Chapter 6
Fletcher
“You can tell a good fish by the gills.”
Dad had been saying this for ten minutes. August was listening like it was the most interesting thing she’d ever heard, her elbows on the kitchen counter, chin in her hands, nodding at exactly the right moments.
“Under the gills,” Dad said, lifting the barramundi so she could see. “You look for bright red. Not dark, not brown. Red. My father taught me that when I was seven years old. We’d go to the market every Saturday morning, just the two of us, and he’d make me check every fish before he’d buy it.”
“That is such a good memory,” August said. “I love that.”
“It’s a disgusting memory,” Margaux said.
We all looked at her.
She was standing near the kitchen island with her wine, the third glass since we’d come in from the beach. She had her free hand pressed flat against her collarbone like she was bracing for impact.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I cannot eat that fish if we keep describing what’s under its face. I just can’t. I’ll have the salad.”
“The salad has anchovies,” Callie said.
Margaux looked at the salad bowl.
“I’ll have the bread,” she said.
The kitchen was full and warm. Mom had the grill going on the back counter, the smell of the fish mixing with the herb butter she’d brushed on it.
Callie and Poppy were at the far end of the island building what Poppy had announced at four o’clock would be a dessert bar.
It had ice cream, four toppings, sprinkles, and a handwritten menu card that Poppy had made herself.
Callie was scooping. Poppy was supervising and making changes to the menu card.
August and I were making the salad.
It had happened the way things between us always happened — without either of us arranging it. Mom had handed out tasks and somehow August ended up next to me at the counter with the cutting board and a bowl of cherry tomatoes, and I ended up next to her, and there we were.
She was slicing cucumbers. I was tearing lettuce. Our arms were close enough that I was aware of every time she reached across me for something.
Margaux was fluttering around the kitchen doing nothing in particular, refilling her wine, occasionally asking Mom questions about the house that weren’t really questions so much as observations about the decor.
“So what do you do?” Margaux asked.
I looked up. She was looking at August.
August set down the cucumber. “I sell flowers. I have a van, and I do the Millhaven Farmer’s Market, and some private arrangements for events. That kind of thing.”
Margaux’s hand stopped moving toward her wine glass.
She looked at August. Then she looked around, like she was checking if someone else had heard this. Then she looked back at August.
“You sell flowers,” she said.
“I do.”
“Like — from a van.”
“Yes.”
“So you’re—” Margaux pressed a hand to her mouth like she was physically stopping herself from spilling something. Her eyes were wide. “You’re a flower girl.”
The kitchen got slightly quieter. Mom kept her eyes on the grill. Dad put the barramundi down.
“I started from nothing,” August said. Her voice was easy. She picked the cucumber back up. “I came out of the foster care system with no safety net, so I built one. It took a while but Gerald and I figured it out.”
“Gerald?” Margaux looked confused.
“Oh, Gerald’s my van.” August said.
I went very still.
I knew what was coming. I could see it on Margaux’s face, the calculation behind her eyes, the way she tilted her head slightly when she found the angle she wanted.
She’d had three glasses of wine and August had just handed her the one piece of information she’d been waiting for all day without knowing she was handing it over.
“The foster system?” Margaux said. “You grew up in foster care?”
“Most of my life, yeah.”
“So you’ve never—” Margaux gestured vaguely around. At the kitchen. At the house. At all of it. “You’re not used to any of this.”
“Margaux,” I said.
“I’m just saying, this must be such a treat for her. A beach house like this. After— I mean, the contrast must be quite something. Especially on a flower girl’s salary.”
The cucumber in August’s hand kept moving. Slice, slice, slice. She didn’t stop.
“It is a treat,” August said. “It genuinely is. But it’s because of Callie and this family. Jennifer and Douglas have always made me feel like I belong here.”
“Aww.” Jennifer turned from the grill. She pointed her tongs at August. “You do belong here. You have since the first summer Callie dragged you up here and you reorganized my entire garden shed without being asked and then apologized for it.”
“I got carried away,” August said.
“She has always belonged here,” Douglas said. He picked the barramundi back up and went back to checking the gills. “I have three daughters. People just don’t always know it.”
August looked up at him.
Her eyes went bright, very fast. Just for a second, the shine of something she was blinking back. She pressed her lips together and looked down at the cutting board.
I hated seeing her close to tears. I hated it more than almost anything. Something in my chest went tight and I looked at the lettuce in my hands and said, before I’d decided to:
“We also keep her around for the donut pillows.”
August laughed. It came out fast, and she shook her head and the near-tears disappeared back to wherever they’d come from and the kitchen picked back up again.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
I went back to the lettuce.
“A portion of our gala proceeds,” Margaux said, “could go to people like you, actually. We fund several outreach programs for—”
“She’s not a charity case,” I said.
The kitchen went quiet again.
I set the lettuce down. I looked at Margaux directly.
“Can you see the difference,” I said, “between someone who lives off of other people’s money, and someone who works every day for herself and still finds a way to give to other people? Because I can. It’s not a subtle difference.”
Margaux’s jaw went tight. “I was being generous.”
“She’s not a cause.”
“Whatever,” Margaux said, as flat as she could.
August cleared her throat. “Actually,” she said, “if you’re really looking for somewhere to direct that funding, I do donate flowers every morning to the children’s cancer ward at Millhaven General. Fresh stems, every day. If your trust ever wanted to sponsor that—”
“We only do large-scale initiatives,” Margaux said. “Not local.”
“Like gala dances,” Poppy said, from the dessert bar, without looking up from her menu card. “And fashion shows.”
