Chapter 11 #2
Second stop: The Sleighbell Springs Public Library.
It’s a small brick building with creaky floors and radiators that knock when the heat kicks on, which is charming in theory and alarming in practice if you’re trying to concentrate.
I push through the heavy door and the quiet wraps around me like a blanket.
The reading nook is in the far corner, by the big window that faces the park. A battered armchair, a side table with a lamp that never quite works right, and on the wall above it…my illustrations.
Pressed ferns, rendered in ink so fine you can count the veins.
Winterberries, their red so vivid against the white paper they almost glow.
I did these the winter after Drew died, holed up in the studio with the space heater cranked, my hands numb, working until the light failed because the alternative was sitting in the quiet house listening to the furnace cycle.
The town librarian asked if she could frame them.
I said sure, not thinking about it, assuming they’d end up in some back office where no one would see them.
They’ve been here for two and a half years.
Framed in simple pine, mounted on the wall where the afternoon light hits them just right.
A kid is sitting in the armchair, legs tucked under her, a book open in her lap, not even looking at the drawings because they’re just part of the room to her. They belong here. I belong here.
The gray-haired librarian looks up from her desk and gives me a small, knowing nod. Not making a big deal, just acknowledging a fact we both already know.
I leave before I start crying in a public building, which feels like a line I shouldn’t cross before ten in the morning.
Third stop: I walk past Springs & Bells without going in. The storefront is quiet, the OPEN sign hanging in the window, Melvin probably in the back doing inventory or grumbling at a pipe fitting. I stop at the window display.
A “Christmas in July” theme complete with a Christmas Tree made out of old suitcases filled with garden supplies and seeds, and the little garden gnome I adopted as the store mascot (much to Melvin’s chagrin) acting as the tree topper.
A hand-lettered sign in my own handwriting: SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW.
I made this last month, half-asleep at two in the morning, fuelled by equal parts insomnia and the desperate need to make the store look like someone gave a damn.
I hadn’t thought of it as mine. It was just a thing the store needed, a problem I could solve with my hands.
I look at it now, and something cracks open in my chest. I reach out and touch the glass with two fingers.
Just a brush, light enough that no one watching would even notice, but I feel the cool smoothness, the vibration of the street beneath the display, the fact that my handwriting is on the other side of this pane and people walk past it every day and see it and it is, undeniably, mine.
I keep walking, not ready to head inside just yet.
I need one last stop: Sleigh Queen, at the far end of Main.
The drag club is quiet in the morning, its lights dimmed to a gentle glow, the marquee dark.
I stand on the sidewalk and look up at the awning, red and gold and slightly crooked, and I remember December, two years ago.
The first holiday show after Drew died. Mason—not in full drag, just Mason in a sparkly shirt and those ridiculous glasses, handing me a camera I hadn’t touched in months.
“Just point and shoot,” they said. “No pressure. But if you get a good shot of Patti’s finale, I’ll buy you a drink that will make you forget your own name. ”
I got the shot. I also laughed, really laughed, when one of the queens slipped on a sequin and caught herself with a flourish that turned the stumble into choreography.
The crowd roared, the floor shook, and I stood there with the camera warm in my hands and realized, with a clarity that nearly knocked me over, that I was still alive.
That I had survived a thing I didn’t think I could survive, and on the other side of it was a drag bar on a Thursday night, cheap well drinks, and the joy of watching someone turn a disaster into art.
I hadn’t cataloged any of this before. The shelves, the illustrations, the window display, the photograph.
I’d let them exist without claiming them, as if making things and leaving them in the world didn’t count as living unless someone else noticed.
Now I claim them. All of them. Every little gesture to a local just because, every stroke of ink, every clumsy attempt to make something beautiful in a town that was supposed to be temporary.
My life here did not begin with Drew. It did not end with him. It changed shape. It kept going… I kept going and left marks on this place without even noticing.
I turn and walk back through town, and the streets are the same streets they were an hour ago. The same storefronts, the same cracked sidewalks, the same blue Vermont sky pressing down on the rooftops. But I’m not the same. I’m seeing with new eyes, and what I see is mine.
One day.
I think I know what to do with it.