Chapter 10
“Butter,” Lucy says three days after the storm.
The power is back everywhere, the dory has been removed from the roof of the bait shed, and Theo has enough temporary decking down that the Widow’s Lantern can resume serving people who apparently suffered greatly from having to drink beer twenty feet farther inland.
“You’ve written butter on this list four times, Pen,” she adds. “In four different places. In two different pens.”
“I know.”
“And then you came home without any butter.”
“I am aware of the butter situation,” I say, “and I would like the room to move on.”
Lucy has already found the list, read the list, and photographed the list. She is sitting on my prep counter, which I have asked her repeatedly not to do since I moved into the building, and she has no intention of moving on.
“Day one,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“The day after the storm you stood in your own walk-in for ten minutes.”
“I went in there for something.”
“You have never established what.”
“It was a cold day and I lost track.”
“It’s a walk-in, Penny. It’s cold by design.” She hops down. “Yesterday, you smiled at a bin of shallots. You made an excellent hollandaise and then couldn’t remember doing it. This morning you forgot the butter.”
I look at the ceiling of a building I have owned for nine years and in which I am supposed to be a professional.
“There’s an explanation,” I say.
“There had better be.”
Here’s the thing about being a terrible liar. There’s no defense available. There is only the speed at which you give in, and I give in at roughly the speed of light.
“Julian and I have been kissing.”
Lucy sets both coffees down on my counter with tremendous care. I have learned over twenty years to be frightened of that. Then she screams at a volume that brings Young Dennett from the boatyard next door to my loading door to check whether anyone has lost a hand.
“We’re fine, Denny,” I promise, considering murder.
“Sounded like a hand,” says Denny, looking almost disappointed before he leaves.
“Ten dollars,” Lucy says when she can talk.
“That’s what you took from that?”
“It’s not the only thing I took from that. It’s just the part I can put in my wallet.” She grabs my wrist. “Sit down. Start at the beginning and don’t skip anything.”
I skip a great deal. She knows I’m skipping and lets me do it anyway, which is one of the best things about Lucy Carver and always has been. At the end she goes quiet for a second, which she does about four times a year.
“Was it good?”
I have to put my face in my hands.
“Oh,” says Lucy, delighted. “Oh, no.”
“We’re not having sex.”
“I didn’t ask.”
“Your face did.”
“My face asked several questions. That’s only one of them.”
“We’re kissing. That’s where we are.”
“Repeatedly?”
I put my face back in my hands.
“Excellent,” Lucy says.
“Can we talk about literally anything else?”
“Absolutely not.”
Julian and I have kept kissing. This feels worth mentioning. Not constantly. We are adults with jobs and responsibilities and a town that considers privacy an interesting theoretical concept.
But he kisses me when he walks me home. I kiss him in the loading doorway at the Salt & Sage. Once, while I’m putting away sheet pans, he comes up behind me and I turn around and kiss him simply because I can. I am becoming extremely fond of being able to do that.
We don’t go any further. Not because I don’t want to. That is very definitely not the problem. There’s simply never been a moment when not tonight has become tonight, and neither of us seems inclined to manufacture one just to get there faster.
In the meantime, Julian starts showing up. Not for dinner. Not because I’ve invited him. Not because Black Harbor has been partially dismantled by weather. He just comes to the Salt & Sage.
The first time is Monday at five. There is no event on Monday, no delivery he needs to make, no elderly resident in need of rescue and no known structural emergency. I’m alone in the kitchen breaking down eleven chickens when the loading door opens and Julian walks in with a book.
“Good afternoon.”
I look at him.
“Hi.”
“Are you busy?”
I look down at the chicken. Then at the other ten chickens.
“Not remotely.”
“Good.”
He takes off his coat, hangs it on the hook by the door, takes the stool at the end of my prep counter, opens his book and starts reading. So that’s what we’re doing.
I go back to the chicken, but the stool is a problem. I want to be honest about the stool. It’s an ordinary bar stool that has held ordinary men for nine years, and when Julian Volkov sits on it he makes it look like a throne.
I break down eleven chickens facing away from him, the back of my neck aware of him the entire time. Eventually I turn around, and he’s looking at me.
“You’re supposed to be reading.”
“I was.”
“Were you?”
“Mostly.”
I wipe my hands and walk over to him. His book closes around one finger.
“Hi,” I say again.
“Hello.”
I kiss him. Because I can. Which is rapidly becoming my favorite thing about whatever this is.
When I step back, Julian looks at me for a moment. Then he opens his book again. I make it halfway back to the chickens.
