Chapter 9
Salt in the Wound
Rory heard the truck before he saw it, and knew it wasn't leaving.
That was the thing that got him, standing at the cold grill in the gray morning with flour he hadn't touched and a mixer he hadn't filled — he knew the sound of Bud Doucette's old pickup, everyone did, it had a rod knock you could set your watch by, and he'd spent the last hour telling himself that the next time he heard it, it would be Theo driving out of Merritt Harbor for good, the way everyone drove out of Rory's life eventually, the way Rory had made sure of the night before with his own flat mouth.
And now here it was coming up Water Street, and it wasn't going away from the harbor.
It was coming toward it. Toward the diner. Slowing. Stopping.
Rory put both hands flat on the cold steel and didn't turn around when the screen door opened.
He'd been up all night. He hadn't started the bread — first morning in nineteen years, and he'd stood here in the dark and physically could not make his hands do the thing they'd done ten thousand times, because the thing they'd done ten thousand times was survive, and Rory had discovered somewhere around three a.m. that he no longer wanted to.
He'd gotten exactly what he'd asked for.
The door shut. The wall high. The dangerous man gone, or going, back to the city where the leaving kind belonged, and Rory safe, Rory intact, Rory alone at a cold grill having successfully protected himself from the only good thing that had happened to him since Eddie died.
The torn halves of Colson's offer were still in his apron pocket.
He'd taken them out twice in the night and looked at them and put them back, and he still couldn't have told you why, except that throwing them away had felt like throwing away the proof of something, and he wasn't ready to not have the proof.
"I'm not here to make a scene," Theo said behind him.
His voice was rough, wrung out, no performance left in it at all.
"You told me to go and I'm going to respect that, mostly.
But I went to see June first. And now I can't leave until I've said one thing, and then you never have to look at me again if that's what you want. "
Rory turned around.
Theo looked like Rory felt — hollowed, up all night, past the reach of any charm. But there was something else in him too, something Rory hadn't seen before, a stillness where the shine used to be, a man standing on his own two feet with nothing to sell.
"I know about the will," Theo said. "What Eddie really did.
Why he tied us together — June told me, and I'm not going to say it to you here because you'll hear it better from her, but Rory, he didn't do it to punish you and he didn't do it to hand me a payday.
He did it because he knew you'd close up like a fist when he was gone and never let another soul in, and he knew I'd run from anything that ever mattered, and he chained us together on purpose because he loved us both and it was the only way he could say it.
" Theo's voice cracked and he let it. "He died trying to give you somebody who'd stay.
And I almost got in that truck and proved him wrong.
I almost proved you right. And I decided I'd rather be a coward about leaving than a coward about staying, for once, so I turned around. "
Rory didn't say anything. He couldn't. The whole night was sitting in his throat.
Because here was the unbearable thing, standing in his cold kitchen looking at a wrung-out man who'd driven back up a hill he could have driven down and away from forever: Rory believed him.
Believed he'd been to June's. Believed he'd turned the truck around.
Believed, looking at the stillness where the shine used to be, that something in Theo had broken open in the night the same way something in Rory had, and that they were both standing in the wreckage of it holding the same shattered thing from opposite ends.
And believing it changed nothing — because Rory had spent the whole night learning that his belief and his ability to act on it lived in two rooms with the door welded shut between them.
He wanted to cross the kitchen. Wanted it so badly his hands ached with it, the way they ached for the phone that couldn't call Eddie.
And he stood exactly where he was, because wanting had never once been the problem.
The problem was the twelve-year-old at the window, and the twelve-year-old did not trust his legs.
"I'm not going to stand here and beg you to want me back," Theo said.
"You told me the truest thing anybody's ever told me, in this kitchen — that you can't tell the difference between someone who might leave and someone who's leaving, because your father broke that part of you when you were twelve.
I can't fix that with a speech. I know I can't. So I'm not going to try.
" He took a breath. "There's a town meeting tonight.
About Colson. About the waterfront. Come to it.
