Chapter 17
A year later
The thing nobody tells you about being happy is how much of it is logistics.
On the second Saturday in October, at twenty past six in the morning, Erin Brooks stood in her kitchen in a bathrobe arguing with her husband about parking.
"There is no parking."
"There's the lot behind the church."
"The lot behind the church has nineteen spaces and we have invited fifty-one people."
"Then they'll walk," Graham said, from the floor, where he was doing something to the leg of a table that had been wobbling since August and that he had been promising to fix since August. "It's Rockland, Erin. Everybody walks. Half of them are walking from the boat."
"Your mother is seventy-six."
"My mother has a car and a woman who drives it and a great deal of nerve." He sat back on his heels. "Try it now."
Erin pushed the table. It did not wobble.
"Oh," she said.
"Yeah."
"You fixed the table."
"I fixed the table."
"It's been nine weeks."
"It's been fourteen weeks and I want that on the record, because I've been telling you it was fourteen and you've been saying nine to make me feel better.
" He got up off the floor, which took him longer than it used to, because he was forty-one now and had spent the summer learning to sail a boat properly out of sheer stubbornness.
"There. That's my contribution to today. I have fixed a table."
"You also paid for the flowers."
"That doesn't count," he said. "Nothing I pay for counts. You made a rule."
"I did make a rule."
"It's a good rule," said Graham Lockwood, and kissed her, and went to find his coffee.
Here is what a year of ordinary time did.
The book came out in March, and it did what Bev had said it would do in an office on Twenty-Sixth Street with a radiator that could not be turned off, and then it did rather more than that.
There was a photograph on the back of it of a woman with brown hair she had stopped highlighting, and the photograph went in a window on Main Street, face out, whole front table, and Owen Dalton sold two hundred and forty copies out of a shop that in a normal March sold nine.
Camden read it. All of Camden read it. So did Boston, and so — this was the part Erin had not predicted and never quite got used to — did about four hundred thousand people who had never heard of a peninsula in Maine and simply wanted a book about a woman who kept a ledger.
There was a bad fortnight in April. She had been ready for it and it was still bad: two columns, a radio thing, a woman on a panel who said the word revenge six times in four minutes, and an evening when Erin sat on the stairs with her phone face down and Graham sat two steps below her and did not say one single word about it, because saying something would have been managing it, and he had gotten very good at the difference.
And in the second week of May, on a Tuesday, he did exactly what she had told him in a car he would do.
There was a thing at a club in Boston. A woman at the next table said something about the book, and about Erin, and it was ugly, and Graham dealt with it — quietly, immediately, extremely well, in about forty seconds, and then came home and told her about it on Thursday because it had come up in another conversation and he'd got cornered.
Erin put down what she was holding.
"When was this?"
"Tuesday."
"And you're telling me Thursday."
He opened his mouth. She watched him get about four words into the reasonable version — it was nothing, it was handled, there was no point upsetting — and then watched him stop, mid-sentence, in his own kitchen, with a visible physical effort like a man catching a door.
"I did it again," he said.
"You did it again."
"I'm going to explain and you're going to hate it."
"Explain anyway."
So he did, badly, for about ten minutes, and it was awful the way she had promised him it would be, and at the end of it he said, "I'm not going to be able to stop doing that."
"No," Erin said. "You're going to do it about twice a year for the rest of your life."
"That's not good enough."
"It's completely good enough," she said, "as long as you tell me on Tuesday."
And that was the fight, in full. It took forty minutes, it happened in a kitchen, and by June neither of them could remember what the woman at the club had actually said.
The differences are small and there are hundreds of them, and Erin noticed every one, because noticing had never stopped being what she did.
He touches her in rooms now. That is the first one and it took her three months to stop registering it as an event.
For five years, in that house, in front of those people, Graham Lockwood had touched his wife exactly twice in public per evening — a hand at the small of her back going in, a hand at the small of her back going out, both of them navigational.
Now he puts his hand on the back of her neck while she is talking to somebody else, and leaves it there, and goes on listening.
