Chapter 7 #2
The next day, Liza brought Dixie a bag of groceries and a bottle of wine because Dixie’s wrist was still healing. Also because Liza just wanted an excuse to see where the woman actually lived.
The house was a small cottage on the east side of the island. It was painted yellow with white shutters and a little porch that sagged slightly on one end.
Inside, it was exactly what Liza would have expected, full of books, color, and framed photographs on every available surface.
Dixie loved her people.
She poured them each a glass of wine, left-handed with impressive dexterity for a Parkinson’s patient, and settled into her armchair while Liza looked around the living room, studying all the photos.
There was Dixie as a young woman, radiant with her wild hair.
And there — framed on the side table — was the man from the guest book photo. Johnny, her late husband, standing on a boat with a fish in one hand and a beer in the other.
William as a boy, gap-toothed and squinting in the sun.
A more recent one of William and Janine with baby Madison, all three of them laughing.
And of course, Dixie with her new husband, Harrison, who was out of town on a fishing trip right now.
“That’s my Johnny,” Dixie said, nodding toward the boat photo. “I took that the summer before he got sick. He was the handsomest man on the island, and he knew it, which was the only annoying thing about him.”
Liza smiled. “How long were you together?”
“Not long enough.” Dixie took a sip of wine. “It’s never long enough, is it? You think you’ve got all the time in the world. You always think you’ve got time.”
Liza thought about Grant and Owen, about the man at the cookout laughing and then gone, about her own father, who was alive at breakfast and dead by dinnertime, about Julie, who had come to the island with a shattered marriage and then built something new from all that wreckage, and about Dixie, who’d lost a husband, a decade with her son, and found a new love all while running a bookstore every morning.
The island was full of people who had lost someone they weren’t ready to lose and somehow kept going.
But that was life, wasn’t it?
You didn’t really have a choice.
They didn’t keep going by forgetting, but by finding a way to carry the weight without letting it stop them from moving forward.
“How did you keep moving forward after losing Johnny? I mean, how did you keep going with a son that you had to take care of?” Liza asked.
Dixie looked at her with those sharp blue eyes.
“Well, I just got up and opened my bookstore every morning. That’s it.
I mean, that’s the whole secret. You just have to keep getting up and moving forward, even on the days where it feels heavy and you don’t want to do anything.
Some days it’s easier than others, but you just have to keep going.
I mean, there really isn’t another choice, is there?
That’s all any of us can do. Doesn’t make me special. ”
Liza took a sip of wine and thought about her own door she needed to open, the one that she’d slammed shut when she fled Charleston.
Just like Dixie opened her bookstore door every morning, even on days when it was hard.
Maybe it didn’t always matter what was on the other side of the door.
Maybe the point was just opening it.
On Saturday, SuAnn called an emergency meeting regarding the pie-eating contest.
The emergency was that she had ordered sixty pies from three different bakeries, and none of them had actually confirmed their delivery dates.
She had also ordered folding tables from a rental company that may or may not still be in business, and she had printed hundreds of flyers with the wrong date on them.
Janine sat across from her mother at the bookstore table, pinching the bridge of her nose.
“Mama, the festival is in two weeks. We still have some time.”
“We do not have time. What we have is chaos, Janine, chaos.”
“Well, to be fair, you created the chaos.”
“That is beside the point.”
Liza tried to mediate from behind the counter, helping them sort out logistics with the demeanor of someone who had once managed a product launch with a six-figure budget and a team that couldn’t even agree on a font.
Compared to that, sixty pies and some misprinted flyers were nothing.
By the time SuAnn and Janine left, the flyers were corrected, the bakeries were called, and Janine had extracted a promise from her mother not to make any more decisions without consulting a second human being first.
SuAnn had agreed to this in the way that a child might agree to eat some vegetables.
There was no conviction in her voice.
That night, after the bookstore closed and Liza heated up some leftover soup, she sat on her bed with her laptop and did something she had been meaning to do for days.
She typed W. Elliott crossword creator into the search bar.
The results were thin.
There was a fan forum with a handful of devoted followers, a little Wikipedia page that said almost nothing, no photo, no real name, just a list of published works and the note that W. Elliott is believed to be a pseudonym.
There was a brief interview from six years ago in a puzzle magazine.
The creator had answered questions by email only and revealed absolutely nothing personal beyond a preference for symmetrical grids.
There was no face, no name, no location.
Liza scrolled through the fan forum.
People had posted their favorite W. Elliott puzzles, debated the clue quality, and occasionally wondered about the real identity.
One user had written, Whoever this person is, they see the world entirely differently than the rest of us. Every puzzle feels like a conversation with someone who understands how your brain is wired.
Her own father would have agreed with that.
She closed the laptop and stared at the ceiling.
Somewhere out there was a person who had given her father years of Saturday morning joy and never even known it.
A person hiding behind a pen name, making puzzles in private and sending them into the world.
And then she thought about Grant, about the way he hid behind his counter and crossed his arms, about the way he designed puzzles that made children’s faces light up and then deflected credit like it was something he needed to be embarrassed by.