Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
Although so much has softened between them, Toby still doesn’t put his book down when Clemence enters the bookstore the following day.
“I don’t need to,” he tells her. “There are jingle bells on the door. And I know it’s you. Who else would it be?” Crampton, beside him at the counter, is unruffled by Toby’s attitude, because Crampton has never expected Toby to be anything other than exactly who he is.
But Clemence is feeling less generous. She’s thinking of what her friends said, of what they’d think if they saw him now, even of what judgment could lie behind Crampton’s neutral expression as she watches Clemence accept Toby’s rudeness.
Clemence has also come looking for reassurance, and this isn’t it.
“Don’t you think you could still say hello?
” she asks. “Isn’t that just common courtesy to greet a fellow human being? ”
“Arbitrary rules.” He waves her off. “And anyway, I was in the middle of a scene.” He slouches back over the book.
“Don’t you worry that he’s putting off the customers?” Clemence asks Crampton.
“Well, he’s certainly not putting you off. You’re here, and this isn’t even your shift.”
“But it might be the last time you ever see me,” says Clemence. “I’ve come to say goodbye. I have a meeting with someone called Mary-Ann Arbuckle today.”
Crampton’s brow furrows, but a different furrow from her usual furrow. Her entire face is rearranged. “Now why would you go and do that?” It’s the most shaken Clemence has ever seen her.
“So you know Mary-Ann Arbuckle?”
“Does she ever,” says Toby, speaking without being directly addressed, so this must be a special occasion.
“Mary-Ann Arbuckle is the only person in all of history to be impeached by the Business Improvement Association,” explains Crampton. “A dark time in our history.”
“Is she the one who’s been calling you racist?” asks Toby.
“It was actually ‘fascist,’” says Clemence.
“Well, of course it was,” says Crampton.
“Mary-Ann is passionate, but not very bright. She’s the one who came after me about my cleaning my windows.
You know, before you did.” She’s pointing at Clemence, who feels unfairly implicated.
“She wanted online entrepreneurs to be able to join the bia, which made no sense. She kept calling me a ‘girlboss,’ and wanted me to teach her how to—so she said—‘build an empire.’ And when I told her the key was inherited wealth, she didn’t like that, and she started calling me a fascist, but really she was just angry that I wouldn’t pay for her online course, something about funnels.
She had it in for me after that, but I think she’s also politically confused.
She was using one of the storefronts as a gallery space, but she never paid the rent, and refused to resign from the BIA executive, so we had to take matters into our own hands.
She started up the artisan market after that, and I guess the drama continues. ”
“She’s accused us of trying to steal her vendors,” says Clemence.
“But it’s borrowing, really. I thought it might help our profile to feature some artists beyond whoever it was who’d made all those toilet-paper covers with the doll heads that somebody donated three boxes of.
Plus a couple of people selling succulents signed on. ”
“So more of an homage, then,” says Crampton, “than outright thievery.”
“Right?” says Clemence. Toby keeps on reading, and she envies him this obliviousness, and his knack for avoiding entanglement in the lives of other people—at least until she came along. But his oblivious makes her furious, too. “It’s not unreasonable,” she says.
“It’s not unreasonable,” Crampton agrees. “But Mary-Ann Arbuckle is far from a reasonable person. I hope you’re not meeting her alone.”
“I’ve got my landlady coming,” says Clemence. Toby still hasn’t looked up. “And the reverend.”
“Well, good,” says Crampton. “You’ll have God on your side.”
Toby moves to turn his page again, but Clemence stops him.
She snatches the book right out of his hand.
“Toby, can you come here for a minute?” she calls over her shoulder, already halfway down the aisle toward the back of the store.
“There’s something I thought I saw … under the stairs.
” She’s hoping he’ll follow, and he does, albeit falteringly, and maybe only because he wants his book back.
Crampton is calling out from behind them, “The bulb’s burned out! I’m surprised you saw anything in there. Somebody needs to remind me …”
Clemence pulls Toby inside with her and closes the door.
“We can’t do this now,” he whispers urgently, though Clemence suspects he’d go along if she insisted.
The darkness, those confines, the smell of the books—something Pavlovian makes it seem like there is no other way to proceed.
