Chapter 5 #2
“You did that on purpose,” I say.
“Did what?”
“Made the whole town love you. You could’ve just let us be wrong.”
“The town wasn’t wrong about the storm. Only the aftermath. It’s a cheap gift to give people their story back, only better.”
I look at him. “That’s—” Kind, I want to say and don’t. “That’s a good line.”
“It isn’t a line.”
“No,” I admit. “I don’t think it is.”
The fiddle scratches into something old and quick. Julian watches the room. I watch Julian watch the room, which is becoming a full-time occupation.
“You remember everything,” I say. “Theo’s boat. Old Dennett’s great-great-grandfather’s boat. You met these people once.”
“People tell you a great deal, if you let them. Most of us are only waiting for a turn to speak. If you don’t take the turn, they’ll keep going. And then—” a small shrug “—you simply remember it.”
“Most people don’t.”
“Most people are thinking about themselves. It’s not a flaw. It’s only common.” He says it without any edge, and then gives me a direct look. “You remember things too. You knew Mrs. Abernathy is allergic to shellfish. You knew before the daughter did.”
I laugh, and it comes out more tired than I mean it to. “God. The Abernathys.”
“The disastrous wedding.”
“The disastrous wedding.” I set my spoon down. “Can I complain? I need to complain and Lucy’s heard it all and Theo just says charge them double.”
“Please.”
So I complain. I don’t hold back, because he’s asked, and because he’s listening to me now and it’s like standing in a warm doorway.
I tell him about the bride who wants a raw bar and the mother who’ll go into anaphylaxis at the sight of it, and how neither will bend, and how the bride keeps changing the head count by fifteen people every three days, and how the venue coordinator hates me for reasons I’ve never established.
“And I can’t say no,” I finish, “because it’s the biggest job I’ve had all year and my van needs new brakes and I have a mortgage. So I just—smile. And absorb it. And lie awake.”
Julian’s quiet for a moment. I expect sympathy, which is what everyone gives, and which is nice and useless.
“You’ve framed it as one problem,” he says. “It’s three.”
I blink. “What?”
“Three problems, wearing one coat.” He turns his water glass, thinking.
“The shellfish is a safety problem. Put it in writing. Frame it as your liability, not their argument. ‘My insurance does not permit an open shellfish service with a documented allergy present.’ People fight preferences. They rarely fight paperwork.”
I stare at him.
“The changing head count is a money problem,” he goes on, unhurried. “So charge for it. A final number by a fixed date. Changes after that date billed per head, stated in a written contract. When a change costs, people stop making changes carelessly. You will find the count settles within a day.”
“And the coordinator who hates me?”
“Make her an ally instead of an obstacle. Ask her advice about something small, something you already know the answer to.” The corner of his mouth moves.
“People rarely hate someone who needs them. And she will fight the bride’s chaos harder than you ever could, because now it’s her show too, and no one who runs a venue wants a bad wedding on her floor. ”
I sit there with my mouth open for the second time tonight.
“Where,” I say slowly, “does a reclusive art collector who spends his mornings reading dead harbormasters learn how to negotiate a catering contract?”
“I invest,” he says, which is one of those Julian answers that’s shaped exactly like a real answer and contains nothing.
“That’s annoyingly good advice. I don’t know what to do with you.”
“You could write it down,” Julian says.
“Don’t get clever.”
“Penny.” He’s looking at the room, not at me. “This is one bad client in one bad season, and you will have a great many more seasons than she will. Forty. Fifty. It will not signify in—”
And then he stops. It isn’t a stumble. It’s more like watching a man reach for a shelf and correct his arm halfway there. The whole sentence changes direction while it’s still in the air.
“—in a year or two,” he says. “It will not signify in a year or two.”
“Fifty seasons.” I put the napkin down. “I’m thirty-two, Julian. I’d be eighty-two. I wouldn’t be catering anything, I’d be Eunice Ballard with a folding chair.”
“Yes.” He looks away briefly. “That was careless of me.”
“It was flattering, actually.”
“It was arithmetic,” he says, and picks the water back up, and does not drink it.
