Chapter 16
Owen was at the register with the ledger book he did his ordering in, which was, Erin had noticed a year ago and never mentioned, exactly the same kind she bought at the hardware store in Camden.
"Morning."
"Morning." He looked up. "You're wearing a coat."
"It's October."
"You're wearing the coat." He put the pen down. "You wore that coat to Portland in July and you came back and sat on my back step for an hour and didn't say anything."
Erin stood in the middle of a bookshop with her keys in her hand.
"Can I say a thing?" Owen said.
"Yes."
"It's the same thing."
"I know what it is."
"Right." He came round the end of the counter, which he did not usually do, and stopped a normal distance away, which he also did not usually do — he was normally behind something.
"Then here it is, and it's the last time, and after this I go back to selling you paperbacks and complaining about the compressor.
"It's finished. I know, it was Tuesday, the whole street knows, Dot told me before you were out of the parking lot.
" He said it without any weight. "So — dinner.
A real one, not a nice gesture toward a woman having a bad year.
And after that another one, and I'd want the boy to come to things eventually, and I'd be good to him, and I'm not going to pretend that isn't part of what I'm offering because you'd see through it in a second. "
"Owen."
"I'm nearly done." He put his hands in his pockets.
"And it would be an ordinary life. That's my whole pitch, Erin.
I'm not — " he gestured vaguely south, toward Boston or Camden or wherever he meant, "—that.
There's no house on a point. There's this, and the apartment upstairs, and about a hundred and ten thousand a year in a good year, and a person who is never once going to make you wonder what's going on. "
And Erin stood there and let herself see the whole of it, because he deserved that much and because she was not a coward.
It was not nothing.
It was a shop bell and a school on Union Street and a man who did not collect.
It was Sunday mornings and a compressor you could hear through the floor.
It was — and this was the part that actually got her, standing there in her coat — a life in which she would never again have to be extraordinary.
She could be a woman who wrote books and burned dinners and got tired, and nobody would ever be measuring her against a house.
She could have said yes and been happy. She was thirty-six and she had learned enough that year to know the difference between a life you would settle for and a life that would have been genuinely good, and this was the second one.
"No," she said.
Owen nodded once. He had known before he started.
"Because of him."
"Yes."
"You sure?" He said it kindly. "Because from where I've been standing for thirteen months — and I've had a good view, Erin, I've had the best view in this town — that man cost you an amount I don't think you've added up."
"I've added it up," Erin said. "I added it up in four blue notebooks for five years and I could give you the total to the dollar.
" She heard her own voice steady itself.
"And this morning I worked out that I'm not going because of what he did last year.
I'm going because of what I want, and I've spent thirteen months not being allowed to want anything, and it turns out that's just another way of letting them set the terms."
Owen looked at her for a second.
"Yeah," he said. "All right. That's a better answer than I was going to get."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't. Don't do that." He went back behind the counter, which she understood was a kindness to himself. "I'd rather have asked and been wrong than spent four years being your extremely reliable friend downstairs. My mother did that. It ruined her."
"Owen—"
"March," he said, picking the pen back up. "Big window display. Face out, whole front table. I've been planning it since August and you can't stop me, you don't own the shop."
Erin, in the doorway, said: "I might buy the building."
"You do that," said Owen Dalton, without looking up. "I'll want a lease."
Shannon took Wyatt without being asked twice.
She came to the door at half past eleven and looked at Erin's face for about a second and a half and said, "Right," and then, over her shoulder into the apartment: "Wyatt! Boat!"
"Shannon."
"Nope."
"I need to say it out loud to somebody or I won't do it."
Shannon stopped in the doorway with a six-year-old's backpack in one hand.
"Say it, then."
"I'm going to go to that house," Erin said, "and knock on the front door, and say a thing to him that he has explicitly told me not to say, and he is not going to make one single part of it easier, because he's made sure he can't."
"Yeah."
"That's it. That's the whole plan. I've got no notes."
"Erin." Shannon shifted the backpack. "You wrote a hundred and nine thousand words about this in twelve days. You've got notes."