But that’s not what Clemence is here for. Plus she’s still got her coat on.
“Toby,” she says. “I’m scared of this Mary-Ann Arbuckle person. And then I came in here hoping you and Crampton would tell me I was being ridiculous, but now I feel even worse.”
“Oh,” he says. They’re standing the way they always stand, close together because there’s no other option in such a small space, and now he puts his arms around her shoulders the way a normal boyfriend might.
“Well,” he says, buying time, still thinking.
“She’s a scary lady, it’s true. But she’s probably unlikely to murder you in broad daylight.
” Clemence sinks into him, the way she used to sink into her husband.
Is this codependence? What would Dr. Penelope think?
“I’m sorry,” she says against his shoulder. Wasn’t the point of this new life she’d made that she wouldn’t have to need anybody like this?
But Toby says, “It’s fine,” smoothing her hair, speaking in the most soothing tones he’s capable of.
He’s missing so many essential emotional parts.
And yet. “And I’d say you even have a good chance of coming out alive,” he says.
“You’re going in there three against one, which makes it almost even. ”
“Almost?” It’s hot in the closet. Clemence wants to be with Toby, but not like this. “Couldn’t you come over tonight? The sheets are fresh. Just this once?” She’s desperate, and she sounds it.
And he seems to know it, too, because he says, “I guess so,” instead of refusing. And then he buries his face in her neck and starts kissing her. “I don’t know what it is you do to me,” he says. “You’re the only person I can’t say no to.”
“And also the only person who ever asks you for anything.”
“You really are,” he says, beginning to unzip her coat. “I don’t know what you’re thinking.”
“I’m thinking we have to get out of here before Crampton gets wise to us.”
“I think she’s wise already,” he says, before running his tongue along the curve of her ear.
“Toby, no,” she says. “I’m getting heatstroke.
And I’ve got to get to this meeting. But come tonight, okay?
There’s a whole world outside of this closet,” and, to prove it, she reaches to open the door, to let the light in, and there is Toby’s face, white and earnest. Does she really want this?
She takes a deep breath and walks out into that world. So what if she does?
But Toby doesn’t move. She turns to him, “What?”
“My book,” he says. “I need it back.”
Clemence is still holding it. She passes it to him, before reaching back into the closet to grab another book out of the darkness.
And as they walk back through the store, Clemence is speaking loudly, conspicuously, “Thanks for helping me find this,” emphatically waving the paperback in her hand.
She sees her luck could have been worse—a copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People, only mildly mildewed.
She insists on buying the book to save face with Crampton, even though Crampton sees through her, that narrowed look.
Crampton sees everything. But it will make a good enough donation to the jumble sale, Clemence thinks, as Crampton wraps it in brown paper, and then she and Toby wish her luck in the afternoon’s endeavour.
“You’ll be fine,” Crampton tells her, but her voice is more tentative than Clemence has heard her sound before.
They assemble at the church beforehand, and while Mrs. Yeung is the same as ever, Reverend Michelle is jittery, awkward, thinking up nonsensical reasons to stall their departure.
She needs to water the plants in her office, she explains, and so Clemence and Mrs. Yeung wait in the hall, and it is a very bad sign indeed if Reverend Michelle is off her game.
Usually her capacity to love and appreciate difficult people is her superpower, including any drunk man with no pants on wandering into the sanctuary, the woman who used to shoot up in the narthex, and the old guy with visions who screams during her sermons.
Convicted murderers on parole had been welcomed into the congregation, so you would think that Reverend Michelle might have room in her heart for practically anyone, but Mary-Ann Arbuckle has brought her to the brink.
Not that Reverend Michelle will admit to being rattled. “Mary-Ann is harmless,” she explains, as they make their way to the coffee shop by the fromagerie. “You’ve got to admire her really—the passion, that fire.”
“Even if it’s hellfire?” offers Mrs. Yeung.
Reverend Michelle ignores the comment. “She’d actually be a useful person to have on our side,” she says finally, carefully, after taking a look up and down the street and around the corner to make sure Mary-Ann Arbuckle wasn’t waiting to ambush them. “If only she were remotely tameable.”
Reverend Michelle pauses once they reach the coffee shop entrance. “Are we ready?” she asks. The other women nod, and they go on in.