Sunshine and Other Hazards: The Towns Verdict

Salt wind off the Atlantic curled around the dented mailbox outside Hartley's Hardware, carrying with it the brine-and-diesel perfume of Heron Cove harbor. The bell above the door gave a single bright peal as June Calloway stepped inside, two canvas totes hooked over one shoulder and the crumpled remains of her grocery list balled in her fist.

The shop was exactly the sort of place that resisted the twenty-first century on principle. Wooden shelving climbed toward a pressed-tin ceiling, and the aisles were narrow enough to force strangers into uncomfortable proximity. Bolts of canvas and coils of rope lined the walls beside racks of work gloves gone soft from handling. Somewhere in the back, a radio murmured a Red Sox game in the steady, unhurried voice of a man who understood that not every pitch warranted excitement.

June had timed this visit for early afternoon, when she expected the store to be empty. She had been wrong.

"Oh, good, you're here."

The voice came from behind a pyramid of hand tools, bright as a struck bell. A woman in her seventies emerged into the main aisle, silver hair pinned back with two tortoiseshell combs, a canvas apron dusted with sawdust, and reading glasses pushed up onto her forehead like a tiara misplaced.

"Marge," June said, recovering. "Hi."

"Don't sound so surprised. I work here Tuesdays and Thursdays." Marge planted both hands on the counter and gave June the sort of look that said she had been waiting for this moment since the last one ended. "Volunteer, technically, but Bert Hartley hasn't shown up since his hip, so we're calling it essential labor. Which is what I'm doing right now. Essential laboring in your direction."

"I was just going to grab a few things."

"Were you." Marge's eyebrows lifted a fraction. "In that case I'll just mind my own business, won't I."

June set her totes on the counter and produced the list. Three items were crossed out, two remained, and a fourth had been added in pen with a small question mark.

"What's the question mark for?" Marge asked, reading over her shoulder.

"Dinner. I'm thinking about cooking for someone."

"Well." Marge straightened, removed her glasses from her forehead, and placed them on the bridge of her nose with the gravity of a judge donning ceremonial robes. "That changes things."

"It shouldn't."

"It does." Marge was already moving down the nearest aisle, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking on the worn floorboards. "Because if it didn't matter, you wouldn't have written it down. Come on. I'll help you pick a wine, and by help I mean decide for you, and by decide for you I mean choose the one with the prettiest label because at this stage in the proceedings presentation is everything."

June followed, because not following Marge in her own store was physically difficult and socially impossible. The wine aisle consisted of a single freestanding rack of perhaps thirty bottles, arranged with no discernible logic beyond what was left over from the previous week.

"What do you actually know about this person?" Marge asked, running one finger along the bottles without looking at them.

"He has a daughter."

"So he has a daughter." Marge pulled a red out, considered it, and slotted it back. "That describes half the fathers in town. Half the mothers. A good portion of the grandparents. Try again."

June exhaled, leaning one hip against a barrel of birdseed. The light through the front windows caught dust motes suspended in the still air, turning them to slow-falling gold. "He works hard. He doesn't talk much. He has a dog that follows him everywhere."

"That's Theo Brennan."

The name landed between them with a small soft thud, the way certain words do when they have been waiting a long time to be said.

June did not confirm or deny. Marge did not require confirmation.

"Well." Marge folded her arms, tilting her head. The glasses caught the overhead light and threw a small bright rectangle onto the shelving behind her. "You've certainly set your sights, haven't you."

"I'm buying groceries."

"You're buying wine. There's a difference, and we both know it." Marge's gaze sharpened, but the warmth underneath it stayed. "How long have you been in Heron Cove now, June?"

"Six weeks."

"Six weeks. And in those six weeks, you've gone out of your way to avoid any conversation longer than three minutes with anyone who isn't paying you to be pleasant on the radio." A beat. "Present company excepted, and only because I cornered you."

"That's not entirely accurate."

"It's accurate enough." Marge waved a hand, dismissing the objection before it could take shape. "I've been running this town, in one way or another, since before you were old enough to vote. I know what avoiding looks like. I also know what deciding not to avoid looks like, and that," she pointed at the grocery list, still visible in June's grip, "is deciding."

