A Season for Second Chances(60)
Chapter 46
The fixing of the hole took a long time and a lot of sawing, hammering, sanding, and swearing. It was nearly half past six by the time John began to pack his tools back into the large canvas tool bag he had brought up from the cellar. Annie wondered if she ought to offer to cook him some supper. She had supplied him with mugs of tea and biscuits throughout the afternoon, and thankfully his engagement in his ceiling task had prevented the need for any real conversation. This, Annie had decided, was a good thing, since they couldn’t be trusted not to argue if they steered away from the basic niceties. However, an offer of supper would invariably require actual talking. Not only that but, Annie realized, it might be misconstrued as something else.
John came into the sitting room. His hair was gray with dust. He’d removed his jumper and rolled up the sleeves on his shirt but kept it tucked neatly into his jeans. He looked like a lawyer who’d walked through an ash cloud. Annie had been through all the Halloween boxes and decided what she would and wouldn’t use. Then she had made lists of all the things she would use with suggestions of how and where she might display them to their best advantage.
“I can help you with Halloween, if you like,” said John, drying his hands on a tea towel.
Annie frowned. “Really?” The idea pulled her up short.
John shrugged.
“Yeah. I’ve been part of enough of my aunt’s Halloween extravaganzas to know how they work. I mean, I know you’ve got the Saltwater Nook almanac and all,” he said, nodding in the direction of Mari’s notebook on the coffee table. “But maybe some firsthand knowledge would be helpful.”
“I didn’t think you’d . . . Yes, thank you, that would be great!”
“I know what you think of me,” said John.
“Do you?”
“You think I’m just some money-grabbing bastard who wants to stick his old aunty in a home and be done with her.”
“I did think that to start with,” Annie confessed.
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know what to think. You’re a bit of an enigma: devil or angel, depending on who you talk to.”
“Small-town gossip.”
“No smoke without fire?”
“You know, it’s unfair to judge a person when you don’t have all the facts.”
“Then why don’t you enlighten me?”
“You strike me as a woman who likes to make up her own mind about people.”
There it was again: that arrogance that drove her half mad.
“You ask me not to judge your motives and yet you won’t help me to understand them.”
John laid the tea towel on the radiator and began to roll down his shirtsleeves.
“Perhaps you could try a little faith in the human condition,” he said, pulling on his knitted sweater and sending a small cloud of dust into the air like a halo around his head.
“Oh, I’m afraid I’ve been disappointed by the human condition too many times to rely on blind faith anymore.”
“What a pity,” said John, grabbing his coat. “I’ll be back to paint the ceiling when the plaster has dried out. Thank you for the tea.”
And he left. The tide of their conversation had turned so quickly that they were neck deep in another misunderstanding before Annie had the chance to think better of it.
Chapter 47
Having a grand opening turned out to have been the best start the café could have had. Annie opened the kiosk at eight each morning and then opened the café door at nine; her eight-o’clockers were not the type to sit and linger, they wanted to grab coffee and go. But many of her later customers wanted to ease into the morning, sitting at the long bench in the window and gazing out to sea either alone or with friends.
Annie had started an Instagram page and already it was being tagged in carefully crafted customer photographs of cups of coffee with the ocean in shot: #coffeebythesea, #saltwatercafe, #beachlife. She wondered if John was on Instagram. She wondered if he had seen all the positive comments and beautiful pictures of the café and the stunning vista. She wondered why she cared.
* * *
—
It was gone three o’clock by the time Annie closed down the café. Tiggs raised her head briefly as Annie entered the sitting room, yawned, and then tucked it back under her paws. The air was stuffy; the autumn sun was high in the sky and the little room seemed to soak in all its rays. Annie threw open the windows and went to make some tea.
She returned ten minutes later to find Tiggs on the windowsill, her ears pricked up and the room filled with the sound of Peter Gabriel singing “In Your Eyes.” It was coming from outside. Annie crossed to the window and looked down. Max. He was wearing trainers, baggy cargo trousers, and a long tan trench coat with the sleeves rolled up. Above his head he held an old boom box out of which Peter Gabriel’s gravelly voice drifted up to her, while Max—uncharacteristically—said nothing, but gazed at her, hopeful and pleading as he re-created the iconic John Cusack window scene from Say Anything.
Max’s arms shook slightly from the effort of holding the boom box aloft. Two of Annie’s regular customers hurried by and pretended not to notice the grand gesture being performed on the promenade. Well, that’ll be all over the village in no time, she thought. Annie sighed; how could anyone fail to be moved by such a demonstration? But she knew that to give even an inch would be dangerous. When the song finished, Max pressed stop on the tape cassette, placed the boom box on the floor, and continued to stare up at her like a lovesick Romeo. Annie leaned out the window.