“Penny.”
I turn.
“Yes?”
“I wasn’t finished.”
Oh. I go back.
The bet gets settled on Tuesday, in public, at the Widow’s Lantern, in front of nine people.
I’m there to drop off chowder base. Julian is with me, because Julian is with me now, apparently, and I hold the door while he carries the cooler through it.
“Penny,” says Theo from behind the bar, then looks at Julian. “Penny’s boyfriend.”
The pub doesn’t go quiet. That’s what makes it so much worse. Nine people carry on with their conversations while my life is casually rearranged around them.
“Theo—”
I turn, ready to explain that nobody has used that word, that there has been no discussion, and that repeated kissing and one extremely explicit conversation on my porch do not, technically, constitute a relationship. Julian sets the cooler down on the bar.
“Where would you like this?” he asks.
That’s all. He doesn’t correct Theo. A word has been used about him in public, and Julian lets it stand there between us like a chair someone moved.
Theo points towards the end of the bar.
“There.”
Julian moves the cooler, and I stare at his back.
“Lucy,” Theo says, looking behind me. “Twenty dollars.”
“Thank you!”
“I protest,” says Wendell Marr from the other end of the bar.
“You’ve no standing, Wendell.”
“I had money on Christmas and I want a ruling on when a thing counts.”
“It counts when I say it counts. It’s my board.” Theo takes a twenty out of the register and puts it in Lucy’s hand like a man paying a plumber.
And that is how I apparently acquire a boyfriend, in a pub, in November, without anyone asking me about it.
The strange part isn’t that Theo said it.
The strange part is that Julian didn’t say he was wrong.
I look at him. He looks back, and one eyebrow lifts.
I decide there are conversations better held without Wendell Marr taking odds on them.
This may be the first mature decision I’ve made all week.
Julian comes back to the Salt & Sage on Wednesday. And Thursday. Not for any particular reason. That’s the part I keep failing to explain to people and, more embarrassingly, to myself. He brings a book. Sometimes two. He takes the stool at the end of my prep counter and reads while I work.
Sometimes we talk. Sometimes we don’t. Sometimes I put music on and hum badly and catch him watching me over the top of a book.
Sometimes I kiss him on my way to the walk-in. Sometimes he catches my hand as I pass and pulls me between his knees and kisses me until I forget what I’m going to the walk-in for. This may explain the butter.
He learns where the sheet pans go, and he starts quietly putting them there. He learns which towels are for hands and which ones are for dishes, a distinction I have been trying unsuccessfully to teach Lucy since 2019.
He knows not to touch my knives. He doesn’t ask why.
This alone may qualify him for marriage, although I keep that thought firmly to myself.
No one in Black Harbor says one word about any of this to my face, which is the most Black Harbor detail of the entire autumn.
A mystery in a beautiful coat starts loading my dish rack several evenings a week, and a community that once held a public meeting about a fence maintains a perfect and courteous silence.
They say plenty behind my back. Harriet reports the numbers to Eunice daily. Mabel has begun using the phrase “you two.”
And I am completely, unmanageably happy. I hum more. I hum badly. I sleep badly and get up early anyway. And every single time the loading door goes up at five, something rolls through me that I would deny under oath in any court in this state.
The Ellises’ fortieth anniversary is a hundred-and-ten-person sit-down and it is going to kill me.
We prep on Friday. By we I mean me, from four in the afternoon, and Julian from about five thirty.
There are forty heads of garlic on my counter. I’d like it understood that this is not a provocation. It’s a menu. Cindy Ellis asked for the roasted garlic and white bean thing in writing, with an exclamation mark, and forty heads is what forty heads is.
Julian comes through the loading door, stops four feet inside, and looks at the counter.
“Don’t,” I say.
“I have said nothing.”
“You’re doing a face.”
“I have an ordinary face.”
“Come inside.”
He considers the garlic. Then me.
“I am evaluating my options.”
“Cindy specifically requested it.”
“Then I wish Cindy Ellis every happiness.”
He takes off his coat and goes to the very far end of the kitchen. I laugh so hard I have to hold on to the counter. At eight I am tying rosemary when I say, “Forty years. Can you imagine?”
Julian is putting away a crate. He stops.
“Forty years,” he repeats slowly.
“Cindy and Ray. Same person for forty years.”
“Yes.”
There’s something in the way he says it that makes me look up.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Julian.”
He looks down at the crate.
“It doesn’t seem very long.”
My hands stop. Forty years. I am thirty-two.