“You just fixed my whole week.”
“I offered opinions. You’ll fix your week.”
“That’s a very Julian thing to say.”
“Is there a Julian thing to say?”
“There’s a whole category,” I tell him. “It’s growing.”
He laughs—actually laughs, a quiet, low sound that I’ve never heard from him before and immediately want to hear again.
The fiddle swings up and somebody hauls Theo into a dance.
For a long while it’s just noise and warmth and the smell of chowder and this man beside me being, against every expectation I had, easy to be with.
By ten the room is at its worst and its best. The steam. The noise. Someone has put music on and Theo has taken it off again, twice.
I touch Julian’s sleeve to get his attention, because Hollis is trying to give him a jar of something, and my fingers land on the bare skin of his forearm.
It’s like touching the inside of a window in January.
He isn’t warm. He isn’t anything. The pub is a hundred degrees, and Julian Volkov’s skin is cool and perfectly dry and does not warm under my fingers at all.
Two things happen in me at once and they have no business happening together.
One is a small cold thread of that is not right.
The other is a shiver that starts at my wrist and goes somewhere I’m not prepared to think about.
I take my hand back.
“Sorry,” I say. “Cold hands.”
“They are not,” he says.
Neither of us says anything else. Hollis puts the jar down between us like a man ending a hostage negotiation, and the evening moves on.
I don’t notice I’m doing it until I’ve done it four or five times.
Rennie corners me about the corn verdict. I turn to answer him—and my eyes go to the chair by the fire, to check that Julian’s still there. He is. He’s listening to Old Dennett again.
Bess flags me over to weigh in on the scoring—there’s a controversy, there’s always a controversy—and I go, and halfway through I glance back across the room.
Julian’s at the counter now, refilling old Gus’s water because Gus can’t reach, and the sight of it, the huge careful man bending to pour water for the small old one, makes my chest ache.
The Patels finally arrive and I get pulled into the whole business of the saffron rice and the wedding and whether I can do the thing they want with the paneer. It’s a good twenty minutes before I surface—and the very first thing I do, before I even set down the sample plate, is look for him.
He goes out at twenty past eleven to help Theo bring a keg up from the yard. I look up when the door shuts. I look up when it opens again and find some cousin of the Whitcombs, and go back to stacking bowls with tremendous focus.
Then I look up again.
“That’s the fourth time you’ve done that,” Lucy says, without lifting her eye from her camera.
“Done what?”
“Checked the door. Four times since he went out. I counted, obviously, because I’m a professional and I have nothing else going on.”
“He’s helping Theo.”
“Mm.”
“I’m just checking.”
The door opens. I look up. And I keep looking, all the way across a crowded room, at a man carrying a keg on one shoulder like a sack of flour. My face is warm. I don’t care.
The next time I look for him he’s by the door talking to Theo with Hollis’s jar in his hand and his coat on. He’s leaving. My stomach drops, just slightly, just enough to notice, at the sight of Julian Volkov with his coat on.
Oh, I think. Oh, no. This is a problem.
I put down the bowls and cross the room before I decide to move. I’m just doing it, the way I do everything with Julian, one impulse at a time and no plan at all.
“You’re leaving,” I say.
“I am. It’s late.” He looks down at me, and the lanterns are low and gold behind him and he looks, for one strange second, like something from another century entirely, standing in a doorway. “Thank you, Penny. I haven’t sat in a room full of people and enjoyed it like this in a long time.”
I meet his gaze, searching for something he won’t tell me without my asking. So, naturally, I do.
“Why did you enjoy it?”
Julian’s head tilts in that small, considering way, and his eyes are the warmest thing about him. “You make it difficult not to enjoy myself.”
My stomach drops again, and I suddenly realize I’m holding the edge of his sleeve.
“Julian—”
But I can’t say what comes next, because Mabel’s calling my name and Theo’s thumping the counter for attention. Something that might be regret moves in Julian’s eyes.
“I should let you return to chaos,” he says. “Thank you again.”
He steps through the door, and the room gets dimmer.
Damn it.