Page 54 of Knot in the Wedding Cards

"Maybe." She ties the apron with a snap. "I'll believe the tenth week when I'm standing in it."

Ruth Kettle materializes at seven-fifteen, which is a genuine feat of nature, because the general store is a full six blocks up the hill and Ruth does not walk downhill for her health.

"Ruth." I give her a smile.The real one, not the four-second one."The store knows you've gone AWOL?"

"The store manages." She plants herself on a stool, orders nothing, and studies me like a jar with a faded label. "So it's true. The wedding's real, the fella's somebody, and they've dragged you three back into her orbit like the whole town didn't spend five years sweeping up after you." She sniffs. "You've gotten handsomer. That's just cruelty at this point."

She’s gonna earn a second smile at this rate.

"I missed you too."

"You missed my gossip. There's a difference, and I'm too old to be flattered by boys who left." But she says it without much bite, thankfully.

I don’t want to be scolded by the entire town now that I’m officially back.

She pats my hand once on her way to not-buying anything, and that pat costs her something to give me, which I clock and don't mention.

My phone buzzes against the counter. A message from a number I don't have saved, though I know exactly who runs the front desk it came from.

Mr. Mercer. Welcome back to Honeybell Harbor.A reminder, since I'm told you'll be working the equinox event: our guests that week value discretion above all things, and this town's reputation is not a resource to be spent on anyone's personal reconciliation. Behave accordingly. — B. Honeywell, Salt & Honey Inn.

She's not wrong,I think, and I type back three words —Understood. Thank you.— because Beatrice Honeywell has run the finest inn on this coast for thirty years by never once being wrong about what a room will tolerate.

I'm not going to be the man who argues.

Renzo Hale wanders in at half past, looking like he slept in the bar again, which he probably did.

He owns The Driftglass, plays a mean slide guitar, and has the permanent squint of a man who spent his twenties touring and his forties regretting the volume.

"There he is." Renzo drops onto the stool Ruth vacated. "The prodigal mixologist. Iris says if you're back for real, you're covering Saturdays, because our weekend cocktail program is currently me pointing at a bottle of rum and apologizing."

"I'm here to work a wedding, Renzo, not tend your bar."

"Sure, sure." He waves it off, and there's something underneath the wave, something tired I file for later. "But you'll come by. This weekend, Theo's got a set. You'll come by, get behind the stick because you can't help it, and you'll remember what a real crowd feels like. The kind that isn't paying two hundred a head to be seen." He grins. "No pressure."

"There's always pressure with you. It's just wearing a Hawaiian shirt."

Oren Pike is the last, and Oren doesn't come in so much as appear in the doorway, sixty-one years of former fisherman and current groundskeeper, weathered to driftwood, communicating primarily through the eyebrows.

He looks at me for a long, geological moment.

"Mercer," he says.

"Oren."

"Heard you were back." He works a toothpick to the other corner of his mouth. "Town did fine without your fancy drinks, you know? Five whole years. Nobody died of thirst."

"I never doubted it."

"Just so you know."

And he's gone again, back out to whatever needs grunting at, having delivered the single most accurate sentence anyone's said to me all morning.

The town did fine without you.

I sit with my cold coffee and let that one land all the way down. They remember me. Delia's got my file, Ruth's got my face, Renzo's got a Saturday with my name on it, and none of that is the same as being needed.

This town remembers me the way you remember a song from a summer that ended.