Silent Words

by Lisa Fenwick

  “I thought so. Sorry for not following your instructions about facing you at times. Just remind me, because with my blindness sometimes I can’t figure out if I’m facing the right way or not.” I laughed nervously to let him know that he wasn’t alone. I had a disability, too, and at times it could be tough.

  “The way that you walked in here with all the confidence in the world, I didn’t notice until you pointed to the agreement that maybe there was something wrong with your sight. I was too busy looking at Boy and admiring the cottage to notice.”

  I was flattered that he was saying that about my sight. I thought that it was obvious, but then where did I go? Nowhere. I had studied this place and mine like the back of my hand.

  He said, “I rely on my phone a lot. It’s always in my pocket or in my hand, so I can get vibration alerts. I even have a voice recognition app that I use sometimes in situations where a person can’t keep facing me.”

  “Do you need a flashing doorbell or anything like that?”

  “No. I just need to ring the one you’ve got a few times to teach my phone the sound, and it will alert me.”

  “So, if you lose your phone, you’re really sunk, aren’t you?” I asked.

  “Pretty much. I hope I can trust you with that knowledge,” he said, with a gentle laugh in his voice.

  “You can,” I said and smiled to let him know I meant it.

  “Let me sign this agreement and let you get on your way. I’ve already taken up a lot of your time.”

  He handed me his pen, which was very nice. It was heavy in the hand but not cold. It felt like it was made of some sort of dense wood. I found the little sticky flags on the forms that showed where I needed to sign. “Okay. That’s one copy for each of us. Is there anything else you need, or should I let you settle in?”

  “I just have a few suitcases to bring in from the car, and then I need to hit the grocery store, so I’ll have something for dinner tonight.”

  “The drawer next to the stove has information on where to shop for different things, as well as a few more options for dining out or catching a drink. We are actually quite a bit ahead of the curve out here on grocery delivery, if you’d like to take advantage of that. Motier’s has been doing it since the first phone lines were installed in town back in 1901. As soon as the internet hit, they were on that too. Finest GeoCities web site in six counties back in the 90s.”

  “Is Motier’s the store I passed about three blocks down toward the river?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think I’ll take a walk. I’ve been in a car for hours. It’ll do me good to stretch my legs a bit.”

  “There are reusable shopping bags in the utility closet,” I said. “It was nice to meet you, Noah. I hope your stay here in Berwick is everything you’re hoping for.”

  “It is starting out very nice. Thank you, Amy.”

  I was sure that my face was red at that point, I couldn’t remember the last time that anyone had shown any interest in me, especially the opposite sex. He’d really put a smile on my face today. So wide that I felt like screaming with excitement.

  “I do have one request, if that’s okay,” I said, just as I got to the door.

  “What do you need?” he said, and he sounded curious about my request.

  “Smokey loves to run out here. The yard at my house is so small that I swear, he could lie down with his tail on the porch and his nose at the back gate.” Smokey heard his name and the word “run” and was immediately at my side, Boy in tow.

  “Sure. Tell you what, take as much time as you’d like. I’ll walk down to the store so you can let the big guy have some fun.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “What about Boy? Should I put him in the house?”

  “You could take him to Motier’s if you’d like. They allow dogs on leash, as long as they’re well-behaved. Otherwise, he could run with Smokey if you’re okay with leaving him here. I could put him inside when I leave. Does he have a kennel?”

  “Yes,” Noah said. “Let me get it out of the car real quick. With Smokey around, he may give you a hard time about it, though. Maybe leave Smokey out in the yard, if that’s okay, and he’ll go right in if you tell him it’s bedtime.”

  I took the dogs outside. Once I got Smokey’s harness off, he was off like a shot. Boy seemed like a healthy guy, but he was a smaller dog, completely incapable of keeping up with Smokey’s long stride.

  “Which room will you be putting that in?” I asked Noah as he came back to the house from his car.

  “Again, please?”

  I remembered that he was relying on reading my lips, and I took a step closer, facing straight at him, and repeated myself.

  “Bedroom. He likes to sleep close to me at night.”

  “I think he’s going to sleep like a rock tonight.” I laughed, listening to him and Smokey running around earlier.

  Noah stopped on the front steps. “Good. It’s hard to get him the same type of exercise in Manhattan as he’ll get here. Regardless of what I get out of my stay here, this yard is going to do a world of good for Boy.”

  I was tempted to ask what Noah was hoping to get out of his stay in Berwick, but I knew that it was none of my business. I was still curious. I sensed that he was a good lawyer, and between Peggy’s opinion of him and my first impression, he was a good man too. Something had driven him out of the big city and out to my little cottage in my small town. Maybe it was love. There was no way that a man like this was single. No way.

  “Well, you have yourself a wonderful evening,” he said. “If I don’t get moving to the store now, I’m never going to.”

  “Thank you, Noah. I hope your first night in Berwick treats you well. Will someone be joining you soon?”

  I couldn’t help but ask the question. I was too curious about him being taken.

  “No. Just Boy and me.”

