Chapter 6
The sky had been threatening all day.
Liza had looked at it that morning when she stepped onto the balcony with her coffee. The air felt heavy, and clouds had started stacking on the horizon like big gray bricks.
By lunchtime, the wind had picked up, and it was pulling at the awnings on the square, sending a stack of flyers from the deli skidding across the sidewalk like stones across a pond.
Dixie had gone home early. Said her wrist was bothering her because of the weather coming in, though she’d never admit that it was just the wrist injury and had nothing to do with the weather.
“I’m not afraid of a little rain,” she said on her way out. “I mean, I don’t want to be here if the power goes out because the last time I was in the building during a blackout, I tripped over that stupid beanbag chair and said words that would have gotten me banned from church.”
Liza was well aware that Dixie had Parkinson’s disease and that sometimes her symptoms were worse than others.
She didn’t want to talk about it. Dixie rarely mentioned it. She acted as though it didn’t exist at all.
Her medications were helping her quite a bit, from what Liza could tell, but she still had a tremor in her right hand that would come and go depending on the time of day and when she had last taken her medicine.
In case of a blackout, she’d left Liza with the keys and strict instructions to lock it up if it got too bad.
It was almost six o’clock when Grant came through the front door.
He was carrying a folder of clue card drafts and two containers of soup from the deli.
“I thought maybe we could finalize the order of the clues tonight,” he said, putting the soup on the counter. “The deli’s closing early because of the weather.”
“Is it supposed to get really bad?”
“The woman at the deli said, and I’m quoting, ‘Honey, batten down.’”
Liza glanced at the windows.
The sky had gone from gray to more of a bruised purple, and the live oaks on the square were bending sideways.
The fairy lights between the shops were swinging wildly, and she doubted they would survive.
“We should probably take those down,” she said.
“It’s too late. They’re either going to survive or they’re not.”
“Yikes, that feels like a metaphor.”
“It’s just lights.”
They sat at a table near the reading nook and spread out the clue cards.
Rain started tapping against the window, light at first and then heavier.
Within about twenty minutes, there was a full downpour, the kind that turned the world outside the glass into a watercolor painting.
Thunder rolled across the island.
The lights in the bookstore flickered.
Then they went out.
The darkness was instant.
Liza’s hand shot out and grabbed the edge of the table.
“Well?”
“Well,” Grant agreed dryly.
She fumbled around for her phone and turned on the flashlight. It cut through the dark and landed on Grant’s face, making him squint.
“Sorry.” She turned it toward the ceiling. “Dixie left a flashlight somewhere, and I think there might be candles in the back room. I’ll go check.”
He was up and gone before she could argue, moving through the dark bookstore like someone perfectly at home in the dark.
She heard him open a cabinet, rummage around, and then return with a flashlight in one hand and a box of emergency candles in the other.
“Found matches, too.” He held up a book of matches from some restaurant in Savannah.
They set up three candles on the table and one on the counter. The flames created a warm glow across the bookshelves, and the store transformed.
During the daytime, it was Dixie’s cheerful, cluttered kingdom.
But by candlelight, it was something else.
Intimate and hushed, almost like the inside of a chapel.
If a chapel were covered in books, of course.
Rain hammered against the roof, and the windows shook in their frames. A gust hit so hard that the building seemed to shudder.
Liza instinctively moved closer to the center of the room.
“These buildings have been here for decades,” Grant said. “They’ve survived a lot worse. Hurricanes, probably.”
“Is that supposed to be reassuring?”
“Well, it was supposed to be factual, but sure, I’ll go with reassuring.”
She laughed, but the sound was swallowed by another roll of thunder.
They moved the soup and clue cards to the floor near the reading nook, where the bookshelves on either side created a bit of an alcove.
Liza grabbed two cushions from the children’s section, the new ones she had ordered, not the sad old ones, and they sat down on the floor side by side with their backs against the wall of books.
For a while, they didn’t say anything.
They just listened to the storm.
It was, Liza thought, the most comfortable silence she had ever shared with another person.
The soup was delicious. It was some kind of tomato bisque that tasted like it had been made by somebody’s grandma and not by a deli.
