Chapter Twenty-Two
Beth
Winter wore itself out the way it does here, grudging and gray, and then one Tuesday in late February the light came in through the shop window at a different angle—higher, yellower, with some actual warmth behind it—and I stood there with a bucket of the first ranunculus and understood that spring was going to come whether I was ready for it or not.
The town had shifted under me by then, slow and total, like a tide turning while you sleep.
I noticed it the way you notice you've stopped limping—by the absence of a thing you'd gotten so used to you'd quit feeling it as pain.
I walked into the Bluebird on a Thursday and there was no pause.
That was the first thing. All autumn there'd been a pause when I came through that door, a half-second hitch in the room while everyone decided how to look at me, and I'd learned to walk into it with my chin up and my face arranged, the way you brace for a step that isn't there.
And that Thursday it just—wasn't there. The room stayed warm.
Sherry Dukes waved me over to the counter.
"Saved you the good cinnamon roll," she said, sliding it across like we were friends, like she hadn't spent three months narrating my disgrace to four hundred people on the internet. "How's your mama? I been meaning to ask."
"She's good, Sherry. Thank you."
"You tell her I asked." And then, lowering her voice to the register people use for confidences they want overheard: "I'll tell you, Beth, I always did think you got treated something shameful. Always said so."
She hadn't. I'd read the Buzz. I knew exactly what Sherry Dukes had always said.
But I took the cinnamon roll, and I said thank you again, and I let her have her revision, because I'd learned a thing about a small town this year that I hadn't wanted to learn: it tells the story it needs to be true, and there is no profit in being the one who corrects it.
Marge Tilly stopped me by the pie case to tell me, apropos of nothing, that I had such a kind face and always had.
A man I barely knew held the door. The warmth was real and it was everywhere and it cost them nothing, and I moved through it like a woman walking through a house she used to be locked out of, touching the walls, not quite believing the doors would stay open.
Because here is the thing nobody warns you about being vindicated: it doesn't feel like winning.
It feels like watching people be kind to you with the exact same ease they'd been cruel, and understanding, all the way down in a cold place, that the kindness and the cruelty came from the same shallow well—that none of it was ever really about me.
I'd been a story they were telling. Now I was a nicer story.
The mouths hadn't changed. Only the script had.
And the same warmth washing back toward me was, I could feel it, washing away from Lola.
I didn't engineer a second of it and I won't pretend I did.
But I've lived here long enough to read the weather, and the weather around Lola Marchetti had turned.
People had started remembering, out loud, in the deadpan way this town remembers things it has decided to disapprove of, that nobody had ever actually known where she'd been all those years.
That she'd blown into town from nowhere with a sad story and a lot of charm and threaded herself into a good family at the exact moment that family's daughter-in-law was at the hospital with her dying-then-not-dying father.
Said plainly, in February light, it didn't sound brave anymore.
It sounded like a thing a certain kind of woman knows how to do.
I took no pleasure in it. I want that to be true, and most days it was.
I'd spent too many nights being the one the well got poured out on to enjoy watching it tip toward somebody else, even her.
But I'd be lying if I said there wasn't a small, cold, satisfied animal in me that uncurled an inch in the warmth and stretched.
I'd earned that inch the hard way. I let myself have it, and I wasn't proud of it, and both of those things were true at once, the way most true things come in pairs that don't comfortably fit.
? ? ?
Mari came to the shop on a Thursday, near closing.
I knew before the bell finished ringing, because Mari Vargas had not set foot in Foxglove they bloom on their own schedule and ask your permission for nothing, which is a thing I have always loved about them.
And somewhere across town, by every account I couldn't stop receiving, a man I'd spent two years loving was becoming, slowly and for real, the person he should have been all along—too late for the engagement, too late for the March wedding that wasn't going to happen now, becoming him all the same, in the dark, with nobody watching and nothing to gain.
I didn't know what to do with that yet. I locked the door on it.
I went home to Nana Ruth's throw, and I didn't cry, and I lay there a long time in the dark thinking about how you can be handed back everything you were owed and still feel the shape of the thing that's missing—and somewhere near sleep I decided that not crying, after the autumn I'd had, was its own small unlikely kind of spring.