  That didn’t mean that he was single, and I wished that he’d expanded to say more about it. He didn’t, and it made me want to know why he said “just Boy and me” and why he sounded sad when he said it.

  Chapter Six

  Noah

  The Present

  My third day in Berwick found me settling into a routine. Boy got me up early to let him out to run in the yard. While he did that, I made coffee and a light breakfast, which I took out onto the little back patio. I’d set out bowls of kibble and water for when Boy was done racing around the yard.

  I knew that I was still unclenching from everything that had happened in Manhattan. I liked Berwick well enough so far. The people I’d met had been decent enough, but I hadn’t visited Bev’s Home Cooking yet. Amy didn’t specifically say it, but “caters to local folk” was usually code for nothing on the menu but cold shoulder for out-of-towners, especially if they were big city folk.

  The pace of life was gentle. With the huge yard, I didn’t even need to walk Boy when he needed to take care of business. I just opened the door for him and let him do what he needed to do. I had time to read for fun, to actually cook things that I selected from the store myself. I’d always really loved to cook, but never in my life had I had either a real need or much time to do it. Growing up, we had a housekeeper and cook. When I was at the university, I stayed first in the dorms where I had access to the cafeteria and a small, inadequate kitchenette then in my fraternity house, where we had a chef.

  Once I finished up my bachelor’s degree and started law school, I set up the kitchen in my apartment exactly the way I thought I wanted it and then had almost no time to cook. After graduating there and taking my position at the firm, I had more time, but was too quickly seduced by the allure of delivered meal plans. With all the shopping done for me, everything showing up at the apartment, I got to actually make dinner for Ashley and myself a few nights a month. However, Ashley loved to cook, and most of the time I let her do it. My apartment in Manhattan was a true gem but was also in a bit of a food desert. The nearest good grocery store was several blocks away. A pai
n on foot, not much better by car with the insane traffic, so I took the pre-packaged food and did what the recipes told me. Good quality stuff but nothing that really scratched that itch.

  When I first walked into Motier’s, though, I had to stop and take a breath. It wasn’t a very large store. The aisles were narrow and crowded, just wide enough to get their small carts through. But their meat counter had things I normally only saw in better butchers in the city, their produce selection was surprisingly vibrant for a little mom-and-pop in a small town, and they had a really good variety of everything else. For the size of the store, I’d expected maybe two big name brands and one off-brand of most things, like canned soup or beans, pasta, salsa, and the like. Motier’s went with the philosophy of carrying as many brands as they could fit on their shelves, even if it meant sometimes only having three packages of each.

  I was like a kid in a candy store, and it took everything I had not to load up on more groceries than I could carry by hand the three blocks back to the cottage.

  So, I was sitting there on my third day in Berwick, thinking that if I got nothing else out of the next six months, I’d get fat on cooking nice meals for myself three times a day, and Boy would become superbly fit and trim.

  My first explorations of Amy’s little cottage also revealed some unexpected gems. She had a solid wood mandolin slicer, a top-quality home espresso maker, and a French press that looked like it came from a fine Parisian café in the 50s. The spice collection spanned the entire world. There were both Calphalon non-stick pans and a full set of well-loved and seasoned cast iron (complete with detailed instructions on how to cook in and care for it, hand-written in a very precise, neat script). The bedding comprised bamboo sheets and antique quilts. The bathroom had an old claw-foot tub with a modern shower head. The place was truly charming and marvelously up to date.

  “Hey, Boy. Want to go into town?”

  Boy turned to look at me but didn’t get up from the sunny spot he was sprawled out in. He was just sitting there, panting lightly after his run and a nibble of breakfast, as if he had no cares in the world. Which he didn’t, because he was a dog.

  “Are you exercised enough?” I asked. “Walk?”

  At that magic word, he got up and came to sit beside me. I could go into town to look around without him, but I really liked the furry little guy, and he was a great icebreaker for meeting people in a strange town.

  The only downside to taking Boy out for that purpose was that people tended to look at him when they talked, even if they were speaking to me. I usually only had to remind them a couple of times, and they would remember for the rest of the conversation, like Amy did when I met her, but it also made me very conscious of my hearing loss having to ask that of just about every single person that I encountered. Once or twice a day was one thing, but if I was going out specifically to get to know people, it just got exhausting to have to keep interrupting a person to have them face me while they talked. I had long since tired of having to draw attention to my deafness. I hated seeing people over and over again trying to figure out if they should ask me whether I’d been born deaf or not, or if they should ask anything at all.

  I had been tempted on more than one occasion to print out a stack of business cards that laid it all out. Yes, I have almost complete hearing loss due to an accident a couple of years ago. Yes, I do know sign language. I needed to stop feeling sorry for myself. Amy was blind and walked around as if she knew where she was going. She didn’t know how much I admired her, and I felt silly for getting hung up about my deafness.

  I’d much rather just go back in time to the night of the accident and simply not do whatever it was I’d done that day. I also wished I knew exactly what had happened. I had been in a coma for quite a while after the accident and woke with no memory of the couple of days leading up to it. There was a gap between me kissing Ashley goodbye after a mid-week lunch date and me waking up in a hospital more than a week later with severe head trauma.

