Chapter 2 #2
Dixie blinked. “Yes, you’ll think about it?”
“No. Yes, I’ll stay.”
Dixie’s face lit up. “Oh, sugar, that made my whole week, my whole month, maybe my whole year, but we’ll see how things go.”
She stood up, winced again, and then sat back down and waved Liza over for a one-armed hug.
“Now,” Dixie said, “we need to talk about your social life.”
“Oh, no, we do not.”
“Oh, yes, we do. Honey, you’re thirty-two years old and single on an island full of perfectly good-looking men with tans and cute personalities. I’m just not going to sit here and watch you spend every evening eating cereal over the sink.”
“How do you know I eat cereal over the sink?”
“Because I lived in that apartment for six months back in the day, and I did the same thing. Now listen, there’s this firefighter named Jake who comes here every Thursday to look at new releases. Very handsome. He’s got great teeth. I’m going to introduce you.”
“Dixie.”
“Oh, and there’s a man who runs the kayak rental place. He has arms like a lumberjack, but don’t tell my husband I said that. I’m not sure what his name is, but I’m going to find out.”
Liza rubbed her temples. “I didn’t come here to date, Dixie. I came here to help you with the children’s section.”
“Nobody comes here to date, sweetheart, but it happens. Like the flu, everybody eventually catches it, except this is something you’ll enjoy.”
Liza opened her mouth to argue, but stopped because she could see from the look on Dixie’s face that the train had left the station and there was no getting it back.
“What about that puzzle guy?” Dixie said, almost to herself. “What’s his name?”
“Grant? What about him?”
“Oh, nothing. Just thinking out loud.” Dixie waved her hand. “Oh, he’s too quiet for you anyway. You need somebody that’s got a little spark.”
Liza didn’t respond.
She went back to measuring the wall, stretching the tape measure from one corner to the other, trying not to think about the way that Grant had looked at her on the porch at the inn.
Spark wasn’t always loud.
Sometimes spark was that little thing you almost missed.
That evening, Liza sat cross-legged on her bed and called her mom.
Linda picked up on the second ring, the way she always did, like she’d been just sitting there right next to the phone, waiting for it to ring, which, knowing her mother, she probably had been.
“Hey, honey, how’s Dixie?”
“Oh, she’s good. She sprained her wrist, but you know how Dixie handles everything. Very loudly.”
Her mother laughed. “Well, that sounds about right. She’s been that way since we were in college. One time she got a splinter, and you would have thought she needed surgery.”
“Well, she asked me to stay on a little bit longer, you know, help with the store while she heals.”
There was a pause. It was just a little too long.
“How much longer?”
“A few weeks, maybe through the summer festival.”
Another long pause.
“Liza, what about your work? I thought you needed to start reaching out to agencies when you got back home.”
There it was, the question at the center of everything.
Her mother thought that she’d left her job voluntarily, like she was making a strategic pivot in her career.
She didn’t know about the ambulance or the way Liza’s hands had shaken for three days afterward or the fact that she couldn’t even walk past a corporate office building without her heart rate spiking.
“I will, Mom. I just need a little bit more time.”
“Well, time is fine, honey. I just don’t want you hiding.”
The word landed harder than her mother probably intended.
Hiding.
Was that what she was doing? Was she hiding in a bookstore on a cute little Lowcountry island where nobody knew that she had failed professionally, while she ate cereal over a sink and measured walls for murals?
“I’m not hiding,” Liza said. The words came out a little sharper than she intended.
Her mother softened. “I know you’re not. I just miss you, and I do worry.”
“I know you do.”
They talked for another fifteen minutes about nothing really important. Her mother’s book club, the neighbor’s new fence that was way too high and way too ugly, whether Dixie still made the peach cobbler that was basically illegal.
By the time Liza hung up, she felt exhausted, but it was the particular type of exhaustion that came from loving someone you couldn’t be fully honest with.
She put the phone on the nightstand and stared up at the ceiling.
The weight of her lies sat on her chest like a sandbag.
She would tell her mom eventually, when she had something to replace it with, a new direction, a new plan, some kind of proof that her falling apart had led somewhere worth going.
And she definitely didn’t have that yet.
Sleep was elusive.
Liza tried reading, scrolling her phone, counting backward from one hundred, then two hundred. None of it worked.
Her brain was doing the thing that it often did at night, thinking through every decision she’d made in the last several months, grading herself like a term paper.
Quitting: C-
Moving to Seagrove: Incomplete
Telling Mom the truth: Never submitted
She threw off her covers and walked downstairs in her pajamas.
The bookstore was dark except for the emergency exit sign.
She’d learned in the last few days that the store had a very different personality at night.
It was quieter, obviously. There was no one there.
But during the day, it was Dixie’s place, and at night, it felt like it belonged to the books themselves.
She walked to the kids’ section and stood in the middle of it, trying to see it in a way that a child would.
A beanbag chair. The sad little shelf. The rug that was barely holding on to life.
She started rearranging things by the glow of her phone flashlight.
She pulled out a bin of picture books and stacked them up on the shelf by size.
She dragged the beanbag to another corner and propped it up against the wall.
She cleared a top shelf on the small bookcase and thought about putting a chalkboard there, maybe with words like What Are You Reading?
painted across the top in bright colors.
Of course, these ideas weren’t much, but it was at least a start. Something she could do with her hands to try to quiet the noise in her head.
But then she heard it.
Music.
It was faint and muffled, coming through the shared wall.
She stopped moving for a moment and listened.
Classical piano. Something slow and sad, the kind of piece that sounded like someone had turned melancholy into sound and then played it in a room where they thought no one else could hear.
She walked to the wall and pressed her palm against it. The plaster was cool. The music sounded clearer here.
She didn’t know the piece. Of course, she didn’t know anything about classical music, really. But she knew what grief sounded like when somebody was sitting alone at midnight, and this was certainly it.
She thought about Grant. About how silent and careful he was, the way he’d said he’d opened the shop to be left alone. She thought about the puzzle box he’d described — how you have to listen to the box before it’ll open.
Maybe he wasn’t a puzzle box.
Maybe he was more like a crossword puzzle. Full of answers, but you had to figure out the questions to ask first.
She stood there for a long time with her hand on the wall, the music coming through the plaster.
She never knocked or texted.
She only listened.
The way that you’d listen to someone who doesn’t know they’re being heard.
When the music finally stopped, she stayed just a moment longer.
Then she walked upstairs, climbed into bed, and fell asleep faster than she had in weeks.