Page 58

Dammit.

Betsy Morris is perched on an upside-down bucket by the cooler with a paper plate on her knees. “She sold me a raffle ticket every spring for four years,” Betsy says. “For the senior trip. I never won a thing. And every year she’d come back to the Market and say, Mrs. Morris, I am so sorry, and sell me another one.”

When I look up, Travis is looking at me from over by the register, where he’s been cutting cake and cobbler all night with his flannel sleeves rolled to the elbow.

Those forearms.

I stare for too long and my body gets all tingly. That’s the effect the man has on me.

Get it together, Lindsey.

“She used to bring my mother soup,” Heidi says. “When Mom had her hip done. Every Tuesday for two months she brought chicken noodle. Seventeen years old, and nobody asked her to.”

“She did that for my June too,” says a voice from the back.

I look up. Hank Simmons is standing just inside the door with his hat in his hands. I didn’t hear the bell. He looks thinner than he did a month ago. The circles under his eyes are darker, the hunch to his shoulders worse.

“Hank,” I say. “Come in. Sit down. There’s food.”

“No, thank you, Lindsey.” He stays where he is. “I just wanted to say. She was a good girl. She brought June soup when June had her gallbladder out. She sat with her. Read to her.” He turns his hat around in his hands. “She was a good, brave girl.”

“She was,” I say, choked up.

The way he looks at me makes me pause. There’s a hesitation in his expression. Same as when he stood on the sidewalk looking at the smoke.

“Good night, Lindsey,” he says, and goes back out. The place falls quiet, then the conversation picks back up.

Over by the register, Travis watches Hank go, then stares at the door.

I’ve learned that look now. The closed look of a man who is thinking and isn’t ready to talk about whatever it is.

Carol Hayes is sitting in the front row with her hands in her lap and she laughs out loud for the first time I can remember.

Travis brings her a cup of coffee and heads back to the register without a word. Carol looks from the cup to me across the room, and her expression softens.

When they finally go, Travis stays and helps me fold up the chairs.

“That was good,” he says.

“It was.” I put the last chair against the wall and look around my shop. Remnants of the party are everywhere. Paper plates. A stack of old photos on my counter that I’m going to frame. “I didn’t know all those people missed her.”

He says, “She was the kind of person people miss.”

“How do you know that? You never met her.”

He takes the stack of photos off the counter and looks at the top one. Danielle at seven, on Santa’s lap at the Huntsville Christmas parade, missing both front teeth.

“Because you miss her like that.”

This big quiet man is holding a picture of a little girl he never met, like it matters. He served food to half of Eden tonight and didn’t say ten words, with one eye on the door the entire time. He sleeps in my bed every night now. He unpacked his boxes.

And I know.

It doesn’t come like lightning. It’s more like walking into my own workroom in the dark and knowing exactly where everything is.

I love him.

“Travis,” I say.