17. Lily
LILY
Cutter's Hollow had four hundred residents, and every single one of them decided we were in love before we finished parking the truck.
"You don't like towns," I said on the way down, watching him drive like the road might file a report on him afterward.
"Towns remember faces." "This one has four hundred people and a traffic light that can't commit.
" "Four hundred people with nothing to do all winter but remember faces.
" "You are being paranoid." "I am being alive.
From the outside the two look identical. That is the entire trick of it."
The first person in Cutter's Hollow to fall in love with the idea of us was Earl Dombrowski, who ran the Gas-N-Go and, from what I could tell, the entire circulatory system of gossip in the county.
He had us spotted through his window before the truck door was shut.
By the time we were inside he had arranged his face into an expression of barely governable joy.
"Well," he said to Sacha, warm as a stove, as though picking up a conversation they had been having for years.
"Well, well, well." "Earl," Sacha said, in the voice of a man paying a toll.
"You went and got yourself a girl." "I have supplies to buy.
" "He got himself a girl," Earl reported, to the empty store, to the coffee machine, to God above.
He turned to me with the frank and delighted appraisal of a man judging livestock at a fair, and I found, to my considerable surprise, that I did not entirely mind it.
"You from around here?" Earl asked me, ringing up nothing, purely gathering intelligence.
"Just passing through," I said. "That is what they all say," Earl told me, delighted, "right before they stay forever.
My Deborah said those exact words in nineteen eighty-one.
She is out back this minute doing the books.
" "Congratulations," I said. "Forty-two years," Earl said, with enormous pride.
"She still tells folks she is only passing through. "
He rang up the coffee and the flour and a box of shells he did not ask a single question about, because a man like Sacha buys shells in a town like that and no one so much as blinks, and the whole while he kept up a commentary on how long he had been saying, saying for years, that the fella up on the ridge only wanted the right person to come along.
Then, as he bagged the last of it, he leaned in with the gravity of a man passing state secrets and slipped a small paper rectangle down into the sack.
"That there is two-for-one at the Pinecone," he said.
"For date night." I watched Sacha look at the coupon.
I have seen him look at loaded weapons with more warmth.
He studied it as though Earl had lowered a live grenade into the groceries, pin already pulled, and he could not for the life of him locate the correct protocol for a two-for-one coupon.
"Thank you," I said, before the silence could curdle into an incident, and I took the bag.
"We'll use it tonight." Earl looked like I had told him Christmas was relocating to his house.
We used it that minute, partly because I was not about to waste a decree from the town oracle, and partly because I wanted, with a force that frightened me a little, to sit in a warm booth and be an ordinary person for one hour.
The Pinecone Diner smelled of scorched coffee and bacon and forty uninterrupted years of pie, and Marge had us seen, seated, and matched before the bell over the door stopped ringing.
"Booth by the window," she said, herding us with two laminated menus like a woman docking a ferry.
"Best light in the place. You'll want it, hon, for your pictures.
" She had found the camera around my neck in under four seconds.
"How'd you know I take pictures?" "You've got the strap mark and the squint.
My late husband had both." She set down two coffees no one had ordered.
"On the house. Congratulations. Lord knows it is about time somebody thawed that man out. "
Marge planted herself at the end of the booth as though she paid rent on the spot.
"So," she said to me, tipping her chin at Sacha.
"How'd you crack him? Three years that man has come in here, ordered his coffee black, said maybe nine words in a visit, and left.
I had money down he was a fugitive." Sacha did not look up from the menu.
"You had the right money," he said. Marge laughed like a delighted crow.
"See now, that is a joke. The man made a joke.
You have done something to him, hon. Whatever it is, you keep at it. "
Here is the thing nobody warns you about being folded into a place.
It happens whether you sign for it or not.
By the time Marge came back around with a slice of pie I had not asked for, I knew that the man two stools down was Earl's cousin, that the woman topping up the ketchups had lost a son overseas and did not speak of it, and that every last resident of Cutter's Hollow had privately ruled that Sacha and I were the finest thing to befall the winter.
I had spent two years making certain no town anywhere learned my name.
