Page 55

The Brook in November had a different quality than it had in August when she’d first walked in... warmer by contrast with the cold outside, the windows fogged slightly at the edges from the difference between in and out, the smell of coffee and something baking that hit differently when you came in from the cold. She’d started to understand why people spent so much time here. It wasn’t just the coffee. It was the feeling of being inside something warm when outside was not.

She sat at her table and held her cup and looked at the square through the window, the maple bare now, the gazebo standing in its clearing, the whole of Founders Square gone quiet and November gray and somehow more itself for it, the way places revealed their actual nature once the seasonal decoration was stripped away.

She was on her second cup when she said, without deciding to:

“The things he does.”

Nora didn’t ask who. She just waited.

“The groceries,” Allison said. “The playground. The things nobody asks him to fix and nobody thanks him for. Does he know people notice?”

Nora was quiet. The November light came through the window at its low angle, falling across the table, and Allison sat in it and tried to figure out what exactly she was asking. It wasn’t just about the groceries. It hadn’t been about the groceries for a while now.

The truth, if she was going to be honest with herself (and The Brook on a Saturday morning had a way of making honesty feel less optional) was that she’d been thinking about him with an increasing frequency that she couldn’t account for. Not constantly. Just... persistently. The way a song got into your head, not intrusively, just there, playing somewhere underneath everything else.

She thought about the workshop and the sawdust smell and the almost touch in the narrow aisle. She thought about the festival and her name in firelight and the way the world had gone very quiet for a moment at the edge of a bonfire. She thought about Halloween and the crowd he’d walked through and the amber light on his face at Vera’s porch.

She thought about these things and felt, alongside them, something she couldn’t quite pin down. Not quite longing, or not only longing. Something more complicated. Something that felt like possibility and also like the vertigo of a possibility you hadn’t prepared for.

She didn’t know what to call it.

She wasn’t sure she was ready to call it anything.

“I don’t think he thinks about it that way,” Nora said finally.

“What way does he think about it?”

“I’m not sure he thinks about it at all. Shane sees something that needs doing and he does it.” A pause. “Roy was the same.”

Allison looked at her coffee.

“Does anyone take care of him?” she asked. The real question, the one underneath.

Nora looked at her steadily with the eyes that had been seeing everything in this room for forty years.

“Not in the way you mean,” she said.

The café was warm around them. The light fell across the table, low and golden. Allison sat in it and felt the something she couldn’t name settle a little heavier in her chest, not unpleasantly. Just present. Just there.

“Maybe it’s about time someone did,” Nora said, in the tone of someone who was absolutely not suggesting anything.

She went back to the counter.

Allison sat at her table for a long time.

* * *

She went to the Mane Gallery on Tuesday.

Her hair needed attention, the mountain air was doing something to it she hadn’t anticipated, and Lauren had told her in September that Judy was the only person she’d trust with dark hair in a small town. She’d made the appointment. She’d been pulling her hair back in a messy bun most days, the same ponytail she defaulted to when she was busy or tired or not thinking about it, which was most days now that November had arrived with its demands.

The Mane Gallery was warm controlled chaos, plants on every surface that had been there since the early nineties, photos on the mirrors going back decades, country radio that nobody listened to and everybody absorbed. Two other chairs occupied when she arrived, women she half recognized, a conversation already in progress that included her the moment she sat down.

Judy Larson was exactly what Lauren had promised: warm, funny, hands that knew what they were doing the moment they touched Allison’s hair, eyes that had seen everything and found most of it interesting.

“Mountain air,” Judy said, running her fingers through with professional assessment. Not a question.

“Is it obvious?”