  It was a miracle that my hearing and a few days of memory were the only things lost in the accident. I could have ended up with more severe memory loss, behavioral changes, paralysis, blindness, inability to think clearly, motor coordination issues. The doctors gave me a whole slate of things to watch out for and ran dozens of tests. While I’d had to adapt to my hearing loss at work, the firm was still committed to working with me to make sure I could still take advantage of every opportunity I would have had otherwise. And there was no sign that I had lost any mental acuity. Nobody had cause to criticize the quality of my work when I went back to my job.

  The generosity of the firm in working with me through my recovery from the accident was another thing I was immensely thankful for. They had worked to take down every possible barrier that my hearing loss had put up before me. And when I asked for the leave of absence, to reset and deal with some of my own internal struggles around it, they came to the negotiations in good faith and were very generous in allowing me six months. I did have to remind myself, though, that they were only so willing to work with me because of the work I’d already done. If I hadn’t given as much of myself to show that I was such an asset, I was sure they wouldn’t have been as understanding. At the end of the day, they’d gotten very good returns on their investments in me to that point, so it was very much worth it for them to continue investing in my well-being.

  I realized I’d spent way too long dwelling on my hearing. It wasn’t the real issue. The real problem was that it’d only been three days and already I was bored.

  What was my plan? What would I do here for six long months?

  I restlessly said, “C’mon. Let’s explore more of this town.”

  Since Boy had just gotten some solid exercise in, I decided to drive down to the main drag instead of walking the five blocks or so. He seemed to appreciate that and had plenty of pep back by the time I got out of the car in front of the local hardware store.

  “Let’s go, Boy,” I said, clipping his leash to his collar before I let him out of the car.

  For being a little rural town, Berwick seemed to be doing mostly well. There were a few empty storefronts, but most of them were occupied and seemed to be doing all right. It was hard for me to gauge exactly what kept the town going. I didn’t even have to walk away from my car to see there was some tourist traffic coming into town.

  There was a certain look to the kind of small-town shop that catered to big city folk, and I could definitely see a few such places. The coffee shop next to the hardware store was a perfect example. There was a certain corporate slickness to it, something designed to make you think you were visiting a nationwide chain that you just hadn’t happened to have heard of yet. The fit and finish was on a level with Starbucks, everything composed and part of a coherent whole, nothing out of place or disrupting the precisely engineered warm and welcoming ambiance.

  A Manhattanite or a Bostonian would walk into that shop almost by force of habit.

  The town’s main street wasn’t an endless procession of gentrified and sterilized cafes and bistros and boutiques, though. The hardware store, for example, was without a doubt a small and completely locally owned business. I could tell just by looking through the windows that it was as cramped and crowded as Motier’s store and completely unapologetic about it. I was sure that if I went inside, there’d be a seventy-year-old curmudgeon at the till bossing around a guy in his fifties who was riding hard on somebody in his thirties who was responsible for a couple of high-school kids that swept the floors. I was also sure that I could go back to Amy’s cottage and pull some random piece out of the stove or furnace or one of the sinks, and if I brought it in, the curmudgeon would immediately know what it was and walk me to the exact shelf where I could get a new one, all the while telling me the secret to getting the part put back in right.

  As I walked Boy down the street, I saw the curious mix of both types of businesses. A few semis drove down the road and turned at an intersection ahead. Berwick was not on any s
ort of highway, so the only reason for the trucks to be here was because they had business in town. This suggested some sort of industry that was keeping people employed in something other than catering to tourists.

  Once I made this realization, a lot of what I was seeing, the mix of businesses and the general good health of the town, started to make sense. I started getting a feel for the place. I could understand why Amy implied that there were some “locals-only” eateries, but there was also no overtly polite chill directed toward me as an obvious outsider. Berwick was not clinging desperately to visitors from the big cities for its survival, the same big cities that everybody’s children had run off to.

  The first few people Boy and I passed were mostly indifferent to me but made sure to give my dog a smile and a kind word or two. Somebody stopped in front of us. I saw her look down to speak to Boy but could only make out a low buzz of sound from her. Fortunately, she looked up when she asked if she could pet him.

  “Go ahead,” I said, bending down beside Boy. This served the dual purposes of letting me put a hand on Boy while he sniffed out the stranger, and it also got my face and the woman’s on the same level so I could see her mouth when she spoke.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Would you believe me if I told you I never came up with anything more creative than Boy?”

  She looked straight at me. “Yes. I think I would.”

  Boy craned his head forward to sniff her, and she leaned into it. With Boy in the way, I couldn’t completely see what she said next, but it appeared she was asking him if he needed a better name.

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  “Oh, I could think of a thousand,” she said, looking back toward me. We were probably the same age, and she had dark eyes and matching hair. Part of me wondered if she was a New Yorker too. I could have talked to her, probably encouraged her. But I didn’t need a woman in my life, especially one who reminded me of the one that I’d lost.