She got Wyatt down the stairs. At the bottom she turned around.
"He's a better man than he was," she said. "I've watched it and I hate it and it's true, and if you tell him I said so I'll deny it in front of a judge." Her chin came up. "But you go anyway, and you say your piece, and if it goes wrong you come to mine and I'll have the fire going."
The causeway got her again.
It always did. Water on both sides, flat and pewter-colored, two boats out, October light coming down the middle of it — and Erin's hands went white on the wheel exactly the way they had a year ago going the other direction, and she made herself keep her speed and breathe.
She had left at 5:52 in the morning in the dark with a child asleep on her hip and had not looked in the mirror once.
She arrived at ten past twelve on a Saturday in daylight with the radio on.
The gate took its six seconds.
The crushed shell made the sound it made, and she came up the drive and parked — and this time, deliberately, took a whole breath and reversed and did it again, nose in, facing the house, because she had parked that car nose out for five years and she was finished with it.
Gail opened the door.
She looked at Erin standing on the step of a house she had walked out of thirteen months earlier, and something went across her face that in a less disciplined woman would have been a shout.
"He's on the water," she said.
"Right."
"Been out since eight. He'll be back for the tide." Gail stood back from the door. "Come in and I'll do you a coffee."
"I'll wait outside, thanks."
"You'll wait outside in October."
"Yes," said Erin, "I will," and Gail Norquist looked at her for a second longer and then, astonishingly, laughed — one short bark of a thing, from a woman Erin had heard laugh maybe four times in five years.
"Suit yourself," she said. "There's a bench."
He came in at twenty to two.
She watched him from the top of the lawn: the small boat coming round the point, the sail dropping, the business at the mooring that took a slow twenty minutes and was clearly a two-man job that he was doing alone, badly, in the cold.
He rowed the tender in. He got out at the float and made it fast. He picked up a bag and started up the path with his head down, working out something about a shackle, in an old coat with salt on it.
He got about twenty feet from the bench before he looked up.
And stopped dead.
Erin stood up.
Neither of them said anything for a moment. Somewhere out on the water a gull did what gulls do.
"Is he all right?" Graham said. Instantly. Before anything.
"He's fine. He's on a boat with Shannon being taught to swear."
"Okay." He put the bag down very slowly, like a man setting something down in a room with a sleeping animal in it. "Okay. Then — is this — Erin, is something wrong?"
"No."
"Right." He did not come any closer. He stood on his own path in his own coat with his hands at his sides and did not take one step, and Erin understood, watching him do it, exactly how much that cost and that he was going to go on paying it indefinitely.
"Then I'll — do you want to come in, or shall I—"
"I'm going to talk," Erin said. "And you're going to let me get to the end, because that's what you asked of me in a letter and it turns out I want the same thing."
Graham stopped moving entirely.
"All right," he said.
"You wrote that you're never going to ask me again."
"That's right."
"And you meant it."
"Yes."
"I know," Erin said. "That's why I'm here. I want that clear before anything else — I'm not here because you left a door open. You didn't. You shut it, on purpose, and it's the only thing you've ever done that I've believed on the first reading."
The water. The wind coming up the lawn.
"So," she said. "I'm going to say it, and I want you to understand that I've come thirty miles to do it and that not one part of it is being pulled out of me."
She put her hands in her pockets, because they were shaking and she was not going to hide it and she was also not going to display it.
"I want to be married to you," she said.
Graham Lockwood made a sound. Not a word. He put one hand over his mouth and turned his head away toward the water for about four seconds and then turned back, and his eyes were streaming and he did not apologize for it, which she noticed.
"Don't say anything yet," Erin said. "Because now I'm going to tell you what it is, and you might not want it, and you're allowed not to.
"It isn't a trial. I want to be extremely clear, because I know exactly what that word does and I'm not going to use it.
This is not a probation, it's not a see-how-it-goes, it's not one day at a time.
I've done thirteen months of holding a gate open one inch at a time and I'm finished with it.
That was for last year. It isn't a way to live.
"So: all the way in, or not at all. That's the offer."
He nodded. He did not trust his voice yet.