7. Beau
Beau
The bell over the door rings its off-key note as it swings shut behind us, and Mormor is already moving toward the counter, and Sloane is already gone — peeled off toward a hook on the wall where she takes down an apron and ties it on with the quick, unthinking motions of someone who has done it a thousand times.
I stand near the door for a second and take in the shop.
It hasn’t changed. It never changes. That’s the point of it.
Same crooked shelves, same hardwood floors gone soft in the middle, same smell — paper and coffee and the dust of a place that’s been the same place for forty years.
Mormor’s been running Margaret’s Books since before my mom could drive. I learned to read in here.
I learned to not be able to read in here too, technically. But that’s not a thing I think about.
“Sit,” Mormor says, pointing at the stool behind the counter. “You look thin.”
“I’m not thin.”
“You look like you’re not eating.”
“I ate a full pan of pasta last night.”
“That’s not eating, that’s a single event.” She’s pulling the reading glasses out of her hair, settling them on her nose, looking at me over the top of them in the way she’s looked at me my whole life. “Sit down. Tell me about the shoulder.”
I run a hand through my hair. “The shoulder’s fine, Mormor.”
“Beau.”
“It’s fine.”
She doesn’t say anything. She just holds the look, which is worse than saying something, and I sit on the stool because the alternative is standing here losing a staring contest to an eighty-two-year-old woman, which I have never once won.
“It’s a little stiff,” I tell her. “From March. It’s getting better.”
“Have you seen the trainer?”
“It’s preseason. There’s no point bothering the trainer over something that’s getting better on its own.”
“Mm.” She files this. She’s going to come back to it. We both know she’s going to come back to it. “Your mother says you didn’t go to the specialist she found you over the summer.”
“I went to a specialist.”
“You went to a different specialist. A worse one. Closer to campus.” She eyes the Roastery cup in my hand, the one I’ve been carrying since the walk over. “You and your fancy coffee. There’s a perfectly good kettle right here. She worries, you know.”
“I know.”
“She worries because you don’t tell anyone anything.” This said lightly, as she straightens a stack of bookmarks on the counter. “You get it from your father. He sat through an entire dinner with a broken finger once and didn’t mention it until I noticed he was eating left-handed.”
I huff a laugh. “That sounds like Dad.”
“It sounds like both of you.”
Across the shop, Sloane is restocking a low shelf, her back to us, working steadily.
She’s not listening. Or she’s pretending not to listen, which from a theater major is probably a refined skill.
Either way she’s giving us the kind of privacy you give people when you’ve decided their conversation isn’t yours, and I find I’m aware of where she is in the room in a way I don’t examine.
Mormor leans against the counter, crosses her arms, and looks at me with an expression I recognize and have been dreading since the sidewalk.
“So.”
“Don’t.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You’re about to say something.”
“I’m simply observing,” Mormor says, “that my grandson came to my shop for the first time in a month, and he came at four o’clock, which is precisely when Sloane starts her shift, and he brought her a chai.” She lets that sit. “From the Roastery. Which is in the opposite direction from your house.”
I drink the coffee. It’s gone lukewarm. I drink it anyway.
“It’s not what you think.” I set the cup down before she can read anything else in it.
“I think it’s wonderful.”
“It’s not — Mormor.”
“I’ve been telling you about her for two years.”
“I’m aware.”
“And now you’ve met her.”
“We met last night. Briefly.” I turn the cup a quarter-turn on the counter. “There was a thing at a party. Her ex was being a problem. I stepped in.”
Something changes in Mormor’s face. The teasing drops off it, fast, and underneath is something sharper. “Her ex,” she repeats. “The football one.”
“You know about him?”
“I know enough.” Her mouth is a thin line now. “I know she stopped walking home past Whitmore Avenue this summer. I know she takes the long way. I never asked why, because she didn’t offer, and I don’t pry.” A beat. “Much.”
This is a lie. Mormor pries constantly. But I understand what she means — there’s prying about coffee orders and there’s the other kind, the kind where you let a person keep the thing they’re not ready to hand over.
Mormor knows the difference. It’s one of the things I love about her that I’ve never figured out how to say.
“He grabbed her arm last night,” I tell her. Quiet, so it stays at the counter. “At the party. Wouldn’t let go. I made him let go.”
Mormor is silent for a moment.
Then she looks across the shop at Sloane, restocking her shelf, oblivious or pretending to be, and her face does something complicated.
