Chapter 13
The second hour was worse than the first, because she had nothing left to ask.
She had used the good questions in June. She sat down in the same booth on a Sunday in July with a list in her head and got through it in twenty minutes, and then there was forty minutes of a diner.
So they talked about the boy.
Nothing else. Forty minutes about a six-year-old — the deaf dog, the reading, whether he was too young for the water at Owls Head, the fact that he had started saying actually at the beginning of sentences and where in God's name he had gotten that.
At three o'clock Erin stood up.
"Two weeks," she said. "Same terms."
"Okay."
That was the whole conversation. She drove home furious with herself and could not have said why, and it took her until the causeway light to work out that it was because she had enjoyed it.
The third one she moved to the harbor because it was July and the diner was full of tourists.
The fourth one ran to seventy minutes and neither of them mentioned it.
She reached for the phone on a Tuesday at the end of July.
She was at the table at half past nine at night with the new file open — the one with the single line in it — and Bev had called at seven to say the thing about the Canadian rights, and Erin had put the phone down and thought he'll find that funny and had her thumb on his name before any part of her caught up.
She stopped.
She sat there with the phone in her hand and the screen lit and looked at it for a good ten seconds.
Then she put it face down on the table, which she was still doing, ten months on, in her own kitchen, alone, and which she noticed herself doing for the first time that night.
She turned it back over. She left it face up.
That was all that happened. It was, she decided afterward, the single most alarming thing that happened all summer.
The book would not move.
Six weeks, and it would not move. She had ninety-one thousand words and a delivery date in September and a jacket that had been approved in March, and she sat down at that table every single weekday morning at nine like a woman going to a job, and she got up at one having produced somewhere between four hundred and nothing.
Bev, who had never once in six years asked her how it was going, called on a Wednesday and asked how it was going.
"It's fine."
"Erin."
"It's not fine."
"No." Paper, three hundred miles away. "You want the professional or the friend?"
"Professional."
"You're eight weeks out and I have two-thirds of a book that ends in a place the last third can't get to.
I've read those two-thirds four times. It's the best thing you've written and it's not close.
" Bev's voice did not change. "And the husband in it does not exist. He did in November.
I can tell you the exact chapter where he stops. "
Erin closed her eyes.
"Chapter nineteen."
"Chapter nineteen," Bev agreed. "Now do you want the friend?"
"No."
"You're getting her anyway. Sweetheart — what's happened?"
And Erin stood in her kitchen with the phone against her ear and found she could not answer it, because there was no version of the answer that did not sound, out loud, in a sentence, like a woman going back.
He's stopped bringing me things.
"I don't know yet," she said.
"Hm." Bev let it go, which was its own kind of statement. "Well. The date's the date and I can move it once, and I'd rather move it now than at the end of September, so tell me inside two weeks."
Colleen called two days later with the other clock.
"We've got a date. October the sixteenth, Knox County, and it's real this time — nothing outstanding, nothing contested, no motions, no positions. It's a formality. You'll be in and out in twenty minutes."
Erin wrote it on the calendar on the side of the refrigerator, where Wyatt's swimming was, and then stood looking at it.
October the sixteenth.
"Erin?"
"I'm here."
"I'm going to ask you something and you're allowed to tell me it isn't my business," Colleen said. "How many times have you seen him?"
"Four."
"Alone?"
"Yes."
"Where?"
"A diner in Owls Head. Twice. Then the harbor."
Colleen was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again her voice had lost the file in it.
"All right. Then I'm going to say the same thing I've said since September, because I'd be negligent not to, and then I'm not going to say it again unless you ask me. It's your marriage and it always was."
"Say it."
"Nothing that man has done in ten months has cost him a single thing he actually wanted.
That was true in September and it was true at the disclosure and I have been waiting all year to be proved wrong about it.
" A pause. "But I filed a withdrawal in June that I cannot explain, and there's a firm in Boston that's had a very bad summer for reasons nobody will discuss, and last week a woman I've known for twenty years told me at a conference that Vanessa Lockwood has taken a job in Hartford. "
"Hartford."
