Page 8 of Drop Dead Gorgeous

"But you have a way of making them memorable."

A smile touches her lips, small enough that another might have missed it.

Rain slants across the street between us as she crosses the sidewalk, her boots splashing through puddles without the slightest hesitation.

"Is there another funeral?" she asks.

"Not yet."

Silence settles between us, comfortable rather than awkward. I have lived through centuries of conversation, and I have learned that people often reveal themselves just as clearly in the moments when neither of you feels compelled to speak.

"Are you a detective?" she asks at last, amusement dancing in her eyes.

"Not exactly."

"I didn't think so."

Without another word, she disappears inside the shop and returns moments later holding a steaming mug.

"You look like you could use this."

She presses it into my hand with the easy confidence of someone who has spent a lifetime taking care of others before herself.

The coffee is strong and pleasantly bitter.

For reasons I cannot explain . . .

It tastes like kindness.

She laughs, the sound bright enough to cut through the rain. "That's a strange way to put it."

"I'm a strange sort of person."

We stand together beneath the steady drizzle while she cradles her mug between both hands. She doesn't ask the hundred questions I can see gathering behind her eyes. Instead, she tells me about Belladonna Blooms with the quiet pride of someone introducing an old friend. The shop belonged to her grandmother, she explains, and in a roundabout way so does the little apartment above it. She laughs softly as she admits that living there sometimes feels like inhabiting someone else's memories while trying to make a few of her own.

"It must be a comfort," I say.

She brushes a rain-soaked strand of hair behind her ear. "Sometimes it is. Other times it feels like standing perfectly still while the years swim past me. Like . . ." She smiles to herself. "Like being a goldfish in a bowl."

I have witnessed poets search for hours to describe a single feeling half so well. She arrives at it without effort, as though honesty has always come more naturally to her than performance.

"Do you like it here?" I ask.

The question surprises me almost as much as it seems to surprise her. It is not the sort of thing I am meant to wonder about.

Her gaze drifts along the rain-darkened storefronts, the weathered awnings, and the banners straining against the wind.

"I do," she says at last. "I just wish I could see the world from outside the bowl once. Not because I want to leave forever, but because I'd like to know how big it really is."

There is no restlessness in her voice. Only curiosity. She does not long to escape her life; she simply hopes to understand it a little better.

"Where would you go?"

She looks toward the blurred outline of the bay.

"Somewhere with wildflowers," she says. "Not the kind people plant on purpose. The kind that simply appear one spring because the earth decided they belonged there."

I find myself smiling before I realize I have done it.