“Good.” Finally. Just that.
“Yeah.”
“Good,” she says again, and picks up a stack of receipts, and starts going through them with more force than receipts require.
I end up staying.
I don’t plan to stay. I planned to see Mormor, finish the coffee, manage the matchmaking, and head back to the house.
But a delivery shows up at four-thirty — three boxes of stock, dropped at the curb by a guy who clearly has somewhere better to be — and Mormor looks at the boxes and then looks at me, and I’m not going to make my eighty-two-year-old grandmother haul boxes while I sit on a stool, so.
“Where do you want them?” I ask.
“Back room. Sloane will—”
“I know where the back room is Mormor. I practically grew up in this shop, remember?”
Sloane straightens up from her shelf. The look she gives Mormor is a specific look, and the look Mormor gives back is an even more specific look, and there’s an entire conversation in it that I’m not part of, conducted in the silent language of two people who know each other well.
“This way,” Sloane says.
I pick up two of the boxes. They’re heavier than they look — books always are, which is the kind of thing you don’t think about until you’ve moved enough of them — and I follow her through a narrow gap in the shelves toward the back of the shop.
The back room is small. A desk, a window that looks out on the alley, more boxes, a kettle, a chair with a sweater thrown over it that I’d guess is hers.
There’s a wall of small wooden drawers, the old kind, each one labeled in handwriting.
A bulletin board with a schedule on it. The light is dim and gold, late-afternoon, coming sideways through the alley window.
“You can put them down anywhere,” she says. “Margaret will reorganize wherever you put them within the hour regardless.”
I set the boxes down. Go back for the third. When I come back she’s crouched over the first box with a box cutter, slicing the tape in one clean motion.
“You didn’t have to do that.” She doesn’t look up.
“The boxes?”
“The boxes. The intervention last night. The —” she gestures vaguely with the box cutter “— the general showing-up.” She pulls the flaps open. “You keep doing things you don’t have to do.”
“I like doing things.”
“That’s a non-answer.”
“It’s a true answer.” I lean against the desk. “I’m bad at sitting still. Ask anyone.”
She glances up at me. Then back at the box. “You came here to see your grandmother.”
“I did.”
“And the rest of it is incidental?”
“The chai wasn’t incidental.”
She goes quiet for a second, focused on the box, and I watch her unpack it — books stacked and sorted into piles by some system I can’t see but that she clearly can, her hands moving fast and certain.
She’s good at this. The same way I’m good on the ice — not thinking about it, just doing it, the body knowing the work.
I look at my own hands instead.
“Can I ask you something?” she says.
“Sure.”
“The plan.” She sets a book on a pile. “The — being seen together thing. If I said yes.” She looks up. “Hypothetically.”
“Okay?”
“How does it actually work? Logistically. Because I’ve thought about it for —” she checks an invisible watch “— forty minutes, and the more I think about it the more questions I have, and most of them are not romantic.”
“None of it’s romantic.” I keep my voice even. “That’s the point.”
“Right. So. Logistics.”
I push off the desk and crouch down on the other side of the box, because it feels strange to be standing over her while she works, and start handing her books from the stack so she can sort them.
She lets me. She doesn’t tell me how to do it, just takes what I hand her and slots it where it goes, and we fall into a rhythm without discussing it.
“Logistics,” I say. “We’d have to be seen. Together. In the places people see things. Games, parties, around campus. Enough that it’s not a rumor, it’s just — a fact people have absorbed. You don’t announce a thing like this. You let people figure it out and feel smart about it.”
“You’ve thought about this.”
“I think about systems. It’s a hockey thing.”
“It’s a manipulation-of-public-perception thing.”
“Same thing, in a smaller rink.”
The corner of her mouth moves. Not a smile. The neighborhood of one. “Go on.”
“We’d need a story for how it started. People are going to ask.
It has to be simple, and it has to be mostly true, because the mostly-true ones are the ones you don’t trip on.
” I hand her another book. “We met at my grandmother’s shop.
That’s true. We met at the party. Also true.
I stepped in with your ex — half the party saw that, so we can’t pretend it didn’t happen, which means we use it.
Captain steps in for a girl, turns out he already knew her, turns out there was already something there.
” I shrug. “It writes itself. People love that one.”
She stops sorting.
She looks at me for a long moment, and I can’t read what’s behind it, which is becoming a pattern with her.