“Tell me,” she said.
“He said to tell you how much he loved you, that you and the children were all that mattered to him. Then he said he hadn’t done the one thing he meant to do.” I paused before I said the truth, the sentence that had traveled with me for days and weeks since then. “Because of me, he didn’t get to do his one thing.”
“His one thing,” she said so quietly I wouldn’t have known what she said but for repeating me.
“What was it?” I asked. “Please tell me. Maybe I can . . . do it for him.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I have no idea.”
“What?” I’d expected so many answers, but not this one, not this.
“I really don’t know.”
“I need to know.” My voice overflowed with that need. I’d waited and waited to find out. I wanted to know. “Would anyone—your kids—anyone—know?” My words tumbled over each other.
“I have no idea. He did so much good in the world, I don’t know what was left for him, what he kept hidden inside.” She closed her eyes and then opened them again. “He kept things to himself until he was ready. He wasn’t secretive and he wasn’t dishonest, but sometimes I wouldn’t know how much something meant to him until later, until it was done.”
“I want to be able to do it for him. To have that one thing done. I need to do it.”
Tory held up her hand. “He wouldn’t want that at all. He would want you to do whatever your one thing is.”
She looked off into the yard and called for Lincoln, and then her gaze returned to me. “And I don’t think there is one thing—but maybe there is one thing at a time. He was about being present, aware. He lived that way. One thing at a time. He believed that one should be completely present for anything they were doing.”
“There wasn’t one thing that arched over his life?”
“If there was, it was his to know. He would want your life to be your one thing. I think if he said that to you, maybe he meant the one thing that meant the most to him at that moment. Right then. Something, the next thing, that was important to him.”
The hope I’d held on to—that redemption might come with doing Nicholas’s one thing—crumbled. “I wanted . . .”
“To fix this.”
“Yes,” I said. “And if not to fix it, to make it better. To do something. Just do something that might help, that might fulfill a wish, that might . . .” All these months, I’d believed that I could redeem myself, in some small way, by doing Mr. Rohr’s one thing. How could I save myself when not even his wife knew what this was? What it might be?
“There’s nothing like that here, Dr. Blankenship,” she said as Lincoln bounded onto the porch and sat next to her. She dug her fingers into the fur of his neck and absently petted the dog. “I miss him every minute of the day. And you doing something he left undone won’t fix that. It’s not your fault he died. It’s not your job to fix this for me.”
Tears fell then, down her face and into the corners of her mouth. “I wish it was your job, or anyone’s job. I wish you could fix this pain, end this grief, do whatever it is he left undone, but you can’t. The best way you can honor him is to live your life to the fullest the same way he lived his.”
To see the raw pain of this woman displayed on the porch of the home she’d shared with a man she loved so deeply was almost too much to bear. I would not break in front of her; I would not allow my grief to damage her further or ask her to carry my own guilt.
“Okay,” I said. “I promise. I will.”
I stood to leave and our good-byes were awkward and quick. She sat still with one hand on her lap and the other in the dog’s fur. I almost stumbled down the stairs, determined not to look back.
When I reached my car to return to Watersend, I turned. Tory remained on the porch with her faithful dog beside her. She waved at me and I did the same, pausing to say out loud, “I promise.”
chapter 38
PIPER BLANKENSHIP
His name—Ryan—popped over and over on my cell screen. I could only stare at it, frozen in the middle of the bookshop. From the speakers, Chris Stapleton sang about Tennessee whiskey, and Mimi’s voice startled me.
“Piper, love, get your eyes off that screen and join us here in the real world.”
It had been four days since we’d found George, or since I’d lost George, depending on how you looked at the whole situation. Mom had returned sans Gus but with a promise to get him when things settled down. Lainey’s friend had sent a big crate full of her art, and there I was setting up for an art show in two days.
“It’s weird. The guy I wanted to hear from all summer long is trying to get ahold of me.”
Mimi shuffled over with that sly smile on her face, one I’d come to rely on, and she took the phone from my hand. “Doesn’t matter right now.”
I stood there with my hand out, my palm empty like I was taking communion or waiting for someone to give me something. I closed my hand into a ball and dropped it by my side.
“But I want to know what he said. I’ve been so sad about him. You know that.”
Mimi held my phone back out to me. “Here you go, but you must not forget who you have become this summer.”
“Meaning?”
Fletch passed me then, his arms full of canvases. “You, love,” he said, imitating Mimi, “you gonna just stand there or help us drag all this stuff in?”
“I’m gonna stand here and look pretty, because that’s my job,” I said with a smile, and I placed my cell back on the counter.
Fletch laughed and kissed my cheek. I felt the sweat of his hard day’s work, of his commitment to this art show, and I felt the littlest bit guilty for my intense need to glance at the phone. As he disappeared around the corner, Mimi’s gaze followed him and then returned to me. She didn’t need to say a word.
