Chapter 8 #2
"He couldn't fix either one of you with words," June said.
"God knows he tried, he wasn't a man who could say the soft thing, it choked him.
So he did the only thing a man like that can do.
He built it. He took the one thing on earth Rory couldn't walk away from — that diner — and he chained it to the one thing that might finally give you a reason to stop running.
He put you in a boat together and dared you both to sink.
He didn't leave you half a diner, sweetheart.
" She reached over and took Theo's hand in her two old ones, and held it, hard.
"He left you a reason to stay. And he left Rory somebody who'd make him open the door.
That was the whole will. That was the last thing my husband ever built, and he built it out of the two of you, because he loved you both and it was the only language he had. "
Theo put his face in his free hand and cried the way he hadn't at the funeral he'd skipped, the way he hadn't in fifteen years, cried for Eddie and for Carol and for the boat named after his mother and for the six weeks he'd spent being handed a home one bowl of chowder at a time by a man too wounded to say the word, and June held his hand through all of it and didn't say there there, didn't pity him, just held on, family, the last of it, the only of it.
"He named the boat after her, you know," June said, when Theo's breathing had come back down.
"The Carol. I used to give him grief about it — thirty years, that ridiculous leaky boat, two traps he lost money on every season.
But he went out in her every Sunday, rain or shine, him and Rory both.
I asked him once why he kept a boat that only ever cost him money and heartache, and you know what he told me?
" She smiled, wet, out at the water. "He said, 'Because when I'm out in her I've still got a little of Carol on the water with me.
' That's your uncle. Couldn't say I love you to a living soul, but he'd keep a sinking boat forty years to stay close to a dead girl he raised like his own.
That's the man who wrote that will. Now you tell me it was about a diner. "
"He did all that," Theo managed, finally, "and I came here to sell it."
"You came here broke and scared and running, which is what he expected, because he knew you.
" June let go of his hand. "The question isn't what you came here to do, baby.
Nobody's judging the boy who got off the plane.
The question is what you do now that you know what he was really giving you.
" She looked at him, level. "You can still run.
The truck's right there. You can drive to Portland and take that man's money and pay your debt and be exactly as safe and exactly as empty as you've been for fifteen years, and Eddie will have died reaching for you and missed, and Rory will get to be right, and everybody stays exactly who they've always been.
That's one road." She nodded at the harbor.
"Or you can go down that hill and fight for the thing my husband died trying to give you.
Which is harder. Which might not even work, because that boy is stubborn as a mooring and he just told you to leave and he might tell you again.
" She stood, slow, Eddie's flannel hanging off her thin shoulders.
"But at least you'd have finally, for once in your life, tried staying.
And you'd find out what your mother never got to.
What's on the other side of not running. "
She went to her door.
"I'm going to go make tea," June said, "because I'm old and this has been a lot before nine in the morning.
You do what you're going to do. But Theo—" She stopped with her hand on the screen.
"That debt you're so scared of. A hundred and forty thousand dollars.
" She said the number like it was nothing, like it was weather.
"It's money. Money's the easiest thing in the world to solve compared to what you'd be throwing away.
There's more than one way to dig out of a hole, and every single one of them is easier with somebody standing in it next to you.
Eddie knew that too. It's practically the whole point. "
The screen door shut behind her. Gentle. She caught it, the way they all did.
***
Theo sat on June Vann's porch step for a long time, above the harbor, above the diner, with his mother's whole town laid out below him and the tide coming all the way in.
Then he walked down to Bud Doucette's truck, and he got in, and he picked up his phone off the seat.
Colson's number was right there. Two taps. The first hour, one call away. Everything he'd driven up the coast to do sitting under his thumb, safe and empty and known.
Theo looked at it.
And then he put the phone face-down on the seat, and he turned the key, and he turned the truck around in June Vann's weedy drive — pointed it back down the hill, toward the water, toward the diner, toward the stubborn wounded impossible man who'd told him to leave and hadn't started the bread — and for the first time in fifteen years, Theo Vann drove toward the thing that scared him instead of away from it.
He had no idea what he was going to say.
He didn't have a plan. For once in his life, he didn't have a plan, and he didn't reach for one, because a plan was just a fancier way of running, and he was done running, and the only thing he had left to offer a man who'd seen through every performance he owned was the one thing Theo had never once put on the table: himself, with nothing on it, staying.
It was the most exposed he had ever been — driving down that hill with no armor and no exit and no idea whether the man at the bottom would even open the door.
It was, June was right, not safe. It was the opposite of safe.
His hands shook on Bud Doucette's cracked wheel, and his mother's photograph rode in a bag on the seat beside him, and a hundred and forty thousand dollars of trouble was still coming for him with a countdown — and none of it, not one piece of it, felt as impossible as the thing he was actually about to do, which was walk into that diner and stay put and let a man decide, to his face, whether he was worth keeping.
The diner came up out of the harbor to meet him.