Don't come to it. But if you come—" His jaw worked, the way Rory's did, the two of them more alike than either had wanted to admit.
"If you come, you'll have your answer about whether I'm the leaving kind.
Not my word for it. Proof. That's all I've got that's worth anything to a man like you.
Not words. Proof. So come watch me, and then decide, and whatever you decide I'll live with. "
He put something on the counter. Rory looked down.
It was a bag. A brown paper bag, grease-spotted, from the bakery two towns over, the only other place within thirty miles that made bread.
"You didn't start it this morning," Theo said quietly.
"I heard the not-starting. So I drove to Wexford at six and bought you a loaf, because a diner that opens with no bread isn't a diner, and whatever's broken between us, the town still has to eat, and you shouldn't have to be the one who— " His voice went.
"You've fed everybody for nineteen years, Rory.
Somebody should feed you. Even if it's just once.
Even if it's the last thing I get to do here. "
Rory looked at the bag. A loaf of somebody else's bread, from thirty miles off, bought at six in the morning by a man who was leaving — so the town Rory had fed for nineteen years wouldn't go without on the one morning Rory couldn't manage it.
It was such a small thing. It was the largest thing anyone had done for him since Eddie put a knife in his hand.
Nobody fed Rory. Rory fed people; that was the arrangement, the whole shape of his life — the one who stayed and cooked and kept the doors open and needed nothing.
And here was a man who'd noticed, in the middle of his own worst morning, that Rory had needs, and had driven into the dark to meet one of them without being asked, expecting nothing back, on his way out of town.
And then he left, careful with the screen door, gentle even now, and Rory stood alone in his kitchen holding a paper bag of somebody else's bread, and something in his chest that had been a fist since he was twelve years old opened one finger.
***
The town meeting was in the church hall, and by seven it was the fullest Theo had ever seen a room in a life spent filling rooms.
They'd come out for it — the whole harbor, the fishermen and the shopkeepers and the church-hall ladies and the summer people who'd bought in, Verne Doucette and Marion Petit and the endless Gagnons and Pruitt with his cane, Wyatt standing at the back with his arms crossed, Dee in the third row with her mouth set.
Wade Colson sat up front with two associates and a slide deck, expensive and patient, a man who'd done this in forty towns and expected to do it in a forty-first. The select board sat at their folding table looking overwhelmed.
And Theo stood at the back by the coffee urn, in the good clothes he'd almost left town in, with a folder under his arm and his heart going like a bilge pump, and he did not see Rory anywhere, and he told himself that was fine.
He told himself he'd meant it, whatever you decide I'll live with, and he had meant it, and it still felt like the floor was gone.
Colson presented first. He was good — Theo could admit that, one operator to another.
He put the empty moorings up on the screen, the shrinking fleet, the tax base bleeding to Portland, the boarded storefronts, and he was gentle and factual and every number was true, and Theo watched the town's face do the thing a scared town's face does when a confident man tells it he can make the fear stop.
Jobs. Year-round. A marina, a hotel, a boardwalk.
Reimagining the working waterfront. By the time Colson sat down, half the room wanted it, and Theo didn't blame them, because Colson wasn't a villain, Colson was just a man selling the one thing a dying town can never resist, which is a future that doesn't hurt.
Theo watched Dee's jaw set and Verne's shoulders come up and Marion Petit fold her arms like a woman preparing to physically eject a marina, and he loved them for it, the stubborn old guard who'd fight Colson on principle.
But he counted the room the way he counted everything, and the old guard wasn't the room.
The room was the young couple by the window who'd give an arm for a year-round job.
The room was the shopkeeper doing the math on a boardwalk's foot traffic.
The room was every tired person in Merritt Harbor who'd watched the harbor empty out one funeral at a time and just heard a confident man promise to make it stop.
You didn't beat that with nostalgia. Theo knew, because he'd sold the exact same feeling himself, in his own rooms, for nine years.
You only beat a future that doesn't hurt with a better one.