Page 10 of Devoted

"I like her so much," Lauren said.

"Everybody likes her. She won’t sit still long enough to find out." Pearl topped Olivia’s cup again, unasked, and settled her forearms on the table, and Olivia watched the next subject arrive on her face before it arrived out loud, and had half a second to brace, and braced for the wrong thing.

"Now," Pearl said, comfortable, at broadcast volume. "You’ll have heard about Brody."

Olivia’s cup stopped an inch off the table.

"Heard what about Brody?"

"Coming home." Pearl said it with the deep satisfaction of a woman who has confirmed she is first. "The company’s bringing him back stateside. Helen told the church ladies and the church ladies told everybody who’d stood still since Thursday." She shook her head, wiped a ring off the table with her rag, world going on. "Seven years. You know what I’ve always said about that boy. The family line’s that the work took him, and the work, mind you, the work never took anybody’s Christmas too. Left over a girl, that one. I’ve said it since the day he went and I’ll say it to his face when he’s back. Some men would rather cross an ocean than sit in the same town as a broken heart, and that’s the whole of it, whatever they pay him to call it."

She said it easy. She said it the way she said everything, to the table, to the room, to the county, about somebody else’s business, meaning nothing by it, and she picked up her rag and her pot and moved on down the counter.

Olivia sat very still and looked at her coffee. Seven years, and she could still feel that night if she let herself. The rail biting her palms, the July heat still coming up off the boards after dark, Brody beside her being kind about his mother, and her own voice handing him the one true thing she’d ever said out loud to anybody, because he was grieving and she’d wanted to give him something honest, and honest was all she’d had. It’s Owen. It’s always been Owen. Her heart had been slamming when she said it, her whole body lit with finally letting it out of her mouth, years of wanting given air for the space of one sentence. And he’d said something nice, and stacked chairs, and been gone by Sunday breakfast, and had not been back since, and for seven years she had turned that night over looking for the crack in it. Nobody knew she’d been at that fence. Nobody living had ever heard what she said at it.

"Anyway," Pearl said. "It’ll be a circus. Remi alone will take the roof off Harvey’s."

Olivia said nothing. She was aware of saying nothing, aware of the exact size and shape of her own silence in a booth where three women were talking, and she reached for her cup and drank from it like a woman with nothing in her lap but a Saturday.

Pearl’s eyes came off the room and rested on her, just a second, just long enough.

"More pie?" Pearl said, mild.

"I haven’t finished this pie."

"No," Pearl said, looking at her. "You haven’t." And she got up, because ten minutes was ten minutes and the register was calling, and whatever she’d noticed she took back behind the counter with her, filed wherever Pearl filed things, in that forty-year ledger behind her eyes that never got read back to anybody until it mattered.

"Okay," Lauren said. "It’s just us. So I’m going to say the thing."

"What thing?"

"The reason you look like that." Lauren pushed her cup aside and put her forearms on the table, blond and level and completely without mercy in the way of a woman who’d been handled once and had sworn off doing it to anybody. "You’ve been sitting there letting everybody be sorry about the wrong thing all morning. The cows are awful and the boxes are awful, and that’s not it. You don’t want to leave because of your feelings for Owen."

The booth went silent.

Heat came up Olivia’s neck and took her whole face, fast, total, a scald from the collar up. She felt it happen and could do nothing at all about it, thirty years old and going scarlet in a window booth in front of the breakfast rush, and Lauren watched it with her head tipped a little, the way you’d watch a theory prove itself.

"That’s what I thought," Lauren said, gentler.

"I don’t." Olivia got her voice level and it cost her the whole morning’s ration. "Whatever you think you⁠—"

"Olivia." Lauren said it flat and kind at once. "I stood in this town for one autumn watching a man be careful with me and I know exactly what it looks like from the outside, and I know exactly what it costs to watch, because I once wanted to throw a bucket of chrysanthemums at Mason Royston’s head for asking me nothing but was I warm enough. Every branding, every wedding, every time that man’s in a room, you make yourself busy at the exact other end of it and you always know where he is. You watched him through the whole of my shop opening. You held a conversation with me and watched him over my shoulder, and I sold him a poinsettia at Christmas, one, for his mother, and you asked me two days later, real casual, how the shop was doing." She sat back. "I’ve said it now. Somebody had to. You can throw the pie."

Olivia looked at the pie. She thought about it.

"Since school," she said instead, because the fight went out of her all at once, the way it had gone out of her in the kitchen with her mother, and what was under the fight was so old and so tired it came out almost calm. "And there’s nothing in it, Lauren, that’s the part you’re missing. There’s no story. Nothing ever happened. That’s the whole story, nothing happened, thirteen years of nothing happening, and I got good at it, I built a whole life around the not-happening, and I thought I’d built it where nobody could see it." She heard her own laugh, short, no floor under it. "And Marge comes out with eggs I didn’t order, and you’re sitting there telling me my own face, so."

"So the town’s known the whole time," Lauren said. "That’s what you’re just now finding out."

"Has it?"

"Honey." Lauren did a Pearl so accurate it hurt. "I knew by Christmas, and I’m new."

Olivia put both hands over her face and left them there, and behind her hands the sting came back into the morning, and under her sleeve, unhelpful, uninvited, her forearm chose that exact moment to remember the pens. His hand around her arm on the ice, six days old now, the weight of her held in it easy as a bucket, and the beat past need where he hadn’t let go. She’d washed that coat since. It hadn’t helped. She took her hands down.

"He knows where I am," she said, and it came out plain and quiet and final, the true thing, said flat because there was no other way left to say it. "He’s known for thirteen years. If he wanted to come, he’d have come. So it doesn’t matter what the county knows, or what you know, or what I look like at the shop opening. In June the place is gone, and I’m gone, and the not-happening can finally get done happening."

Lauren looked at her a long moment.