Page 44 of Piece By Piece

He stood up.

“Good night, Liza.”

“Good night, Grant.”

He walked inside, and she stayed on the step for a little while longer, watching the lightning bugs.

She thought about Dixie’s list and the two perfectly nice men who had made her feel absolutely nothing, and the one difficult, quiet man who made her feel everything just by sitting next to her on a porch step.

The next day, Liza brought Dixie a bag of groceries and a bottle of wine because Dixie’s wrist was still healing. Also because Liza just wanted an excuse to see where the woman actually lived.

The house was a small cottage on the east side of the island. It was painted yellow with white shutters and a little porch that sagged slightly on one end.

Inside, it was exactly what Liza would have expected, full of books, color, and framed photographs on every available surface.

Dixie loved her people.

She poured them each a glass of wine, left-handed with impressive dexterity for a Parkinson’s patient, and settled into her armchair while Liza looked around the living room, studying all the photos.

There was Dixie as a young woman, radiant with her wild hair.

And there — framed on the side table — was the man from the guest book photo. Johnny, her late husband, standing on a boat with a fish in one hand and a beer in the other.

William as a boy, gap-toothed and squinting in the sun.

A more recent one of William and Janine with baby Madison, all three of them laughing.

And of course, Dixie with her new husband, Harrison, who was out of town on a fishing trip right now.

“That’s my Johnny,” Dixie said, nodding toward the boat photo. “I took that the summer before he got sick. He was the handsomest man on the island, and he knew it, which was the only annoying thing about him.”

Liza smiled. “How long were you together?”

“Not long enough.” Dixie took a sip of wine. “It’s never long enough, is it? You think you’ve got all the time in the world. You always think you’ve got time.”

Liza thought about Grant and Owen, about the man at the cookout laughing and then gone, about her own father, who was alive at breakfast and dead by dinnertime, about Julie, who had come to the island with a shattered marriage and then built something new from all that wreckage, and about Dixie, who’d lost a husband, a decade with her son, and found a new love all while running a bookstore every morning.

The island was full of people who had lost someone they weren’t ready to lose and somehow kept going.

But that was life, wasn’t it?

You didn’t really have a choice.

They didn’t keep going by forgetting, but by finding a way to carry the weight without letting it stop them from moving forward.

“How did you keep moving forward after losing Johnny? I mean, how did you keep going with a son that you had to take care of?” Liza asked.

Dixie looked at her with those sharp blue eyes.

“Well, I just got up and opened my bookstore every morning. That’s it. I mean, that’s the whole secret. You just have to keep getting up and moving forward, even on the days where it feels heavy and you don’t want to do anything. Some days it’s easier than others, but you just have to keep going. I mean, there really isn’t another choice, is there? That’s all any of us can do. Doesn’t make me special.”

Liza took a sip of wine and thought about her own door she needed to open, the one that she’d slammed shut when she fled Charleston.

Just like Dixie opened her bookstore door every morning, even on days when it was hard.

Maybe it didn’t always matter what was on the other side of the door.

Maybe the point was just opening it.