Chapter 12
MAPLE
I was behind the counter refilling coffee cups when Mira walked in without ordering anything.
She just sat at the counter next to one of the regulars.
She put her purse on the stool next to her.
She was not here for the food. She was here for a conversation.
I could read it in the set of her shoulders.
I could read it in the way she did not smile.
I could read it in the particular energy that she brought in with her, the energy of someone who was about to push you toward something whether you wanted to go or not.
I said, “What’s wrong.”
She said, “You’re wearing his flannel.”
I looked down. I was wearing a shirt that did not belong to me, a men’s flannel in forest green that smelled like Knox’s laundry detergent and the cold air of his apartment and specifically like him.
The tag said medium, which was funny because he was anything but medium.
The sleeves were long on me. The body was loose.
I had not thought about it this morning when I grabbed it from the back of my chair.
I had just grabbed it because it was comfortable and it was warm and it smelled like the one thing in my life that was making sense.
The thing that was making me not-cold. The thing that was making me not-alone.
The thing that was maybe making me happy, which was terrifying because happy things could go away.
I said, “It’s cold.”
Mira said, “You’re sleeping with him.”
I said, “Define sleeping.”
She said, “Maple.”
I said, “Fine. Yes. I’m sleeping with him. Yes. We’ve been sleeping together for—I don’t know, a week and a half. More. Since the storm. It’s complicated.”
Mira sat back on the stool. She ordered a coffee.
She waited until I had poured it before she continued.
The regular next to her moved to a booth, giving us the space for whatever was about to happen.
This was the thing about Mira. She understood that some conversations needed private space.
She understood that some moments were too big for an audience.
She said, “How complicated.”
“He’s the goalie coach. He’s living in my apartment.
He’s… I don’t know. He’s smart and he’s quiet and he has not asked me for anything except to keep showing up.
He brought me a generator during the blizzard and he fixed my bike—not my bike, Theo Jr.’s bike—and he sits at my counter and he eats pie and he doesn’t look at me like I’m falling apart, he just looks at me like I’m happening.
Like I’m the thing that is happening in his life right now.
And I think I might be falling in love with him, which is insane because I’ve known him for three weeks, and I cannot afford to fall in love with someone who is probably going to leave, and—”
“Maple.”
“Yes?”
“He’s not going to leave.”
“You don’t know that. He came here to disappear.
He told me that himself. He didn’t come here because he wanted to stay.
He came here because it was the least bad option.
And eventually the least bad option is going to feel boring or suffocating or both, and he’s going to remember that he came here to be alone and he’s going to figure out that I’m not compatible with alone.
He’s going to realize that he made a mistake.
He’s going to pack his truck and he’s going to drive somewhere else, somewhere where nobody knows his name or his history or anything about him. ”
Mira said, “Has he said that.”
“No.”
“Does he look at you like he’s planning to leave.”
“No.”
“Then stop inventing catastrophe,” Mira said.
“Accept that a man showed up and he is choosing you every single day and stop trying to talk yourself out of something good. You do this. You catastrophize your way out of good things because it’s safer than hoping.
It’s easier to sabotage something yourself than to let someone else do it for you.
But you’re doing it to yourself, Maple. You’re the one sabotaging this. ”
I said, “He hasn’t told me anything about his past. He hasn’t told me anything about why he came here or where he came from or what he’s running from.
He just appeared and he’s been kind and he’s been present and that’s not a foundation for a future.
That’s a house built on sand. That’s a life built on a lie. ”
Mira said, “He told you about his brother.”
I looked at her. I felt my chest tighten.
She said, “You told me about the steakhouse. You told me that he told you his brother died and that he hadn’t told anyone in eight years.
Maple. That’s a foundation. That’s a man saying ‘I trust you with something I don’t trust anyone with.
’ That’s not nothing. That’s everything.
That’s the bedrock. That’s the thing you build a future on. ”
I did not say anything. I was thinking about Knox at the steakhouse, about the way he had held my hand across the table, about the way his voice had changed when he told me about Caleb.
About the way he had said eight years like that was the measure of his grief.
About the way he had held my hand while I cried.
About the way he had driven home with one hand on the wheel and one hand holding mine, and we had not talked about anything heavy for the whole drive because we had already said everything that needed saying.
About the way he had kissed me on my grandmother’s porch and it had felt like a promise.
She said, “Don’t lose the diner over a man.
The diner is older than him. The diner will be here when you’re sixty and the man is long gone.
But don’t lose him over fear, either. The diner is just a diner.
He is just a man. But together, if you’re careful and honest, they could be a life.
And you have to decide if you’re the kind of person who gets to have that.
I think you are. I think you’re the kind of person who deserves it.
But you have to decide to believe that too. ”
She left at 10:15 a.m. to open the post office.
She left me sitting at my own counter in Knox’s flannel shirt, understanding that I had been running away from the same thing I was running toward, that I had been trying to catastrophize so that I could not be surprised by catastrophe, and that this particular thought pattern was not going to serve me when a man was actually trying to build something with me, one day at a time.
At 11:47 a.m., the front door of the diner opened.
The team came in. All of them. Wilder, the captain, with the green eyes and the divorced energy, the kind of man who had learned to carry sadness like it was part of his job description.
His shoulders were broad. His handshake was firm.
He was the kind of captain who knew how to make men feel welcome, how to bind them together, how to make them believe in something.
He had probably done it a hundred times before. He was good at it. He was a natural.
Banks, the quiet one with the thin face and the haunted eyes and the 5-year-old daughter he was clearly trying to raise right, alone, after his wife.
There was a particular sadness about him, but it was not the kind that made him closed off.
It was the kind that made him kinder. It was the kind that made him understand loss.
Maddox, who I had only seen once, passing through town, the man who owned things and made decisions look easy.
The man who had probably bought into the team because he understood business the way most people understood breathing.
He was wearing an expensive watch. His coat was tailored.
Everything about him said: I am used to getting what I want.
Beckham, the head coach, with the particular authority of a man who had been making decisions his whole life and had learned to live with the weight of them.
He looked tired, but it was the kind of tired that came from caring about something.
He looked like he was holding the team together through sheer force of will.
Theo Nash, the one who looked at the floor and never smiled, the forward who moved like he was always thinking about something a thousand miles away, something that had happened before he ever got to Frostbite Falls.
There was something about his silence that made me want to protect it.
He did not want to be saved. He just wanted to be left alone with whatever he was thinking about.
Hudson, the big one, the enforcer, the one who looked like he had been in a fight that morning but probably just had that face, that way of existing like violence was always just one moment away.
But when he smiled—and he did smile, at something Wilder said—he looked like a completely different person.
He looked like someone who understood joy.
And Knox.
Knox came in last. He was wearing his post-practice clothes—jeans and a dark hoodie and the particular coat he wore when he was being deliberate.
He looked at me across the diner and his expression did not change, but his eyes did something.
Something that said: this is on purpose.
This is a choice. This is me choosing you.
This is me telling the entire town that I’m choosing you.