resuming, ‘it’s nice to see you back. And it’s nice to see that dog of yours. And it’s nice to see Tom Darcy smiling again, which according to Dot he’s been doing since yesterday evening. Draw your own conclusions.’
‘I’m not drawing any conclusions.’
‘Suit yourself.’ She turns her attention to her knitting, and the conversation moves on to safer topics – the weather, the tourists, the ongoing drama of the parish council’s attempt to install new benches on the harbour front.
I let it wash over me and try not to think about Tom Darcy, standing outside a closed café, looking at fuchsias that weren’t his, eighteen times.
Maisie arrives at half three, still in her school uniform, bag dragging on the floor behind her, and Chips’s lead in her other hand. Since Reuben has been signed off childcaring duties, I have Maisie some afternoons after school, just like I used to before I shut the café temporarily.
Wait. Chips’s lead.
‘He was outside,’ she says, before I can ask. ‘Just sitting by the door. I think he wanted to come in but he couldn’t work the handle.’
‘He’s supposed to be inside. I put him in the garden for five minutes.’
‘He escaped.’
‘Clearly.’ I take the lead from her and Chips wags his tail, entirely unrepentant. ‘Thank you for catching him.’
‘I didn’t catch him. He came to me.’ She climbs onto a stool, her feet dangling a good six inches from the floor. ‘Dad said you were back. He said I shouldn’t bother you on your first day but I’m not bothering you, am I?’
‘You’re not bothering me.’
‘Good. Can I have a cinnamon bun?’
‘You can have a cinnamon bun.’
She eats it the way she always does – pulling it apart in layers, saving the gooey centre for last, giving her full attention to the task. Maisie does everything with full attention. She’s eight years old and already has the focus of a surgeon.
‘Isla says the baby is kicking,’ she tells me, through a mouthful of pastry.
‘That’s so exciting. How do you feel, becoming a big sister?’
‘I’m going to teach it things. Dad says I can’t teach it to climb trees until it’s at least two, but I think that’s too long to wait.’
‘Two seems reasonable. Babies are quite small.’
‘I was small and I learned to climb trees.’
‘How old were you?’
She considers this. ‘I don’t remember. But I was probably younger than two.’
I decide not to argue with this logic. ‘What else are you going to teach it?’
‘How to find crabs. How to skip stones. The names of all the boats in the harbour.’ She ticks them off on her fingers, sticky with cinnamon. ‘Isla says I can help choose the nursery colours. I said yellow because yellow is friendly. She said that was a good choice.’
‘Yellow is a very good choice.’
‘I know.’ She finishes the last of her cinnamon bun and licks her fingers with methodical thoroughness. ‘Dad says they’re calling it Peter if it’s a boy.’
The words land in my chest, soft and sharp at once. The same landing as yesterday, when Tom said I think Peter is a good name delicately.
‘I heard that too,’ I say. ‘I think it’s lovely.’
‘Were you sad? When Isla told you?’
‘A little bit. But a good kind of sad. Does that make sense?’