Chapter 13
August
I had cried enough.
That was the decision I made at ten in the morning, still on the kitchen floor, back against the cabinets, staring at the ceiling.
I had cried enough and I had bills to pay that nobody was going to pay for me.
I had not been born with a silver spoon in my mouth.
I had been born into a situation that required me to move on from whatever was breaking my heart and go do the thing.
I had been doing that my whole life, and today was not going to be different just because Fletcher Calloway had called me a nobody on a patio in Sable Cove.
I got up. I washed my face. I called my flower supplier.
The Millhaven Farmer’s Market was already busy by the time I set up. Cliff was at his booth, talking to a young couple who had bought a few bottles of his honey. He looked up when I came in with my first bucket and watched me set up without saying anything for a while.
I arranged the dahlias. Lightest to darkest, left to right.
“What happened to you?” Cliff said.
I looked up. “Nothing at all.” I gave him my best smile. “Good afternoon, Cliff.”
“I can see it,” he said. “Right there in your eyes. Something big happened. It takes a big thing to bring down a girl like you. I told you that on your first day.” He paused. “The young man who doesn’t love you but buys all your flowers. Is he coming today?”
I straightened a peony. “I don’t know.”
“Actually.” I put the peony down. “I don’t think he’ll be coming here anymore.”
My eyes went blurry. Fast, without warning, like a faucet turning. I blinked hard and looked at the dahlias and told myself absolutely not. Not here. Not at the market. Not in front of the customers and the guitar player and Cliff.
He came around from behind his booth and put both arms around me.
I let him. I stood there in the middle of the farmer’s market in my apron and let a sixty-something honey vendor hug me while I held myself together by the thinnest possible thread.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “you will be okay. I have lived long enough to know that.”
“I know,” I said into his shoulder. “I know I will.”
He patted my back twice.
He was still looking past me, toward the entrance, when he said: “It seems like instead of him, there is a girl who has come looking for you. She is practically running towards your booth.”
I turned around.
Callie was sprinting through the market entrance.
Her hair was still half undone and she had her bag slapping against her hip and she was weaving between stalls and people, her eyes focused on my booth.
She reached my booth and bent over with her hands on her knees, completely out of breath.
“Callie.” I stared at her. “What are you—”
She held up one finger.
She breathed.
I handed her my water bottle. She took it and drank half of it. She straightened up.
“What.” She was still panting between words. “Did my dickhead brother. Say about you. On the patio.”
Cliff looked at me. He looked at Callie. He picked up a honey bottle and said he had just remembered he needed to check something on the other side of the market and he would be back shortly.
I handed Callie the rest of the water bottle. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s get in the van.”
Gerald was parked behind the booths under a large old oak tree, the way he always was when I set up at this market.
The shade kept the flowers from wilting in the heat.
Callie climbed into the passenger seat. I got in the driver’s side.
We rolled down both windows. A cool breeze came through, moving the air around and bringing the smell of the oak tree and the distant cinnamon from the baked goods stall.
“I’m so sorry,” Callie said. She had her hands pressed flat on her knees. “Whatever he said. I don’t know what you heard. But I know he said something about you and I am so sorry.”
“He said—” I stopped. I looked at Gerald’s steering wheel. “He said to Margaux that I am just someone who sells flowers. That I’m a nobody. That she should not be threatened by someone like me.”
Callie said nothing.
“And then Margaux asked him if he meant that.” I kept looking at the wheel. “And he said yes.”
“August—”
“He meant it, Callie. He said it and he meant it. Now I know. That’s all.”
“I cannot believe—” Callie stopped. She pressed both hands to her face. She made a sound that was somewhere between a groan and something worse. “I cannot believe he said that. I have no explanation for it. None.”
“You don’t need one.”
“We should go confront him. Right now. We should drive back to Sable Cove and—”
“Callie.” I turned to look at her. “Please. Please don’t.
I have had enough. I have had enough humiliation for one summer.
” I stopped. I looked back at the wheel.
“I love you. I love your whole family. I love your parents and I love Poppy and I—” My voice did something I didn’t want it to do.
I waited. “I loved Fletcher. I know I always told you I didn’t.
I know I kept saying it was nothing and it meant nothing and I was being stupid.
But I’ve always loved him. Since the night he showed up at the market.
I’ve always loved him.” I shook my head.
“So please don’t go there and make this worse than it already is. Please just let me have this.”
Callie reached over and took my hand. She held it on top of the gear shift. She didn’t say anything for a long moment.
“I always knew,” she said finally. “That’s what makes this so hard to sit with. I always knew you loved him. And I have always known, August, that he loves you too.”
“He doesn’t—”
“Let me finish.” Her voice was firm. “You asked me not to make this worse so I’m going to tell you the truth and I need you to hear it.
The minute he figured out you were gone this morning, he lost his mind.
He woke me up at six in the morning. He ran to your room.
He ran back. He had this look on his face — fear and regret and something else that I don’t have a word for — and he went straight to his car. ”
I looked at her.
“He started the engine,” Callie said. “He sat there. And then something happened. I don’t know what he thought. I don’t know what he decided. But five minutes later he came back inside and all he said was — it’s better this way.”
I looked out the windshield at the oak tree. A bird was in it, doing something complicated with a twig.
“I don’t know what that means,” Callie said.
“But I know that man. I have known him my whole life. And what I also know is that something happened to him. Years ago. Something changed him completely.” She paused.
“He used to tell me everything. Every stupid crush, every bad day, every fear. He was my brother and I knew him. And then one day — maybe seven, eight years ago — he just closed. Not gradually. Almost overnight. He became someone I didn’t fully recognize.
” She shook her head. “I’ve asked him so many times.
He always says it’s nothing. But it’s not nothing.
Something happened to him and he’s been carrying it by himself ever since and it has made him into someone who thinks he doesn’t deserve good things. ”
I said nothing.
“I don’t know what it is,” Callie said. “None of us do. But August — the way he ran to that car this morning and then made himself stop — that is not a man who thinks you’re a nobody. That is a man who is terrified of himself.”
We sat in silence, the breeze coming through the windows, the market humming on the other side of the booths.
“He’s a mess,” Callie said quietly. “For whatever that’s worth.”
The bird in the oak tree flew away.
I watched it go.
***