CHAPTER EIGHT
Lucy was in a booth alone, reading, when Claire walked into the diner the next morning.
Today Lucy looked up when Claire walked in.
Not a surprised look. The look of a woman who'd registered Claire's arrival before the bell over the door finished ringing.
"There's room," Lucy said.
Claire slid in across from her. Mae appeared with two coffees and set them down without being asked. Lucy’s cup was already mostly gone. Mae was refilling it. The second was for Claire. Mae hadn't asked whether she wanted coffee. Mae had decided.
"I'm Lucy," Lucy said. "We've passed each other a few times."
"Claire."
"I know."
The book on the table between them was a battered field guide to Pacific Northwest mosses, published in the seventies on cheap paper and never reprinted. Lucy was halfway through it, a small notebook beside it where she was writing things in pencil.
"That's a serious book," Claire said.
"My grandmother's." Lucy turned it so Claire could see the inscription inside the cover. Beatrice Anderson, 1974. "I'm teaching myself the local ones. The book's older than I am, which means a lot of the names have changed, which means it's been slow."
"Most of those names have changed twice."
"You know mosses?"
"I know what survey botanists complain about. Mosses are at the top of the list."
Lucy almost smiled.
The conversation moved. Claire asked about Lucy's work.
Lucy answered in a careful matter-of-fact way.
The way of a woman who'd decided long ago what she would and wouldn't explain about herself.
That she'd come to Pine Ridge eight months ago and was staying.
Claire didn't ask follow-ups. Lucy had said staying in a way that suggested follow-ups weren't the right move.
Lucy asked about the survey. Claire said it was going. Lucy didn't press.
A pause.
Lucy looked at Claire's hands.
A deliberate look. Not a glance. Not a flicker. Lucy looked at Claire's hands the way Mae had looked at them at the counter the night Claire arrived. The look was open. An inquiry. It said I see something. I am asking.
Claire didn't pull her hands off the table.
She let Lucy look.
She didn't know, in the moment, why she was letting her. Only that the looking had a quality of welcome to it, the way the cabin had held her like it had been waiting, and Claire was, this morning, very tired of pretending she didn't have hands.
Lucy looked up. Met her eyes.
"If you ever want to talk to someone who has spent her life noticing things she can't explain," Lucy said, "I'm in town most Thursdays. I have a chair on a porch. Feel free."
"Okay."
"Don't feel free if you don't want to. The invitation isn't a price tag."
"Okay."
Lucy went back to her field guide. Claire drank her coffee. Mae brought the menu and Claire ordered toast and eggs and ate them while Lucy turned pages and made pencil marks and the diner emptied out around them.
When Claire got up to pay, Lucy said: "It does get easier."
"What does?"
"Letting them be your hands."
Claire paid Mae. Walked to the trailhead. Jackson was already there with his coffee, parked beside the gate, the way he'd been every morning for the eight days she'd been on this contract. He looked up as her truck pulled in. The look stopped on her a count longer than usual.
She got out. He said almost nothing to her. Something in the way he watched her had shifted.
She thought about Lucy's chair on a porch all afternoon.
She did not, that day, accept the invitation.
She also did not, that day, refuse it.
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