Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Tammy’s on a Tuesday night in October was exactly what it had always been — worn wood, low light, the smell of something good happening in the kitchen, and Tammy herself running the floor like a woman who had catered every event in this town for twenty years and had strong opinions about all of them.
She seated us at the corner table without being asked. Tony’s back was to the wall. Mine faced the door. We had never discussed this arrangement. It had simply evolved the way small domestic negotiations evolve, quietly and by mutual accommodation, until they feel like they were always there.
“The halibut,” Tammy said, setting menus down that neither of us was going to look at. “I have four portions. After that it’s the haddock.”
“Halibut,” Tony said.
“Me too,” I said.
Tammy made a note and disappeared without ceremony. She had the gift of appearing and vanishing exactly as much as a table required, which was one of the reasons her restaurant was always full.
Tony poured water from the carafe. He was still in his work clothes — the dark jacket, the tie loosened one precise degree. He had what I thought of as a resting state of competence. The kind of man who looked like he knew what to do in an emergency without having to think about it first.
“Long day?” I asked.
“Long enough.” He set the carafe down. “Better now.”
That was as romantic as Tony got in public, which suited me fine. I had spent twenty-six years married to a man who performed affection for an audience and kept the actual version in a drawer. The private version was the one worth having.
The restaurant was half full — a couple near the window, a table of fishermen who had been coming here since before I moved to Starfall Bay, an older woman eating alone at the bar with a paperback and the focused pleasure of someone who had decided to enjoy her own company.
The harbor was dark beyond the glass, just the lights of a few boats and the distant sweep of the lighthouse beam moving in its slow reliable circle.
“You look like you’re thinking about something,” Tony said.
“The summer.”
He nodded, once. He knew about the summer. Not every particular, not every word that had been spoken in that chamber, but enough. He had chosen to know enough and not more, which I had come to understand was its own kind of generosity.
“It’s different,” I said. “The town. Can you feel it?”
“Different how?”
I tried to find the right words for it. “Like when you fix a window that’s been stuck for years. Everything still looks the same from outside. But inside it’s — easier to breathe.”
Tony looked at me steadily. “Redmond left in August.”
“I know.”
“And Hollis is gone. Whatever she was doing with those permits, that’s done.” He turned his water glass slowly. “Whether the town feels the difference from a window being fixed, or just from the people who were breaking things being removed — I’m not sure those are separable.”
“Maybe they’re the same thing.”
“Maybe.”
He wasn’t wrong, exactly. The town’s ease could be practical as much as magical.
What Redmond had been doing had been visible enough — the pressure on the council, the permits, the money moving in directions that didn’t make sense.
When someone stops pushing a thing, the thing stops moving. That was not mysterious.
Tammy reappeared with bread, set it down, and lingered exactly two seconds longer than she needed to.
“You two are very cute,” she said, and left before either of us could respond.
The halibut arrived. We ate the way people eat when they are comfortable enough together that the meal doesn’t need to perform.
Tony told me about a fender bender on Mill Road that had involved three different conflicting accounts and a lost dog.
I told him about Patricia, my Wednesday client, who had decided that once a month was not enough and had begun testing whether twice was better.
“Is it?” Tony asked.
“Ask me in February.”
He smiled. He had a good smile — rare enough to mean something when it appeared.
I broke off a piece of bread. The harbor light moved over the water. The older woman at the bar had finished her fish and was deep in her paperback. Outside, a boat engine turned over and settled into idle.
“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“Thanksgiving.” I watched his face. “Carmen has been texting me about dates. Josie’s talking about coming. Nick will drive up. Tony—“ I stopped, recalibrated. “I want all of them there. At the cottage. And I want you there too.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“All three kids,” he said.
“All three.”
Another pause. Not hesitation — he wasn’t a man who hesitated — but something he was doing more slowly on purpose, giving the thing the weight it warranted.
“That’s the whole family,” he said.
“Yes.”
“With me.”
“With you.”
He looked at me across the table, and something moved in his expression that I didn’t have a word for. Not surprise. Closer to recognition — the look of a man who had been watching a door and was registering that it had opened.
“That’s starting to seem permanent,” he said.
I held very still.
I was not sure if permanent was a word he was walking toward or walking away from. I was fifty-two years old and I had stopped being the kind of woman who catastrophized the pauses in conversations, but I was paying close attention to this one.
“Is that a problem?” I asked.
The corner of his mouth moved. “No.”
Just that. No elaboration, because the elaboration wasn’t the point. The point was the no.
“Good,” I said. “Carmen will be relieved. She’s been asking about you in a way that suggests she has opinions.”
“Carmen has opinions about everything.”
“She gets that from her grandmother.”
He raised his water glass. I raised mine.
Tammy was running a tray past the bar she stopped at our table on her way back, tucking her tray under her arm.
“You two want the brown sugar tart?” she said. “There are two left.”
“Yes,” Tony said.
“Good.” She turned to go, then half-turned back with the air of someone remembering. “Gina. Meeting tomorrow night, seven o’clock. Ruth called me this afternoon — she’s got something about Constance’s estate. I don’t have details.”
“I’ll be there,” I said.
Tammy nodded and went.
The tarts arrived a few minutes later. They were delicious. Outside, the lighthouse beam crossed the harbor, steady and indifferent and reassuring in the way of things that have done their job so long they no longer need to announce it.
I was happy.
I thought about Rosaria in her chair this morning, watching the harbor with the coffee she couldn’t drink, thinner than she’d been in August.
I was happy, and I was worried, and for now both things were true and I was going to sit in a warm restaurant with a good man and eat brown sugar tart and let tomorrow be tomorrow.
“Josie called today,” I said.
Tony looked up.
“She asked what I was doing tonight.” I turned my fork over. “I told her you were taking me to dinner.”
“What did she say?”
“She said she was glad.”
Something in his face settled, quiet and unhurried. He knew what Josie had been, and what she was becoming, and what that cost, and what it meant.
“Good,” he said.
Just that. The way he always said it.
Good.