I wake up before the alarm, which is unusual for someone who treats the snooze button like a life partner. The bedroom is washed in early light, the lavender walls still strange and new and mine, and for a long minute I just lie there, staring at the ceiling, letting the weight of yesterday settle into something I can carry.
One day.
I get dressed without overthinking it in one of my favorite vintage dresses, the one with the cherries on it, and slip on my good sneakers because today feels like a day for good sneakers. I don’t check my phone. I don’t make coffee. I just walk out the door and into a Sleighbell Springs morning that smells like cut grass and distant rain.
This is not a stroll. Let’s be clear about that. A stroll implies leisure, meandering, the kind of aimless wandering you do when you have nowhere to be. This is something else. My pace is steady, my eyes are open, and every step feels deliberate in a way I can’t fully explain, like I’m walking a boundary I’ve been skirting for years.
First stop: The Brew House. The bell above the door jingles, and the smell of espresso, cinnamon, the particular warmth of a place that’s been awake since five hits me. Noelle is behind the counter, sleeves rolled, already in the thick of the morning rush. She sees me, raises an eyebrow that says both “hello” and “where have you been,” and I just smile and order my usual.
While she pulls the shot, I drift to the back wall and the shelves I made for her. I run my hand along the edge, feeling the grain under my palm. Walnut, warm and smooth, sanded to a finish that catches the light. I did this. One Saturday, sandpaperand stain brush, refusing help, refusing payment, because the shelves deserved better, and I needed something to do with my hands that wasn’t crying or staring at walls. I hadn’t thought about it since. It was just a thing I did on a bad day.
Now I look at it, really look. The way the stain deepened in the knots, the clean lines of the joinery, the fact that it doesn’t match the rest of the shop but somehow makes everything else look right. A man in a baseball cap nods to me as he reaches for a stirrer. A woman by the window lifts her mug in a casual half-salute. I am part of the morning here. I have been for a while.
I take my coffee and go.
Second stop: The Sleighbell Springs Public Library. It’s a small brick building with creaky floors and radiators that knock when the heat kicks on, which is charming in theory and alarming in practice if you’re trying to concentrate. I push through the heavy door and the quiet wraps around me like a blanket.
The reading nook is in the far corner, by the big window that faces the park. A battered armchair, a side table with a lamp that never quite works right, and on the wall above it…my illustrations.
Pressed ferns, rendered in ink so fine you can count the veins. Winterberries, their red so vivid against the white paper they almost glow. I did these the winter after Drew died, holed up in the studio with the space heater cranked, my hands numb, working until the light failed because the alternative was sitting in the quiet house listening to the furnace cycle. The town librarian asked if she could frame them. I said sure, not thinking about it, assuming they’d end up in some back office where no one would see them.
They’ve been here for two and a half years. Framed in simple pine, mounted on the wall where the afternoon light hits them just right. A kid is sitting in the armchair, legs tucked under her,a book open in her lap, not even looking at the drawings because they’re just part of the room to her. They belong here. I belong here.
The gray-haired librarian looks up from her desk and gives me a small, knowing nod. Not making a big deal, just acknowledging a fact we both already know.
I leave before I start crying in a public building, which feels like a line I shouldn’t cross before ten in the morning.
Third stop: I walk past Springs & Bells without going in. The storefront is quiet, the OPEN sign hanging in the window, Melvin probably in the back doing inventory or grumbling at a pipe fitting. I stop at the window display.
A “Christmas in July” theme complete with a Christmas Tree made out of old suitcases filled with garden supplies and seeds, and the little garden gnome I adopted as the store mascot (much to Melvin’s chagrin) acting as the tree topper. A hand-lettered sign in my own handwriting: SOMETHING OLD, SOMETHING NEW. I made this last month, half-asleep at two in the morning, fuelled by equal parts insomnia and the desperate need to make the store look like someone gave a damn. I hadn’t thought of it as mine. It was just a thing the store needed, a problem I could solve with my hands.
I look at it now, and something cracks open in my chest. I reach out and touch the glass with two fingers. Just a brush, light enough that no one watching would even notice, but I feel the cool smoothness, the vibration of the street beneath the display, the fact that my handwriting is on the other side of this pane and people walk past it every day and see it and it is, undeniably, mine.
I keep walking, not ready to head inside just yet.
I need one last stop: Sleigh Queen, at the far end of Main. The drag club is quiet in the morning, its lights dimmed to a gentle glow, the marquee dark. I stand on the sidewalk and look up atthe awning, red and gold and slightly crooked, and I remember December, two years ago. The first holiday show after Drew died. Mason—not in full drag, just Mason in a sparkly shirt and those ridiculous glasses, handing me a camera I hadn’t touched in months. “Just point and shoot,” they said. “No pressure. But if you get a good shot of Patti’s finale, I’ll buy you a drink that will make you forget your own name.”
I got the shot. I also laughed, really laughed, when one of the queens slipped on a sequin and caught herself with a flourish that turned the stumble into choreography. The crowd roared, the floor shook, and I stood there with the camera warm in my hands and realized, with a clarity that nearly knocked me over, that I was still alive. That I had survived a thing I didn’t think I could survive, and on the other side of it was a drag bar on a Thursday night, cheap well drinks, and the joy of watching someone turn a disaster into art.
I hadn’t cataloged any of this before. The shelves, the illustrations, the window display, the photograph. I’d let them exist without claiming them, as if making things and leaving them in the world didn’t count as living unless someone else noticed. Now I claim them. All of them. Every little gesture to a local just because, every stroke of ink, every clumsy attempt to make something beautiful in a town that was supposed to be temporary.
My life here did not begin with Drew. It did not end with him. It changed shape. It kept going… I kept going and left marks on this place without even noticing.
I turn and walk back through town, and the streets are the same streets they were an hour ago. The same storefronts, the same cracked sidewalks, the same blue Vermont sky pressing down on the rooftops. But I’m not the same. I’m seeing with new eyes, and what I see is mine.
One day.
I think I know what to do with it.
I push through the door of Springs & Bells, and the bell does its thing, that clear, bright ring that has soundtracked three years of my life and still, somehow, hasn’t gotten old. The store smells the way it always smells: sawdust and metal and that faint, mysterious funk from the back room that defies categorization and probably violates several health codes…and like home.
Melvin is behind the counter, cap pulled so low I can barely see his eyebrows, a clipboard in one hand and a pencil tucked behind his ear. He doesn’t look up, doesn’t say hello, doesn’t ask where I’ve been all morning or why I look like I’ve been on a hike in this heat. He just keeps counting hex bolts, his finger moving down the column, mouth moving silently with the numbers.
I lean against the counter and wait. The fluorescent light above us hums its song, the one that lives in the exact frequency designed to give accountants migraines. A floorboard creaks somewhere in Aisle 3. The fridge in the back room kicks on with a groan that suggests it’s considering early retirement.
Melvin finishes his count, makes a note, sets the clipboard down. Then, without a word, he turns and walks into the back room. I hear him moving around back there, the scrape of a chair, the rustle of paper, the soft thump of something heavy being lifted. He emerges a minute later carrying a ledger—old, leather-spined, the cover worn soft at the corners from decades of handling. The pages are yellowed at the edges, the binding cracked along the spine. He sets it on the counter in front of me with a single, definitive thud, like he’s laying down a gauntlet, and then he turns and walks back to his clipboard without a word.
Classic Melvin. No ceremony, no explanation, just the thing itself, delivered with the efficiency of someone passing a wrench.
