He met her the way bedrock meets a load it was meant to carry, and the guitar would have fallen over if he hadn’t caught it without looking, one-handed.
When she drew back her forehead rested a moment against his, and neither of them said the careful thing.
“I should drive home,” she said, not moving.
“It is late.”
Neither of them mentioned the cold kettle on the stove because for once nobody had thought to heat the water.She gathered herself eventually and went down off the porch into the dark.In a minute, her lights swung out onto the road and disappeared.Hank sat a long while in the ridiculous chair with the guitar beside him and his pulse pounding.
He took his own pulse, an old reflexive joke he used to play on himself in medical school after a scary case.It was running fast, and he realized to his vast surprise that he was no longer afraid to feel it run like this.
The house behind him sat with its windows lit, learning to carry sound again, and he understood, sitting there, that he’d stopped wanting the silence anymore, and he was just now figuring that out.
He left the porch light on and went in.
11
Susan Vance called on Tuesday morning, while Sunny stood at her kitchen counter with a dish towel over one shoulder and Chloe sitting on her foot, fastened to her shin like a barnacle.
The gallery owner wanted three more pieces for the fall youth wall, if Presley had them, and she’d pay for each the way she’d paid for the first piece.
“I’ll ask her,” Sunny said.
“Don’t ask her to make new ones,” Susan Vance said.“Ask which ones she’s already done that she’d be willing display and also part with.An artist of her caliber will already know what I’m talking about.”
Sunny found Presley at the folding card table she’d annexed as a studio, working a stub of charcoal across newsprint with the absorption of a surgeon.She didn’t look up.Sunny had learned not to make her.
“The art gallery wants more of your work,” Sunny said.“For the show in the fall.Miss Vance asked if you had any you’d let her buy and hang.”
Presley’s hand went still.She looked at the stack of finished sheets weighted under a river rock at the table’s edge: the lake at every hour, the heron in a dozen postures, the twins asleep in a tangle of limbs, a pair of hands on a guitar she’d drawn from the porch steps without anyone knowing she was there.
“She can have these three.”Presley slid them free with care.Then she laid her palm flat over a fourth, the porch one, and didn’t explain herself.“Not that one.”
“Not that one,” Sunny agreed and didn’t ask why.
As she turned away, she had a parenting moment.Presley had just done the thing that was the whole of what she wanted to teach her children.That it was okay if they wanted to keep something back, that not every true thing you made for yourself had to be handed over to other people.
Sunny had spent an entire marriage learning that the hard way.And here was her daughter, ten years old, already holding one drawing back as if she meant to keep it for herself forever.
Sunny drove the three drawings over to Apple Pie Creek, and on her way home, she swung by Main Street in Cobbler Cove to run a few errands.And that was when she felt the change.
Cobbler Cove had been bruised for two weeks, and Sunny had watched it happen like a column of figures that quit adding up, slowly and then all at once.
The out-of-town investigators had come poking into the Shoemacher fire and never quite gone away.Two unmarked sedans sat outside the fire station most days, and men in windbreakers carried clipboards in and out of it.They were unfailingly polite.That was almost the worst of it.
They asked their questions about the barn that had burned five summers ago and wrote the answers on their clipboards, turned over every old grief in the valley like spades turning sod.
The town seemed to have sorted itself into camps, and the dividing line ran straight through the people she’d come to love.At Rose’s the booths had gone quiet in a way the diner was never quiet.
Two ranchers by the window were saying, without bothering to lower their voices, that the Shoemachers were good people and a man’s barn burning on his own land was his own business and the state should go home.
In the next booth Molly Vandyke, one of the WoWS widows, sat with her coffee going cold and her mouth a flat line.Rose moved between them with the coffee pot and a stoic expression, refilling cups.Sunny could see, plain as day, that Rose was losing her battle with not saying anything.Rose also clearly knew she couldn’t out-talk a half a town that had decided it would rather not know the truth.
It was the same everywhere Sunny went.At Pins ’N’ Needles, Charlotte had two workmen in to fix a water line, and they’d carried their opinions in with their wrenches.Sunny heard Tessa’s voice come down the back hall flat and cool as the cop she’d once been, telling them they could keep their theories or keep their job, their pick.
At Buns & Roses, Grace was boxing a dozen scones for a woman who was explaining to her, kindly, the way you’d explain to a child, thatcertain peopleought to think hard before they went pointing fingers at a sick old man.And Grace, soft, sweet Grace, had gone a shade of white that meant she would cry the moment the door chimed shut.
To her, Sunny said quietly, “Don’t give her the satisfaction of breaking where she can see it.Don’t give any of them the satisfaction of seeing your tears.”
