Flying Solo(30)

He widened his eyes and nodded. “I appreciate the effort, which is effortful.” Someone brought the fizzy water, and someone else took their orders—steaks for both, because why not?—and brought a little bowl of bread and a steel cup of butter. The music was gentle coffeehouse anesthetic, not quite fancy but also not cool. “So,” Nick said as he tore a piece off a miniature loaf of French bread, “what’s the duck news? You were going to send it to someplace in Hartford, right?”

“I was,” she said. She explained how Matt had materialized and taken the task off her hands, exactly the way she needed. “This way, I’ll know it’s in good hands, it’s taken down there in person and everything.”

“What do you think your odds are?” he asked.

“That it’s real? That it’s worth money? No idea. I’m not sure I care that much about that. I mean, obviously, it would be great, but that would go to my folks and Dot’s other family, just like it will when they sell her house. It’s not like I’d pocket it.”

“So you’re still planning to sell the house?” He wasn’t looking at her. He was busily buttering some bread.

“Of course,” she said. “What else would I do?”

He shrugged. “Keep it?”

“I already have a house.”

“I know.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Nick, you know I’m not moving here, right?”

He nodded. “Sure. Yes. Of course.”

“I’m not moving into Dot’s house.”

Now he looked up. “If you say so. You just look pretty comfortable kicking around that kitchen, that’s all.”

“I’m also pretty comfortable kicking around the kitchen I already have.”

“Okay. So you’re not in it for the money, you just want to solve the duck.”

She smiled. “Yeah. I know it’s weird. It’s probably nothing. It’s just the way she had it in there, under the blankets, and then that letter, and now the picture that we found. I just want to know. I’m just curious. I know you probably think it’s strange.”

Nick had always kept his hair fairly short, because when he let it grow longer, its close waves would grow into total chaos. But there was this one curl he had—she used to call it his Superman wave—and it would drop down over his left eye. And when Laurie used to gaze at him a lot, which was most of high school even before they started dating, it was one of the things she gazed at. She could never decide whether it was the result of calculation or good luck, whether he spent ten minutes making sure it would fall the right way, as she would have, or whether he just ran his hands over his head every morning and was blessed, as she figured boys mostly were. She was thinking about this at the moment when he said, “I don’t think it’s strange. I think it’s great.”

She blushed. Oh boy. New subject. “So now that you’ve single-handedly saved your place of work, what’s next?”

He immediately took out his phone. He scrolled through some screens and then showed her a picture of a blue van with colorful type on the side. “This is the Rockland Bookmobile,” he said. “I want one just like it.”

“It looks expensive.”

“It is,” he said, “but we need it. We also need the county to get a better mobile app, and we’re still in the middle of all these repairs. We’re trying to figure out how to do it without closing down, since every time you close, somebody starts arguing over whether you should ever open again.” He put his phone away and sighed. “I basically never stop thinking about that building. I see construction paperwork and grant proposals when I close my eyes.”

“Do you like that?” she asked.

“I think it and I are one now,” he said with a smile. “I think I’ve fused so completely with that place that I don’t think about liking it or not, you know? I just do it.” He shrugged. “How about you? Do you like your work?”

“I do,” she said. “It’s not a particularly stable way to live since I’ve been freelance. You know I had a staff job when I was first in Seattle?”

“I heard, yeah.”

“Had that until five or six years ago. Then that all collapsed. I’m lucky to work as much as I do now. I get to schedule myself, which you can tell from the fact that I hopped on a plane out here to do all this.” She waved her hands around.

“Well, it sounds like you’re doing amazing,” he said. “Even if you did end your engagement over a waffle iron.”

“Not over the waffle iron. Maybe after being enlightened by the waffle iron. Like you said, he just thought things were going to turn out one way, and I thought they were going to turn out another way. And I couldn’t get used to living with him.” She ran her finger around the edge of her plate.

“Why’s that?”

“I really like living by myself, honestly,” she repeated. “I can have breakfast for dinner, I can have dinner for breakfast, I can take a bath at two-fifteen in the afternoon on a Wednesday. And I sleep so well there. I don’t talk about it very much, but I’ve slept like garbage for most of my life.”

“Really.”

“Really. The whole thing, waking up with my clothes twisted and my sheets in knots. I had terrible dreams. I would wake up in the morning and feel like I hadn’t slept at all. I’d pass out in my breakfast or while I was trying to write. But then I moved into the house, and I bought this new queen bed after I had bounced on about a hundred mattresses. And I had these sheets, these linen sheets. They are so cool in the summer and cozy in the winter. It is the first bed where, when I sleep in it, I am just out. I am out, for hours and hours. When I wake up, I feel like I have a full battery.”