Chapter 2 #2
"Upstairs. That's what she's telling you.
That there's nowhere for you but upstairs.
" Rory set the case down on the counter with a control that was somehow louder than dropping it.
"Eddie's apartment. Over the shop. Which is where I—" He stopped.
His hands flattened on the case. "One bedroom," he said, flat.
"One. There's a couch. It's bad. You'll hate it. "
"I've slept on worse," Theo said, which was true, and which he made sound like a joke, which was a skill.
"You really haven't," Rory said, and it wasn't a joke at all, it was a door closing, it was you have no idea what worse is, you soft thing, you left before worse got here — and the maddening part, the part Theo turned over the rest of the day, was that Rory was right, and that Rory had somehow said the truest thing anyone had said to him in two years while trying to insult him.
"Rory," Dee said, warning.
"It's fine." Rory picked the case back up.
"He can have the couch. He's not gonna last long enough to break it.
" He shouldered through the swinging door, and just before it swung shut he added, not turning around, in the voice of a man laying down the single rule that mattered: "Stay out of my kitchen. "
The door thumped twice and went still.
Theo stood in the dining room of the diner that was, insanely, half his, under the specials board with a dead man's handwriting on it, and smiled at Dee, because the smile was the only tool he'd brought that still worked.
"Well," he said. "He seems great."
Dee looked at him for a long moment. Then she reached out and, very lightly, straightened the collar of his overpriced jacket, the way you'd fix a boy before a photograph.
"He sat with Eddie every night for two years," she said quietly. "Every night, baby. So whatever you came here to do—" She patted the collar flat. "You go easy. Both of you had him. You just had different halves."
Then she went to refill the man who looked at Theo like a raccoon, and left Theo standing there with that, holding it, not knowing where to set it down.
One of the men at the counter — Theo half-recognized him, a Gagnon maybe, one of the endless Gagnons, he'd have been a teenager when Theo left — turned on his stool and looked at Theo without hurry, the way you'd look at a weather system that might or might not come ashore.
"Heard Marsh read this morning," the man said. Not to Theo, exactly. To the room. To Dee. To the record. "Heard it's half yours now."
"Word travels," Theo said pleasantly.
"Word doesn't travel. It's already here. Lives here." The man turned back to his coffee, having delivered this, and added, to the mug, "We'll see how long you do."
"Ronnie," Dee said, the same warning-shot tone she'd used on Rory, apparently a tone she kept loaded for the whole town.
"I'm being friendly," Ronnie told his coffee.
And that was it, that was the entire town in one man on a stool — no venom in it, even, just the flat certainty of a place that had watched him leave once and had already, over its Tuesday coffee, placed its quiet bets on him leaving again.
Theo gave the back of Ronnie's head his best warm nothing of a smile, the one that cost the most, and filed it with everything else.
Then he did what he always did when somebody handed him something he couldn't hold: he went to work on the room instead.
Nine years builds a reflex, and the reflex didn't care that the restaurant was gone, or that he'd sworn off the whole business, or that this particular room belonged half to a man who'd told him to stay out of the only part of it that made money.
Theo stood in the middle of The Foghorn at one in the afternoon and his eye did the thing it had always done — the thing that had made him good at this, the thing that was, if he was honest, the only real talent he'd ever had. It read the room like a ledger.
Eleven tables and a twelve-seat counter, and at the deadest part of the day he counted six bodies, two of them nursing refills they weren't paying for.
The specials board hadn't changed in three weeks; the chalk had that soft settled look, and bread pudding if Dee feels like it was not a Tuesday.
A rack of local jam sat by the register where nobody would buy it because it was behind the napkins.
And the light — the good light, the harbor light — came pouring in the front windows onto the two worst tables in the house, both empty, while the booths people actually sat in faced the kitchen wall.
The whole place had its back to the water.
A diner on the prettiest working harbor in the state, and Eddie had pointed it at a wall of pie signage.
You could fix this in a weekend, Theo thought, and the thought came warm and automatic and complete, the way they used to, back when he had somewhere to put them.
Turn the counter. Open the harbor side. Kill the half of the menu that isn't moving.
Put the jam where a human can see it. Do a real board.
And for God's sake stop giving the fishermen coffee at four a.m. out of charity — build a takeaway window, there's a whole shift of men down there with money in their pockets and nowhere to spend it—
He stopped.
Because it wasn't his. Because he was here to sell it, not save it, and you didn't renovate a house you were planning to burn for the insurance.
Because the last time he'd looked at a struggling room and thought I could fix this in a weekend, he'd been right — and he'd fixed it, and it had still taken nine years and everything he owned to learn that being right about a room wasn't the same as being able to keep one.
And because the only other person in the building who'd care that the diner was bleeding was standing behind a swinging door with a knife, and had asked exactly one thing of him.
Theo turned his back on the harbor light, same as the diner did, and went to find the stairs.
***
The apartment was worse than the couch and the couch was exactly as advertised.
Theo lay on it at one in the morning with his feet hanging off the arm and stared at the water stain on the ceiling, which was shaped, if you were the kind of person who found shapes in things, like the state of Maine, which felt like a personal remark.
The whole apartment was Eddie. It was Eddie in a way that a coffin at a service, apparently, had not been — the reading glasses still folded on the side table, the paperback western spread open and face-down where a man had set it expecting to come back to it, the mug in the drying rack, one mug, washed and set out by hands that had believed in tomorrow.
Theo had walked the two small rooms once, in the dark, not touching anything, and had understood that he was standing inside the actual shape of a life that had gone on for fifteen years in the space where his used to be, and that he had missed all of it, on purpose, and that the missing was permanent now in a way it hadn't been last week.
On the shelf by the window, though — and this was the thing that had stopped him, on his one silent circuit of the rooms — the apartment stopped being only Eddie.
There was a photograph in a cheap frame, the glass gone dusty, and it was his mother.
Carol, maybe twenty-five, squinting into harbor sun on the deck of a boat Theo didn't recognize, laughing at whoever held the camera, and on her hip a small furious boy with a scabbed knee and a fist in her collar.
That was Theo. That was the two of them.
And Eddie had kept it on the shelf where he'd see it every day for the fifteen years Theo had spent making sure he never had to.
He hadn't picked it up. He'd looked at it in the dark and made himself keep walking, because there was a whole country between looking at that photograph and picking it up, and he didn't have a passport for it tonight.