I looked at Dad. Dad looked at Mom. Mom had turned back to the grill and was staring at the fish with more focus than it required.
Margaux’s phone rang.
She looked at it. Something in her face shifted, softened. “It’s daddy.” She stepped away from the counter. “Daddy?” She walked out of the kitchen toward the hallway.
The kitchen exhaled.
We finished the salad in near silence, the good kind. August was quiet, passing me the tomatoes when I reached for them before I asked.
“I need some fresh air.” I nodded toward the patio door. “You want to come out?”
The sun was still going down. It hadn’t finished yet. The sky over the water was doing the thing it only did at Sable Cove — layers of orange and pink going all the way down to the horizon, the kind of sunset that looked fake in photographs but was completely real in person.
August leaned on the railing and looked at the water.
I stood next to her.
“I’m sorry about what Margaux said back there,” I said.
“Don’t be.” She kept her eyes on the water. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“She’s had a lot of wine. People say things.”
I looked at her profile. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make it easier for everyone.”
She smiled at the ocean. It was a small smile, a little tired around the edges. “She’s very pretty,” she said. “You look good together.”
I looked at the railing. Her hands were resting on it, right next to mine. Close enough. I looked at them and looked away.
“Tell me about the shop,” I said.
She turned to look at me. “What about it?”
“Last time you mentioned it you said you’d found a location.”
Her whole face changed. The tired edges disappeared. Her eyes went bright and she straightened up and turned toward me. I had made a very good decision asking about the shop.
“Okay, so,” she said. “You know the block on Halden Street? Right next to the coffee shop and the bookstore?”
“Birch & Grounds.”
“Yes. Right next to it. There’s that narrow little unit that’s been empty since the candle place closed down. It has the big front window, and the ceiling is high enough that I could hang installations. I went and looked through the glass three times before I called the landlord.”
“What did the landlord say?”
“He said the monthly is fourteen hundred and I almost cried right on the phone.” She laughed. “But I kept it together. I have eleven months of savings right now. I need about five more and I can put down the deposit and the first three months.”
“You need to save for five more months?”
“Maybe four if the market picks up in the fall. I’ve been thinking about adding dried arrangements to the stock. They sell really well online and the margin is better than fresh stems.”
“You’ve done the margin math.”
“I’ve done all the math. I have a spreadsheet.” She paused. “It’s color coded.”
“Of course it is.”
“Each flower has its own color in the spreadsheet. The dahlias are orange. The peonies are pink. The sunflowers—”
“Are yellow.”
“Obviously yellow.” She grinned. “I also have a column for Gerald’s maintenance costs because he’s part of the business plan until I can afford a delivery van, and his rattle is getting worse and I’m pretending I don’t hear it.”
She was still smiling. She was looking at the water again, but it was a different kind of looking than before. She was seeing something I couldn’t see, something that lived a little ways ahead of right now, and her eyes were completely clear.
I had an offer sitting in my chest that I had already decided I would not make tonight. I had made it before and she had said no with so much warmth and so much certainty that I had understood immediately it wasn’t about the money. It was about what the money would mean. I kept it in my chest.
“I think I’m going to cry at the opening of my flowers shop.” August said, still looking at the ocean. “I’m already planning on it. I’m going to stand outside and look at my name on the glass and cry.”
“You should.”
She looked at me. “Yeah?”
“You’ve been working toward it for three years. You’re allowed to cry about it.”
She looked back at the water. The orange was fading now, the pink taking over. She had her chin slightly lifted, the way she did when she was happy about something and didn’t want to make a big deal of it.
I looked at her hands on the railing.
I looked away.
“Fletcher. Daddy wants to say hi to you.” Margaux’s voice came from inside.
I straightened up.
August didn’t look at me. She kept her eyes on the water. “Go,” she said. “I’ll stay for a bit.”
I went in.
I couldn’t sleep.
Margaux was out the second her head hit the pillow, the four glasses of wine having done the trick. She breathed slow and even next to me while I lay on my back and looked at the ceiling and waited for the dark to do what it always eventually did.
It always caught up.
That was the thing about the dark. You could be fine all day.
You could be in a kitchen making salad, you could be on a patio listening to someone talk about flower spreadsheets, you could be watching a sunset turn pink over the water, and you could feel, for minutes or even hours at a time, like a person who was mostly okay.
And then it came back.
I got up. I got dressed in the dark, slow and quiet. I picked my car keys up off the nightstand.
The house was still. I went down the stairs and through the front door and I closed it behind me without a sound.
The driveway. The car. The dark road out of Sable Cove.
I drove.
I didn’t have a direction. I never did, on these nights. I just drove until the house was far enough behind me that I could breathe, and then I kept driving because stopping didn’t help. The road was empty at this hour, just the headlights and the dark and the sound of the engine.
The man who was dead because of me lay buried two hours from here.
And here I was, enjoying a summer retreat with my family.
It was not fair.
Nothing about it was fair.
I drove on a road next to the coast, the ocean somewhere to my right, black and invisible and loud.
I thought about August on the patio with her chin up and her eyes clear and her plans for a flower shop, and I thought about Paul Greer in the ground two hours away, and I thought about what I was and what I had done and what I could never undo.
She could not be near me.
Every time I got too close to wanting something good, I would remember this. I would remember what I had traded for a clean balance sheet and a pat on the back from my father. I would remember the name. I would come back to this road in the dark and I would remember.
I drove until the clock on the dashboard said 3 a.m.
Then I turned around and drove back.
***