“I know,” I said. “I’m just curious. I mean”—I took a step closer to her and whispered—“I have no idea what happened. I just want to know what happened between us. It was so awful. He literally just . . . poof.” I raised both hands in fists and quickly undid them as if blowing smoke from them.
“And you want to know why?”
“I want to know what I did wrong.” Tears sprang into my eyes.
Mimi grabbed my hand. “Stop. Now.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“You’ve said it before—don’t take things personally. But you know, it’s way easier to say than do. I just want to find the right . . . guy.”
“Piper, my dear, I think it is much more important to be the right girl than find the right guy.”
I didn’t exactly believe Mimi carried the secret of life, but sometimes I wondered. Just then Harrington ambled through the doorway as if he’d never had an emergency. He walked straight to Mimi as if she was the only one who existed in the store and kissed her. Love had no age limit, that was for sure.
She waved her hand at me. “Now help Fletch set up. We have a big party in two days. I’m going to run to the print shop and pick up the posters and you can go hang them in storefronts this afternoon.”
“You know,” I said, “you’ve made it so I can’t live without you. That’s not good.”
“That’s my evil plan,” she said and left, waving over her shoulder, Harrington at her side.
I grabbed the phone from the counter and glanced at the screen. I would like to think I was the kind of girl who could hear something so wise, from a woman I loved so deeply, and adjust my actions. But I didn’t. I needed to look. I needed to know what he wanted.
Pip. That was the first text. And I hated that nickname. Hated. It.
You there? The next text.
??????? The next.
I miss you. The final text.
I stared at this and swiped my forefinger over the screen
. Delete. Delete. Delete. Delete.
And yet, my heart picked up its pace as it raced to the old feeling where I needed him to approve of me because I couldn’t approve of myself. To that old moldy corner of my heart where I needed the drama to make sure I felt something, anything. I inhaled deeply and from far back in the store came Fletch’s laugh.
I wanted to tuck all of this—the bookshop, Mimi, the quiet friendships, Fletch, the river behind the house—into a safe place inside. I wanted to always know, the way dusk arrived just when you thought the day would last forever; how the moon hung so low over the ocean that it touched the waves with its night light. How the hydrangea bushes burst forth with glorious blue bundles, and the earth was soft and wet with morning dew. I wanted to be in a world where only that kind of beauty existed. I wanted simple forgiveness when I messed up. I wanted it all forever to keep me from feeling empty again.
But already I knew that emptiness would come again, and it would be my job to fill it with new things, and not with Ryan things.
The art show posters Mimi had made flapped in the wind as Fletch and I held them in our hands. We ambled from storefront to storefront asking if we could pin up the posters to let people know about the show. Yes was the only answer. My favorite image of Lainey’s was stamped on the front of the poster—a photo of June Cleaver in her pearls with Lainey’s brilliant take on it all. The announcement—ART SHOW—was curved around the image with Lainey’s name and the other details listed underneath.
When I first went into the garage to see her work, which had arrived overnight, I’d been hit by a kind of stunning beauty. Maybe what someone makes shouldn’t change how you think of them or see them, but her art changed her for me. What is closer to who someone is than what they make? And I hadn’t seen all of what she’d made.
I’d come to love Lainey, to wake to her voice in the kitchen humming a song while she made coffee. She was always the first one to wake, and now I knew she was out in the garage at all hours of the morning.
“You know,” I said to Fletch as we exited the Bloom Boutique, where we’d hung posters in the window and dressing rooms, “I wonder if it’s weird to see Lainey differently now that I love her art. Can you love someone more because of something they made?”
“Probably.” He pointed at the poster. “Especially if it’s that good.”
He grabbed me around the waist and kissed me. I kissed him back, right there on the sidewalk. “You’re crushing the posters,” I said with a laugh and a kiss on his neck.
“If you kiss me like that again, I’m throwing these old things away and taking you home.”
“Then I won’t kiss you like that again,” I said.
“Right.” He took a couple steps back. “As if you can resist.”
Fletch and I laughed, a team now, and by the time we’d finished with the posters, dusk had done its sneaky thing and worked its way into our day, another day I didn’t want to end, when before there’d been so many days I wanted to end as quickly as possible. We made our way back to the store, where the party paraphernalia was now hung. A banner made of triangular-shaped felt hung across the bookshelves and said ART SHOW and LAINEY MCKAY.
Mimi pointed at my phone. “There. That phone of yours. It’s going crazy. You might want to answer it.”
I rolled my eyes just as the shop door opened with that jingle. To see his name on my screen and his face in the doorway at the same time felt a little crazy, like I’d just downed a shot of tequila and double vision confused me. This wasn’t exactly double vision because one was a name and one was a face, but they were both Ryan. I didn’t know where to look—to Mimi for help or to Fletch to explain. But no one was helping me. We all just stood there. This was mine.
“Ryan,” I said as he strolled so confidently toward me.
“I’ve been texting and calling and texting . . .”
“I know,” I said. “How did you find me?”
“I asked around. This is a super-small town. It wasn’t hard. Some girl told me you spend all your time here. I said, Yep, that’s my girl—in a bookstore.”
