Page 9 of Beachfront Pages

"You came all the way down here to feed me and insult my inventory," he said. "There's usually a third thing."

"There's a new tenant." She brushed sugar from her fingers, light about it. "Sea Glass Cottage. Moved in a few days back."

"Sea Glass." He tried to place which one that was and couldn't, and didn't much care to. The cottages came and went with seasonal renters. The renters came and went with their reasons. Most of them never once made it into town to find a bookshop on the harbor. "Tourist?"

"A writer."

He glanced up. "A writer."

"That got your attention." Winnie smiled. "Don't get excited. She's private. Down here to work, she says. Needs the quiet."

"They all need the quiet." He'd heard it a hundred times. Every other person who came to a coast like this was a writer needing quiet. The quiet was the easy part. The writing was the part that broke them, and then they went home. "What does she write?"

"Wouldn't say. 'Small stuff,' she told the girls. 'Nothing you'd know.'" Winnie turned the foil back over the plate, careful, like she was tucking it in.

"Mm."

She leveled her eyes at him, patient as a tide. "This one's got a wall up. The whole height of her. I thought you'd recognize the type."

He held the look and didn't answer that. There wasn't a clean answer. Winnie had a way of saying a thing and then letting it sit on the counter between the two of them until he had to pick it up.

"You're matchmaking," he said instead.

"I'm gossiping. There's a difference, though I'll grant you it's a fine one. I'm only telling you there's a reader in town pretending she isn't anything at all. Seemed like your kind of puzzle. Do with it what you like, Martin. You usually do nothing, so."

"That's not fair."

"It's a little fair." She patted his hand where it rested on the counter. Her own hand was warm and knotted and stronger than it looked. "Eat another cookie. I'll want my plate back. Don't you dare keep it a month like the last one."

"I returned the last one."

"You returned it in March. I brought it in December." She was already at the door, knob in hand. And with that, she disappeared out into the sunshine.

The shop was quiet again. He preferred it quiet. That was the thing. He told himself so, anyway, sweeping the foil plate to the end of the counter and going back to the second box.

A writer with a wall up, pretending to be nothing at all. He thought about that while his hands worked, slitting tape, folding cardboard. He caught himself half-curious and didn't entirely care for it. He'd built a good life out of not being curious about people anymore. Curiosity cost something. A man got interested in a person and started wanting things for them. Then they left, or they changed, or they got sick in the early summer and were gone by the fall. And he was left holding all that interest with nowhere to put it.

Not that a single renter in a cottage was any of that. He was getting ahead of himself over a plate of cookies and a woman he'd never laid eyes on, wasn't he?

He unpacked the grief book last. The slim one. He read the first page standing up. It was a thing he never let customers do and did constantly himself.

It was good. Quiet, plain, and true, the way he liked a thing to be. The author had lost a wife too. A reader could tell by the second paragraph, the particular way grief settled into the ordinary stuff of a house. The coffee for one. The side of the bed that stayed made. Marty knew that house. He'd lived in it sixteen years now, the one Annette wasn't in.

The grief wasn't sharp anymore. That was the thing nobody warned a man about. It didn't stay a knife. It wore down to something duller and heavier. Then a book or a song or the smell of somebody's vanilla cookies reminded him it was there. He didn't cry over Annette these days. He just lived in the space she'd left. In the shop she'd have loved and would have made him stock differently.

She'd have liked Winnie. She'd have liked Hal too, and would have ordered him his Maxwell without a single sniff. She'd have read one herself just to argue with Marty about it at dinner.

"Worth carrying," she'd have said, holding up some paperback he'd turned his nose at. "Worth more than that Hungarian you'll never sell."

He could hear it exactly. That was the trouble with sixteen years. A man got the voice down so well he could lose whole afternoons to it.

He closed the grief book.

Then he carried it behind the counter and set it on the narrow shelf back there, the one customers couldn't reach. The keep-shelf. It held the handful of books that weren't for selling. His own. He slid the slim gray spine in beside the others and squared it with a thumb until it sat flush.

His glasses were up on his forehead again. He brought them down. Out past the front windows a fishing boat was coming in slow against the glare. He watched it a moment. Then he went to put the kettle on for a cup of tea.

Chapter 4