He says her name to strangers. My wife, Erin Brooks — the second half of it, every time, without a pause in front of it, in a tone that dares the room.
He tells her about money before it happens rather than after. He asked her, in January, whether he should take a board seat, and she said no, and he did not take it, and the thing she noticed was not the answer. It was that he had asked before he had decided rather than after.
And on her side:
She speaks in rooms.
That is the whole of it and it is enormous.
For five years Erin had a technique for a Lockwood dinner table, and the technique was to be pleasant and accurate and to go very still whenever a subject arrived that she actually knew something about.
Now she talks. She interrupts. In February, at a thing in Boston, a man explained her own book to her for six minutes and she let him get all the way to the end and then said, "That's a really interesting reading and it's wrong," in a perfectly friendly voice, and watched the whole table stop.
Graham, next to her, did not smooth it over.
He laughed. Out loud, once, badly, into his glass — and then he did the thing that Erin thinks about more than the wedding, more than the letter, more than any of it.
He said nothing at all, and let the silence sit exactly where it had landed, and made no attempt whatsoever to make the moment easier for anybody in that room, including himself.
That, she decided on the drive home, was the marriage. Not the vows. That.
There is a hard part and she would not leave it out of any honest account.
Wyatt asked, in June, on the way back from swimming, whether his father had gone away because of him.
Erin pulled the car over on the harbor road.
She did not say no of course not and she did not say don't be silly, because he was seven and he was owed better than that.
She said that his father and she had made a promise to each other before he was born, and that his father had not kept it properly for a long time, and that she had left because of that promise and not because of anything else in the world, and that no version of it had ever had anything to do with Wyatt at all.
"Was it a lie?" Wyatt said. "The promise."
"No," Erin said. "It was true and he was quiet about it, and quiet is worse than you'd think."
Wyatt looked out the window for a while.
"Is he quiet now?"
"No," she said. "You've met him. He never shuts up."
That got her a laugh out of the back seat, and the conversation ended there and has never come back, and Erin told Graham about it that night, all of it, including her own answer.
He sat down on the edge of the bed and put his face in his hands for a moment.
Then he said, "Thank you for telling me on Tuesday," which was a joke and was also not one, and they both let it be both.
Other things, in no order.
Vanessa is in Hartford. She sends Wyatt a book at Christmas and on his birthday, always the right book, always chosen with real care, and she does not write to Graham and Graham does not write to her.
Erin has thought about that a great deal and has arrived at a position she can live with, which is that some doors get closed properly and stay that way, and that this is not the same thing as cruelty, and that it took a man six years to learn it and she is not going to be the one who reopens it out of tidiness.
Blair Chadwick moved to Charleston in the spring.
Erin knows this the way you know anything in a small state — somebody said it at a thing — and she noticed, at the time, that she had to work for a second to remember why the name mattered.
Ten months after a woman in a bay window in Camden, Blair had gone all the way down to a fact you have to reach for.
Adelaide bought the book in a shop. She drove to Rockland in April, went into Dalton Books on her own two feet, waited in a line of four people, paid for it with a card, and asked Owen to put it in a bag.
Then she came upstairs and sat in the chair by the window and read the morning-room chapter with Erin in the room, which took twenty minutes, and at the end of it she closed the book and said, "You've made me considerably better-looking than I am," and then went very quiet and said, "Thank you," and neither of them said anything else about it, ever.
Colleen Hendricks sent a card. It said: I was wrong. It has happened four times in twenty-eight years and I keep a list. — C.H.
And in June, Erin bought the building.
The whole thing — shop, apartment, the empty second floor at the back that had been full of somebody's furniture since before Owen.
She paid for it out of Ninebark and it went through on a Thursday, and she signed her own name on twenty-two separate pages, and then she went downstairs and put a lease in front of Owen Dalton and watched him read it and then watched him get to the rent figure and look up.
"That's less than I'm paying now."
"I know."
"Erin, that's less than the mortgage."
"I know," she said. "I've got a book with a bookshop in it. Do you want it or not?"