Chapter 31
Chapter
Thirty-One
Ihad, by the third week of August, achieved every single thing I had set out to achieve, and I would not have wished the result on a woman I hated.
The parlor was the most profitable soft-serve operation on the Georgia coast. The cart cleared its nut by noon.
The wholesale shell was in four stores, a marina, and on a waiting list. I had taken a beloved wreck running on luck and a dead woman’s address book, and I had made it, by every metric a human being has ever devised, sound — and I sat in the middle of it like a woman who’d won an argument so thoroughly that everyone she loved had left the room.
I had the numbers. I had nothing else. The two facts sat side by side in me and would not reconcile, and I have spent my whole life reconciling things, and I could not reconcile these, because they were both completely true and measured in currencies I could not convert between, and I only owned the one.
Dani found me like that, which was its own small mercy, because Dani is the one person on the island who has never once required me to be having a good day.
She was rehanging the parlor’s screen door, which the tourist traffic had worked loose on its hinges, and she was doing it like Dani does everything — slowly, completely, with no apparent awareness that there was a faster way and no interest in it if there was.
I came out the back to escape a bus, and there she was, a shim in her teeth, communing with a doorframe.
“You’re losing your regulars,” she said, around the shim.
Not an accusation. Dani doesn’t do accusations; she does observations and lets you supply the verdict.
“Whole morning crowd’s at Hutchins’s bait shop now.
Buddy of mine sells him the shrimp. Says it’s like the parlor used to be in there. Says Odette made coffee.”
“I’ve heard.”
“Mm.” She set the shim, tested the swing, frowned at a degree of something I couldn’t see.
“Funny. You came down here to fix a place that was barely making it, you made it print money, and the thing it was actually for picked up and moved to a shed.” She took the shim out of her teeth.
“I’m not saying it to needle you. I genuinely think it’s interesting.
I build things for a living. You can build a perfect thing that nobody wants to stand inside of.
Happens all the time. People hire me to do it.
Big, beautiful, square, dead.” She fit the door back on its pins, and it swung true, soundless, the way it hadn’t in months.
“There. That’s been bugging me since June. ”
I watched her gather her tools, unhurried, satisfied by a fixed door in a way I had not been satisfied by a record month, and I felt the specific envy I’d been feeling all summer and finally got far enough underneath it to see what it was.
Dani did one thing. She did it all the way.
Then she stopped, and the stopping didn’t cost her anything, because she wasn’t running from a single thing the stopping might let catch up.
She was just a person, in a body, on an island, fixing a door, and she was more whole standing in a parlor full of strangers than I had been in twenty years of being the most necessary woman in every room I entered.
“How do you do that?” I asked before I could stop myself.
Dani looked at me. She has a way of looking at you that is not unkind and not soft either, just level, like a thing she’d set with a bubble. “Do what?”
“Stop. Be done. Not — reach for the next one.”
“Oh.” She set the tool bag back down, which from Dani is a speech.
“I want my life more than I want to win it. Took me a while.” She was quiet a second, deciding how much to spend.
“You remember the year I went away. Nobody says what it was, and I’m not going to start now, but I’ll tell you the part that’s yours.
I got to the bottom of a thing I could not fix, and I’d been a fixer my whole life, same as you, different tools, and when I finally understood there was no fixing it — that some things you just have to carry, that there’s no version where you set them down solved — I thought it would kill me.
The not-fixing. It nearly did.” She picked at a fleck of old paint on the doorframe, not looking at me.
“And then it didn’t. And on the other side of it, I found out the only things worth a damn in my whole life were the ones I’d never once been able to fix or schedule or win.
The grain in a board. A morning. The people who stayed while I was no use to anybody.
” She shrugged, and shouldered the bag again.
“I build now because I love it, not because it proves anything. That’s the whole difference between me at thirty and me now, and it cost me a year in the dark I wouldn’t wish on you, and I’d do it again for what’s on the far side. ”
She headed for her truck, then turned back, the closest Dani comes to tenderness. “You’ll get there or you won’t, Brooke. But you can’t shim it. I’ve watched you try all summer. There’s no faster way to the thing you’re after. That’s the whole reason it’s worth having.”
Cam called that night, because Cam has a sense for my low points the way some people have a sense for weather, and because the universe was apparently determined to deliver the same sermon in three different voices until one of them took.
“Tell me everything,” she said. “I want the divorce update, the parlor update, and most of all I want the captain update, and don’t you dare give me the parlor one first, I can hear you reaching for the spreadsheet, Brooke, I can hear it through the phone.”
I told her about the parlor. I am, even bleeding, a woman who leads with the P&L.
“Mm-hm. Record month. Cool. Don’t care.” Cam, who loves me, who has loved me since we were twenty and who has never once been impressed by a single thing I’ve accomplished, which is exactly why I keep her.
“Now tell me about the man you’re so scared of that you tried to give him a prenup for a relationship that didn’t exist yet.
Greer told me — and yes, before you ask, she’s still furious with you about the loan, she could hardly get through the story she was so mad, and she still called me the second she was worried, because that’s the whole of Greer, isn’t it: the love doesn’t wait for the anger to finish.
” A pause, and then, softer, the Cam underneath the Cam: “When are you going to let yourself just want something, honey? No plan. No exit. No projections past Labor Day. Just — want it, out loud, with your whole chest, like a person, and see what happens. You’ve spent your whole life being the thing everybody needs.
Aren’t you tired? Don’t you want, one time before you die, to find out what it’s like to be the thing somebody picks? ”
“I have to go, Cam,” I said. “The cart closes at nine, and I do the deposit.”
“Yeah,” Cam said, and I heard her not believe me, the whole loving chorus of them.
“Okay. Go do your deposit. But I’m writing this down, and I’m reading it back to you at Thanksgiving: you are going to wish you’d been braver this summer than you were.
I just hope it’s the kind of wish you can still do something about when it shows up. ”
I did the deposit. It was a record Tuesday. I drove home to an empty house and lay in the dark with nothing in my hands, the way Sophie had tried to teach me on a towel, except that I had not chosen it this time, and it did not feel like rest. It felt like a preview.