“My girl?” Fletch echoed his words and yet didn’t move, stood a few feet away.
Ryan turned around. “Yes.”
“No,” I said. “No.”
Ryan turned back to me and reached for me. I took two steps back and held up my hands. “Stop, you.”
He grinned. “I love when you call me ‘you.’”
I shook my head. “You can’t just come here like this.”
“What do you mean? I’m here for you. To make it up to you. To make it all right again. I’m an idiot. An asshole.”
“Language,” Mimi said.
We both turned to her and I smiled at an echo of only weeks before when she’d said that to me.
“Pardon, ma’am,” Ryan said. He lowered his voice. “Who is she?”
“Follow me,” I said and motioned out the front door. He did follow me and I thought of the old adage, the one we know and don’t know when we need to know: you always want what you can’t have.
Fletch grabbed my hand as we moved past. “Piper?”
I kissed his cheek. “Give me a minute. No worries.”
He smiled at me just as Ryan glanced over his shoulder to see the kiss. “What the hell?”
We exited the store and stood on the sidewalk outside. A day, not so long past, I’d walked straight into this shop as steel to magnet. If I was the scrapbooking type at all and had a photo of the blue awning, of the window display with the piles of books and the little desk with the antique typewriter, I’d write underneath it, And then everything changed.
I sidled out of view from Mimi, Harrington and Fletch so I stood between the market and the café. I gathered my strength to say what I’d always imagined saying when he came crawling back.
“You can’t just come here in the middle of my summer, in the middle of my life. I don’t want you here.” But these were words I only partially meant. They were words I wanted to mean, but wasn’t sure I did . . . yet.
He grinned, the smile that drew me in, the one that I’d seen on his Instagram feed all summer. The one I saw with Hannah. And then, right then, I did mean the words I’d already said.
It wasn’t any one piece of Mimi wisdom, or the books I’d read, or the terror of losing George, or Mom’s bravery in changing our life when hers was falling apart, or Fletch’s strong humor and gentleness, that had transformed me. It wasn’t just Mom drawing me close and trusting me as she always had no matter my misbehavior. It was everything and all things. These people, these books and the losses had done their job inside me: an alchemy of stories and wisdom and experience.
I didn’t want Ryan. At all.
His face shifted. He wasn’t so sure of himself anymore or his place in the world.
“I thought you broke my heart, Ryan, but it wasn’t my heart at all. It was some part of me that thought I deserved to be treated terribly.”
“Baby,” he said and took my hand and placed it next to his cheek like some ridiculous gesture from a movie he’d seen.
I yanked my hand away. “Don’t,” I said.
“Will you just at least listen to me? Let me tell you how I feel and what happened.”
I nodded and we sat on the iron bench facing each other. I scooted so far from him that the armrest dug into my back.
“I made a huge mistake,” he said.
“You already said that part.”
“God, can you just cut a guy a break? I drove all the way here to see you. To talk.”
“And you went all the way to Europe with Hannah.” The anger in my voice shocked me. I took a deep, calming breath. “Go ahead.”
“It was a mistake with Hannah. I don’t know why it even happened. I’m in love with you. And it scared me because I started thinking about things like what we’d do when we gradua
ted. Where would we live? How long until I could propose to you? Could we live together next semester?”
He took in a long inhale, the kind George and Daisy took when they were afraid the grown-ups were going to stop listening and they’d have to rush all their words out on one puff of air.
“You were thinking those things? Really? Or are you just telling me this in hindsight now?”
“No, I was thinking those things.” He moved closer, an inch or two but enough that our knees touched. “It just scared me. I didn’t want to be so . . . tied down. Then Hannah came along.” He cringed, his eyebrows dropping into a V. “And she had this trip to Europe . . .”
“And all that money,” I said.
“And all that money,” he repeated. “Yes.”
The town was quiet, and I thought of it as my town. I was stronger there. The oak trees that bent and gnarled like the hands of an old crone showed me how I could withstand whatever came my way. That afternoon the Spanish moss looked lit from the inside, a nimbus around a saint.
I could have told Ryan about each storeowner or the movie theater and how it had come back to town. I could tell him why cars never parked in between the white lines. I could tell him all of this and so much more, but I didn’t want to. I wanted to go back inside Mimi’s store and set up for the party. I wanted to pick wildflowers from the meadow beside Loretta’s house and arrange them in blue enamel water pitchers. I wanted to color with George, or fish with Daisy.
What I didn’t want? To sit here and have Ryan explain to me why he’d run off with Hannah to Europe, to hear how he loved me so much that it scared him.
“You shouldn’t have come all this way,” I said slowly, carefully.
His face wrinkled in confusion. “You didn’t hear me, did you? I mean, if you did, you’d understand. I love you and only you.” He reached for my hands, and I shook my head.
“No.”
“You’re breaking my heart here, baby.”
“Please, please stop calling me baby. It’s making me a little sick.”
The Bookshop at Water's End Page 28