7. Beau #3
Out front, Mormor has roped a tourist couple into a forty-minute discussion of local maritime history, which is her favorite trap to spring on unsuspecting visitors, and I sit on the stool behind the counter and finish the coffee, gone cold now, and watch the shop do its thing.
Sloane comes out of the back and resumes her shelving like the conversation never happened. She’s good at that — the clean reset, the face that goes back to neutral. I’d believe it completely if I hadn’t just heard her laugh thirty feet away.
The tourist couple buys two books. Mormor rings them up and tells them about a third they should read and a fourth they shouldn’t, and they leave looking slightly dazed, which is how people generally leave Mormor’s shop.
“Beau.” Mormor turns to me, holding a clipboard. “Be useful. I need you to check the order against this list. The boxes that came in.”
She holds out the clipboard.
And there it is. The thing.
I take the clipboard because not taking it would require an explanation, and I look down at the list, and the page does the thing it does — the lines sliding, the letters not holding still, the work it takes me to make text behave that I’ve spent thirteen years getting good at hiding.
I can do it. I just can’t do it fast, and I can’t do it casually, standing at a counter while my grandmother watches, with a list of titles that all blur into the same shape.
“I’ll do it later,” I say. “Let me finish my coffee.”
“It’ll take two minutes.”
“I’m savoring the coffee.”
“You’re savoring cold coffee.”
“It’s good coffee.”
Mormor gives me a look, but she takes the clipboard back, because Mormor knows — she’s one of the five people on earth who knows — and she covers it the way she always covers it, smooth, no fuss, like it was never a thing. “Fine. Sloane, can you check the order when you’ve got a minute?”
“Sure,” Sloane says, from the shelves.
And I catch Sloane glance at me. Just a flick. A half-second. Her eyes go from the clipboard to me and back, fast, and something moves behind them — not understanding, not yet, but the start of a question, the way you notice a gap before you know what’s missing.
I look at my hands.
She goes back to shelving.
But she clocked it. She clocked something. I don’t know how much, and I’m not going to find out by staring at her, so I drink the last of the cold coffee and let the moment close over itself.
She catches things. She told me that herself, on the walk. I observe a lot.
I’m going to have to be careful.
I leave around five-thirty, when the after-class rush picks up and the shop fills with students and Mormor stops having time to interrogate me.
I hug her at the counter — she comes up to my sternum, all silver hair and reading glasses and surprising strength in her arms — and she holds on a second longer than usual.
“Come back,” she says. “And not just to move boxes.”
“I will.”
“And see the trainer about the shoulder.”
“Mormor.”
“I’ll know if you don’t. I have my ways.”
She does. I don’t doubt it for a second.
I’m at the door, hand on it, the off-key bell already starting to sound, when Sloane’s voice comes from behind me.
“Sorensen.”
I turn.
She’s at the counter now, ringing up a stack of books for a kid in a Whitmore hoodie, not looking at me, her attention on the register. For a second I think I imagined it.
Then she says, still not looking up: “Wednesday. There’s a hockey thing, right? A game?”
“Friday. Home opener’s not for a few weeks but there’s a preseason exhibition Friday.”
“Friday.” She hands the kid his change. “I’ll think about it. The —” she glances at the customer, recalibrates, lowers her voice a notch “— the thing. I’ll have an answer by Friday.”
“Friday,” I say.
“Don’t read into it.”
“I’m not reading into anything.”
“You’re doing a face.”
“I’m not doing a face.”
“You’re doing the face people do when they’re reading into things.
” She finally looks up at me, and her expression is dry and level and gives away exactly nothing, which is becoming the thing I’d most like to crack.
“Friday, Sorensen. Now go home. You’re scaring the freshmen with your whole —” she waves a hand at me, the jacket, the general situation “— aura.”
“My aura?”
“It’s very loud. Goodbye.”
The bell rings its half-step-off note behind me, and the evening’s gone cool and blue out on Main Street, the streetlights just coming on, and I stand on the sidewalk for a second outside my grandmother’s shop with my hands in my jacket pockets and my shoulder aching its low ache.
She’ll have an answer by Friday.
She didn’t say no.
I head up Main toward campus, and I’m three blocks gone before I catch myself doing the thing — running the exhibition game in my head, where she’d sit, what she’d see, whether Mormor would come — and I stop, because that’s not — there’s no reason to be planning that far ahead.
It’s a business arrangement she hasn’t even agreed to yet.
I run a hand through my hair.
I keep walking.
I don’t plan the game.
I do, a little. But I don’t mean to.