June turned the paper over, as if that would make the question mark disappear. Outside, a car passed on the road, its tires hissing briefly on the damp pavement. The harbor bell rang once, marking the quarter hour.

"You want to know something about Theo Brennan," Marge said, and it was not a question.

"I want to buy groceries."

"You're going to buy the pinot noir, by the way. The one with the fish on it. It's not the best, but it's better than you deserve for a first attempt and worse than he'll expect, which is exactly the right balance." Marge reached past June and plucked the bottle from the rack with the confidence of a woman who had been arranging other people's affairs for decades. "And since I'm holding your wine hostage, you might as well hear a few things."

"I really do have to get back."

"Theo's been shut up like a clam since he got here."

The phrase surprised June enough that her face did something she could not control. Marge, who had been watching for exactly that reaction, gave a small satisfied nod.

"Three weeks," Marge continued, tucking the bottle under one arm and steering them both toward the register. "Moved into the cottage on Pelican Lane at the end of August. Nice place, if you like salt damage and a roof that needs patching. His mother left it to him, I gather, though he didn't say so and I didn't ask, because I am capable of restraint when it serves me."

"I didn't say you weren't."

"You implied it with your eyebrows." Marge set the bottle on the counter and began punching numbers into the ancient register, which responded with a series of clunks and a receipt ribbon that came out curled like a tongue. "Theo comes from somewhere upcoast. Portland, maybe, or one of those little towns north of Portland where everyone has the same accent and nobody locks their doors. Coast Guard. Rescue swimmer, the kind they put in the water when it's stupid to put anyone in the water."

June set the remaining items on the counter: olive oil, a bundle of fresh thyme tied with twine, a wedge of parmesan wrapped in paper. She kept her hands busy so they wouldn't betray anything else.

"He's been down to the diner twice," Marge said. "Stopped at the post office once. Took his daughter to the school to meet the teacher before classes started, which is more than most of the fathers around here bother to do. Other than that, he keeps to himself. Buys his milk at the gas station because he doesn't want to make conversation. Waves at people from a polite distance."

"He sounds polite."

"He sounds lonely," Marge corrected, and the sharpness in her voice was the sharpness of a woman who had buried a husband and understood the weight of a quiet life. "There's a difference."

The register drawer rattled open. Marge made change with the efficiency of long practice, dropped the coins into June's palm, and folded the receipt into a careful square.

"The girl," Marge said, and her tone did something complicated, "is eight. Has her mother's eyes, or so I'm told by people who knew the mother, which I did not, because she passed before they ever moved here. The girl is fine. Bright. Talks enough for two Theos, which is some balance, I suppose."

"Her name?"

"You'll have to ask him." Marge pushed the bottle of pinot across the counter. "That information isn't mine to give."

June took the bottle. The glass was cool against her palm, the label slippery with a faint residue of dust. She looked at the fish on the label, which had been painted in cheerful disregard of anatomical accuracy.

"Marge."

"Mm."

"Why are you telling me this?"

Marge considered the question with the seriousness it deserved. She removed her glasses, folded them, and tucked them into the pocket of her apron. Outside, the harbor bell marked another quarter hour. Inside, the radio murmured itself through a long fly ball.

"Because you're going to ask him anyway," Marge said finally. "And I'd rather you went in with your eyes open than spent the rest of the week pretending you weren't interested. I have watched people pretend not to be interested for forty years in this town. It is never, ever as convincing as they think."

June opened her mouth to protest.

"And don't tell me you're not interested," Marge added. "You wrote a question mark on a grocery list. That's not a woman buying vegetables. That's a woman making a decision in pencil."

A long moment passed. The light through the windows shifted as a cloud crossed the sun, dimming the aisle and then brightening it again. Somewhere in the back of the store, a pipe ticked with the temperature.

"The pinot is eight ninety-five," Marge said. "The olive oil is six. The thyme is two-fifty, and I'm not charging you for the parmesan because Bert left it out and it's going to go hard by Friday."