They ate in candlelight with the rain drumming steadily on the roof, and Liza felt the day’s tension slowly uncoil from her shoulders.
“Hey, can I ask you something?” she said.
“You always ask me that, and then you ask anyway, regardless of what I say.”
“Well, that’s true, so I guess I’ll just ask.”
She put her soup down.
“Who taught you to talk to kids the way you did at Books and Brains? That tangram thing, you know, the way you got down on the boy’s level and walked him through it? That’s not something you learn from selling puzzles.”
He was quiet for long enough that she thought he wasn’t even going to answer.
The candlelight moved across his face, softening the angles, and she could see him trying to decide something.
“My brother,” he finally said.
Liza waited.
“His name was Owen. He was two years older than me. Kind of like a second dad more than a brother in a lot of ways. He was…” Grant paused.
“Well, he was the loud one, the one who talked to everybody, the one who could walk into a room and just make it warm. He was the person who taught me that you don’t learn by being lectured at. You learn by being met where you are.”
“He sounds wonderful,” she said, smiling.
“He was.”
The past tense sat between them, and Liza didn’t say anything.
She had learned enough by now about Grant to know that silence didn’t mean absence with him. He was processing. He needed the space to find the next words.
“He died three years ago,” Grant said. “Sudden cardiac arrest. It was the craziest thing. He was at a cookout, laughing about something somebody said, and then he was gone.”
“Oh, Grant.”
“He was thirty-eight years old. No warning signs, no history. Doctors said it was just one of those things.”
He said one of those things like it was a phrase he’d heard a hundred times and still couldn’t make it fit.
“He was the one who pushed me to do everything I’ve done. All this, the puzzles, everything. He was my noise. When he was gone, I didn’t see the point of making noise of my own.”
The rain filled the silence.
A candle flickered, as if Owen were in the room with them.
Liza didn’t reach for him because she sensed that what he needed right now wasn’t someone to touch him.
It was just someone to witness what he was saying. Someone to hear the thing he’d been carrying and not try to fix it.
“He sounds like someone I would have liked,” she said softly.
He turned his head and looked at her. His eyes were dark in the candlelight, and there was something there she hadn’t seen before.
It wasn’t sadness exactly, but it was definitely adjacent to it. A place where grief starts to look less like a wall and more like a door he just hadn’t opened yet.
“He would have loved you,” Grant said.
The words had come out before he could stop them.
She could see that, the way his jaw tightened the second after he said it and his eyes shifted away like he’d accidentally handed her something breakable and was already regretting it.
But she didn’t make a big deal of it.
She just said, “Then I’m sorry I didn’t get to meet him.”
They sat there with that for a while, the occasional crack of thunder vibrating through the floor.
Liza pulled one of the cushions onto her lap and held it, not because she was cold, but because she needed something to do with her hands.
“He used to do this thing,” Grant said after a while.
“Every time I finished a new puzzle, he would call me up. Didn’t matter what time it was, and he’d say, ‘Read me the clues.’ And I would, every single one of them, and he’d try to solve it over the phone.
” Grant looked at the candle. “And he was horrible at crosswords. I mean, genuinely the most awful person I’ve ever seen at crosswords, but he never stopped trying. ”
Liza smiled. “That says a lot about him.”
“It says everything about him.”
The storm was not letting up. If anything, it seemed to be getting worse.
The wind had changed directions and was now blasting rain against the side of the building in huge sheets.
A branch cracked somewhere outside and Liza flinched.
“Just a branch,” Grant said.
“I know. I’m not scared of storms.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
She pulled her knees up and wrapped her arms around them.
The candlelight made the bookstore feel like the rest of the world had washed away and this was all that was left.
Two people on the floor between the shelves, rain hammering against the roof.
And the truth sitting between them like an open book.
He’d given her something real.
The least she could do was give him something back.
“I didn’t just leave my job,” she suddenly said.
“I had a panic attack at my desk in the middle of a meeting with a dozen other people right there. My hands actually went numb first, and then my chest, and then I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
I truly thought I was dying. So that’s what it felt like when my body decided to shut down and didn’t care that I was in an office with twelve people staring at me. ”
She pulled at the thread on a cushion.