"Hartford," said Colleen Hendricks, in the voice of a woman for whom this was the most extraordinary fact of the year. "So. I don't know what I'm looking at anymore, and I've stopped pretending to. October the sixteenth. Put it in your book."
Labor Day weekend was the first week of September, and the Sunday of it was his.
She had thought about that for two weeks and had arrived nowhere, and in the end Wyatt solved it by announcing at breakfast on the Thursday that the parade was the most important thing that had ever happened and that everybody was coming, said in a tone that admitted no appeal.
So everybody came.
Shannon came, on the condition — stated twice — that she would be standing next to Erin and not next to anyone else.
Owen closed the shop at noon like the whole street did.
Adelaide came, driven down by Gail, in a hat, and sat in a folding chair on the sidewalk outside Dalton Books like a woman at Ascot and was fussed over by three separate strangers within ten minutes.
And Graham came, at eleven, and parked four streets away, and walked.
Erin watched him come up Main Street in the crowd.
Here is what she saw, and she made herself look at all of it, because looking at things properly was the one discipline she had never let go of.
He was in a shirt with the sleeves rolled and old boat shoes and he had nothing in his hands.
Nobody looked at him. That was the thing.
On a sidewalk in Rockland on a Sunday in September, Graham Lockwood was a tall tired man in his late thirties who was slightly in the way, and a woman with a stroller said excuse me and he moved, and that was the entire transaction.
She had never once in six years seen him in a place where his name did not arrive before he did.
By one o'clock he was holding Wyatt on his shoulders, and Wyatt's shoes were leaving marks on the shirt, and Graham had a half-eaten snow cone in one hand that he had been given to hold forty minutes earlier and had not been able to put down anywhere, and it was dripping blue onto his wrist.
Erin, standing next to Shannon on the curb, laughed.
Out loud. A real one, up from underneath, the kind you don't get to approve first.
Shannon said, without turning her head, "Yeah, I saw it too."
"Shut up."
"I didn't say anything."
"You said yeah I saw it too."
"And I stand by it," Shannon said, and went back to watching the parade.
The bad part came at the fireworks and it was not his doing.
They went out onto the breakwater at nine — the whole ridiculous group of them, Adelaide having flatly refused to be taken home — and Wyatt fell asleep against his father's chest before the finale, the way six-year-olds still do, mid-sentence.
And Erin, sitting on a granite block a yard away with her arms around her knees, looked over at some point and saw the two of them lit up green and then red, and Graham's chin resting on the top of the boy's head, and his hand flat on Wyatt's back.
And thought, with no warning at all:
This is what it would have been like.
Not the past. That was the trap of it. Not five years of dinners and calendars and a woman's name on a screen — she had those, they were in a drawer in four blue books. This was the other thing, the one she had never let herself take out and look at.
This is what it would have been like if he'd been like this.
Six years of a life she had not gotten to have, watching itself on a breakwater in the dark.
She put her forehead on her knees for about four seconds.
When she looked up Shannon was watching her with an expression Erin could not read at all, and Shannon said nothing, and never mentioned it, not that night and not once afterward, which was the second-greatest act of friendship of Shannon Gallagher's life.
The honest conversation happened at half past eleven and nobody planned it.
Adelaide had gone. Owen had gone. Shannon had taken Wyatt up and put him to bed and then gone home, pointedly, with a look at Erin on the way out that contained an entire paragraph.
And Graham was standing on the sidewalk outside the shop with his keys in his hand, four streets from his car, saying goodnight.
"Thank you for today," he said. "I know it wasn't — "
"Don't do that."
"Do what?"
"The thing where you thank me for things that were Wyatt's idea," Erin said. "You've been doing it since April and it's exhausting."
Graham stopped. Something almost like a smile went across his face and did not stay.
"All right," he said.
And then neither of them moved.
The street was empty. The tide was doing what it did, two blocks down. Somebody was still setting off small illegal things over toward the north end.
"Sit down a minute," Erin said.
They sat on the bottom step of her own outside staircase, a foot apart, both facing the street, because that was the only way either of them was going to manage it.
"Ask me something," she said. "You've had a year of me asking. Ask me one."
Graham was quiet for a while.
"Why did you finish the wedding?"
She had expected almost anything but that.
"That's the question?"