I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(38)
Maybe this, the fact of his difference, is why she, who hardly talked—truly talked, not just chatted politely—to anyone apart from John Blanchard, talked to him, a complete stranger in a sandwich shop. The shop itself was the sort of place she rarely went, overpriced, catering to tourists, and just a stone’s throw away from the fanciest hotel in town, but that day, a Saturday in late November, she had woken up and felt the urge to be out in the world, to sit in a place with other people. A week later, after she met George Graham for the second time, she would wonder if this unprecedented urge had been the hand of fate pushing her out the door and into that sandwich shop, and even though she would try to laugh off this idea, dismiss it as silly and overly self-involved, she could never fully convince herself that it was wrong.
She asked him what he was reading about. What she actually said was, “Excuse me for interrupting, but you look so engrossed in that paper. If you’re reading something interesting, could you please tell me what it is? I’ve forgotten to bring any reading material of my own, so I’m all at loose ends.” It came across as forward, flirtatious even, and unlike anything she would normally say, but she didn’t feel mortified. Instead, for the first time in ages and for no reason she could explain, she felt young, a young woman, out and about and lingering over lunch. Young and open and unguarded. When the man set his paper on the table and met her eyes, she smiled.
“Are you?” he said.
“Well, yes. It’s been so long since I’ve been to a restaurant that I’d forgotten how dull it can be to eat alone in this town.”
“You live here, then? Just for the summer or all year round?”
“All year. I run a guesthouse, although I’m a little short of guests at the moment. After October, business slows down.”
“You run it by yourself?”
“Yes.”
“Interesting.”
For a moment, Edith considered telling him why she was going it alone, but somehow, she didn’t want to bring up Joseph’s death. It had been more than a year since anyone had seen her as anything other than a widow, and even though she would sooner have cut off her arm than forsake Joseph or betray his memory, she felt uncompelled to share her personal history with this stranger whose business it surely was not. For the space of that conversation, she allowed herself to put away her story of loss. She felt bare and stark without it, like a tree without leaves, but also lighter.
“Sometimes, it’s interesting,” she said. “Often, it’s not particularly. Busy, yes, for which I’m grateful, but not exactly fascinating. My mind gets restless.”
That last sentence just slipped out. She had said the same thing to John Blanchard just the other evening during one of their front porch conversations, but, unlike this man, John was a friend, a friend who, for the sake of Edith’s reputation, kept mostly to the peripheries of her little world—the porch, the backyard, occasionally but only in broad daylight, the kitchen table—but a friend nonetheless, the only one she had. She waited to see if this man would laugh or be taken aback by her odd statement, but he simply said, “So what do you do with it when it does?”
And, just like that, she was off, telling him about her canoe trips, her hikes through the pinewoods at the water’s edge, her new interest in bivalves.
“Did you know that scallops can swim?” she asked.
Now, he did laugh. “I can’t say that I did. But then mostly I prefer my bivalves on the half-shell, with a dollop of cocktail sauce. Where did this curiosity of yours about the natural world come from?”
And again—off she went. Her father, her upbringing, her years spent nursing, her love affair with solitude, her abject failure at making cocktail party conversation.
“I never would have guessed that,” deadpanned George (midway into the conversation, they had remembered to introduce themselves, and from that point on, were on a first-name basis).
“Surprisingly, describing the particulars of how a mussel attaches itself to a rock doesn’t go well with canapés,” Edith said, with a sigh. “Which is probably why I’m not exactly rolling in invitations.”
“Nonsense,” said George. “All my life, I assumed mussels did it the same way barnacles do. It’s even possible I thought mussels were barnacles. Now, tell me again about those silky fibers.”
And Edith did. On the walk home, she went back over the conversation in her mind. Look at me, she thought, walking around in the afternoon sun smiling to myself like a crazy person. Her fingers slid inside the neck of her shirt to touch the two wedding rings she wore on a gold chain, remembering the night after Joseph’s funeral, how she’d taken off her ring because she couldn’t bear to see it on her hand when he no longer wore his. It occurred to her that she hadn’t even noticed if George had been wearing one. It hadn’t mattered. Edith had not been flirting. She had merely talked to George Graham the way a woman talks when she knows she will never see the other person again. For that hour, she had felt like a normal human being. It had been a reprieve, a tiny space of time in which she’d floated, unencumbered. For that hour, she could have been anyone.
Six days later, he called.
He wanted to reserve a room at Blue Sky House for the following night. Business, he said. She wondered what sort of business a man like that—perfectly cut trousers, watch like something out of a Fifth Avenue window—could possibly have in her little beach town in the off-season. Her first impulse was to say she was booked for that night, but since late October, she’d had so few guests—one traveling salesmen, an elderly couple who liked the beach in cold weather—that she could not afford, despite her frugal ways, to turn anyone down. So she told him yes in as brisk a tone as she could summon, and it wasn’t until she went to write his reservation down in her leather-bound ledger that she realized her hands were shaking.