This one had my whole story roughed in before the pie went cold, and instead of the old animal need to run, I felt something behind my ribs go loose and warm.
And then my eye caught the date on the little laminated calendar by the register, and the air went out of me, because I knew that date.
I had been driving away from it for two years.
It was today. The anniversary I had built my entire life around missing had come and found me while I was looking the other way, and for the first time since she died I was not eight hundred miles from every familiar face, being nobody in a brand-new city.
I was in a booth in a town that had adopted me on sight, beside a man who had taught me to breathe out and press the trigger like a secret, and I had forgotten to dread it.
I did not know whether to laugh or to fall apart, so I drank the terrible coffee and did neither.
I should have known better than to let a morning get that good.
The good ones always come with a bill attached somewhere.
I had learned that in a hospice corridor, and it seemed I needed the lesson again, because I was three sips into the second cup and most of the way to believing the bright morning was mine to keep when the man at the counter turned around on his stool.
The man at the counter was the one thing in Cutter's Hollow that had not turned up to love us.
He was friendly the way a brochure is friendly.
He was in his fifties, perhaps, in new flannel that had plainly never met a fish, nursing a coffee he was not drinking behind a smile he wore the way you wear a coat you can take off at the door.
"That is a serious camera," he said, with a nod at the Nikon, easy, neighborly.
"Old glass. You do not see much of that up this way.
" "It was my mother's," I said, because it was true, and because I tell true things to strangers, which is a flaw I have never managed to break.
"Beautiful country to shoot," he said. "I am up for the hardwater season myself.
Gus." He put out a hand. I shook it. Sacha did not.
"You two local?" Gus asked, easy as anything.
"Or you got a place out on one of the lakes?
I am always hunting a quiet spot the tourists have not spoiled.
Fella at the bait shop said there are cabins up the ridge road with a view worth the drive.
" There was a beat then, one single held beat, where the warmth of the entire morning hung in the room like steam.
Then I felt the temperature of the man beside me drop straight through the floor.
Gus was still smiling, still patient, still waiting on his answer with the mild and bottomless patience of a man who has the whole winter to spend.
"No rush," he said, easy. "Just making conversation.
Small town. Everybody knows everybody." He looked at the camera again, and then at me, and then, for the smallest fraction of a second, at the door we had walked in through, the way a man clocks an exit.
That was the thing my body understood a beat before my mind caught up to it.
Nobody makes conversation like that. Conversation does not case a room.
Sacha had gone still in a way I had seen exactly once before, on a porch, behind a gun, on the night I first came through his gate.
He did not answer the question. He set money on the table, a good deal too much of it, and he stood.
"We are not local," he said, pleasant and flat and final all at once.
"Enjoy the fishing." And he had my coat in one hand and my elbow in the other and we were most of the way to the door before I had finished understanding that the friendly fisherman had just asked me, in the most neighborly voice in the state of Wisconsin, exactly where it was that I slept.
The bell over the door was still going behind us when the rest of him changed.
I had seen him gentle and I had seen him wry and I had seen him come apart in the dark with my name in his mouth.
I had not seen this. Every soft thing the last two weeks had worked into him drained out somewhere between the booth and the truck, and what stood in the parking lot in its place was the man the price on his head had built, the one I had put a car through a gate to meet, and I understood, standing in the cold with a bag of flour on my hip, that I had spent two weeks keeping company with a coat, and had just been introduced to the man wearing it.
"Sacha." I put a hand on his arm and felt it, under the sleeve, gone to stone.
"It was probably nothing. He was probably just a nosy man who likes to fish.
" "He had soft hands, a coat with the fold lines still pressed into it, and a rented car with the bar-code sticker in the back window," he said, unlocking the truck.
"He has never baited a hook in his life.
And of everything he said to us, he wanted the answer to exactly one question.
" "Where we live," I said, and the last of the good morning went out of me. "Where you live," he said.
Out in the lot, Sacha's whole body had changed, the jaw, the shoulders, the hands. "We don't come back to town," he said, not looking at me. "Not you, not me. Not ever." I laughed until I saw that he meant it.