Page 42 of Something Old

“So you were, what? Talking to your dead husband?” The words came out sounding derisive and appalled, but he didn’t mean his comment that way. He was just . . . he didn’t know exactly. Shell-shocked, maybe, was closest. He joked about Madeline being crazy, but he meant it in a good way. He’d actually thought she was the sanest person he knew.

“Isn’t that a little . . . nuts?” he asked, striving for a lighter tone, hoping to salvage the damage he now realized he’d done. Madeline didn’t answer, just picked up her phone and trudged toward the front of the store, where she flipped the sign to Closed and flicked off all the lights.

When she finally looked at him, her face was hard and expressionless, as if set in stone. It was so different from her usual open frankness or twinkling good humor that Grant was thrown.

“No, Grant.” She said his name, intentionally he feared, with the same bitterness that he’d uttered Lyle’s. “It’s not ‘nuts.’ I’m not ‘nuts.’ I realize that my sister is dead. I realize that my daughter is dead. That my husband is dead. I am just really, really sad. Sometimes that happens when you lose everyone you’ve ever loved . . .” She sucked in a ragged breath. “If I choose to suspend a little disbelief and get myself through some of the agony by talking to them and listening to my heart for what I know they’d say back, what’s it to you? I don’t need to explain myself. Not to you. Not to anyone.”

“I’m sorry, but—”

She shook her head. “No sorrys. No buts. Just after we first met, I told you that you don’t get to shit on me, remember? I had a long marriage, good, even great, in some ways, terrible in others. I know how patterns get set. I feel for you. I really do. I even suspect your little episode back there”—she motioned toward the dining room—“was more about something new you’re going through than about me, but that doesn’t matter. I can’t—I won’t—make allowances for you treating me badly.”

“I’m sorry. So sorry,” he mumbled. “I thought—I mean, I didn’t—”

Madeline’s face crumpled. She looked exhausted. “You thought . . . you thought I would lie about something like . . . my family dying?” She broke eye contact. “I thought we were friends. That you knew me. But you don’t. Not at all.”

He suddenly remembered her facial expression in the dining room when he’d surprised her—the flash of something that had confused him. He recognized it now. Relief. She had been relieved to see him, had thought he would help her . . . and he had done the opposite.

She’d trusted in their friendship, and he was the betrayer he’d accused her of being. He also remembered how all he’d wanted to do was help her the way she had so generously helped him for absolutely no reason except that she saw he needed it. This was how he repaid her? He layered hurt upon hurt upon hurt—and accused her of lying about the roots of her deepest pain. What was wrong with him?

“Madeline, I—”

She held up a hand to stave off his words. “You don’t need to apologize. It was a misunderstanding. I see how you could make it.”

Her gently worded comment was worse than any curses she could’ve screamed at him because of the distance it revealed. The old wall he’d sensed in Madeline that had fallen away as they got to know each other was back in full force. He could feel it as surely as if it were made of bricks and mortar. Madeline didn’t trust him the way she had before—and no wonder. He had let his old fears, insecurities, and harbored hurts blind him. He’d been a monster.

Madeline opened the shop’s door and motioned Grant toward it. “I’m locking up.”

What could he do but comply? Just as he was about to step over the threshold, Madeline reached into the pocket of her apple-print shop apron and handed him an envelope.

“What’s this?”

“A check. That’s why I wanted to go for dinner. I was going to surprise you. I sold your hutch and buffet today.”

Grant’s heart stuttered. Grief and remorse filled his sinuses. He had to try to explain one more time. “Madeline—”

“Have a good week, Grant. I’ll see you later.”

She didn’t mean it, though. It was just a thing people say instead of the F-you that they’re thinking.

The sound of the lock clicking behind him was as loud as a bomb. He turned back, but Madeline had already disappeared.

Grant waited in his truck for a good hour, wanting to see her leave with Boots at her heels, to know she was all right, but not a shadow moved inside The Second Chance Shop. The door stayed locked up tight.

Chapter 22

Madeline had a crick in her neck, and her lower back was complaining about her seating arrangements when Grant finally drove off in his massive beater of a truck that you could see a mile off. Did he think he was subtle, lying in wait for her like that?

She released Boots, who had kindly let her squeeze him against herself and bury her face in his fur. She’d been perched on a three-legged milking stool beside the big window, at an angle where she could see out but wasn’t visible from the street. Thus, she saw Grant, but he couldn’t see her. Oh, how cruelly accurate that was in all ways.

She walked through her dim shop, taking as much time as she had at her worst, inhaling deeply and gently straightening this or turning that. Eventually, the awful fibrillating sensation in her chest ceased, and the tightest knots in her muscles eased. She let herself and Boots out the front door, relocked it, and cut across the backyard.

She’d been sharing meals with Grant so regularly that she wasn’t sure what she had in the house to eat. It didn’t matter. She didn’t think she could swallow a bite, despite the fact that anticipating a big dinner, she’d skipped lunch.

“Don’t worry, though,” she said to Boots. “I definitely have Fancy Feast. It might even be a two-can night if you play your cards right.”

Boots softly bumped her calf with his broad head, and Madeline bent to pet him. Then she fumbled in her bag for her keys to unlock their little house, bone-weary and utterly depleted.

Chapter 23