"Marge, I can pay for the parmesan."

"You can and you will, by accepting my invitation to the bake sale on Saturday. The Methodist women's group is doing lemon bars and I need someone tall to reach the top shelf in the fellowship hall. The short ladder has been out since the flood of '09 and nobody wants to fix it."

"I'm not particularly tall."

"You're taller than me, which is the relevant measurement." Marge began bagging the groceries with brisk efficiency, the canvas totes receiving their contents in a specific order that June suspected had been refined over decades. "Also, Theo will be there."

"I didn't ask."

"No, but you're not saying no, and in my experience that's the same thing." Marge handed over the totes, their handles already beginning to bite into June's shoulder. "Bake sale. Saturday. Ten to two. Bring something if you bake, which I suspect you don't, so bring twelve dollars and an excuse for why you look tired, because you do."

"I slept fine."

"You slept the way people sleep when they're trying very hard to sleep, which is not fine at all." Marge came around the counter, removed June's hand from the totes, and adjusted the straps so the weight distributed across a different part of her shoulder. "There. That's better. You were going to have a mark by the time you got home."

June adjusted her grip. "Thank you."

"Don't thank me. I'm meddling."

"You're also helping."

"I'm both. That's the trick, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise." Marge walked her to the door, which she opened with one hand, admitting a fresh gust of salt air and the distant sound of rigging against a mast. "You know where Pelican Lane is?"

"I can find it."

"You can. But in case you can't, it's the third left past the bait shop, the cottage with the blue trim and the gutter that needs replacing. Don't go tonight. Give him another week to settle in. Show up Saturday with something in your hand besides a question, and let the rest take care of itself."

June stepped onto the sidewalk, the bell above the door giving its bright peal a second time. The wind caught at her hair, pulling strands across her cheek, and the harbor beyond the low buildings glittered with a hard, clean light that made her squint.

"How did you know I was thinking about cooking for him?" she asked without turning.

Marge leaned against the doorframe, arms folded, a silhouette against the dim interior.

"Because," she said, "the only thing more dangerous than a question mark on a grocery list is olive oil and fresh thyme. Those are the ingredients of intention, June Calloway. I've been reading between the lines of this town for longer than you've been alive, and I know intention when I see it."

The door swung shut. The bell rang a third time, soft and final.

June walked three steps down the sidewalk before she stopped, one hand on the strap of the tote, and let out a breath that had been waiting in her chest since she'd woken up that morning. The breath came out foggy in the salt air and dissolved before it reached the curb.

She looked down at the bottle in her bag, the cheerful fish grinning up through the canvas. She looked at the thyme, its stems tied in twine, still fragrant in the cold. She looked at the question mark on the list, now tucked into her coat pocket, and decided to leave it there.

Behind her, she could hear Marge's shoes squeaking back toward the register. The radio murmured on. The harbor bell counted the hour.

Across the street, half a block down, a man in a dark Coast Guard jacket was stepping out of the post office with a small bundle of mail under one arm. He was tall, and his shoulders were set in a way that suggested he was trying to take up less space than his body required. A girl of about eight stood on the bottom step, swinging her legs, her hair in two braids that caught the afternoon light.

Theo Brennan, presumably.

He hadn't seen her. Or if he had, he had given no sign of it, and was now guiding the girl down the sidewalk with a hand on her shoulder, the two of them moving in the careful choreography of a parent who has done this many times and never quite gotten used to the fact that the other hand is empty.

June turned the other direction and walked back toward her car, which was parked at the small lot beside the pharmacy. The totes swung against her hip with each step. The wind carried the sound of rigging, and the bell from the harbor, and somewhere beneath it the thin, clear note of a girl laughing at something her father had said.

She did not look back. But she did not need to.

The fish on the label grinned all the way home.

Theo's girl had asked for a hot chocolate with extra foam, and the man behind the counter, who knew him from somewhere June had not yet identified, had made a little show of it. He had poured from a height. He had drawn a leaf in the foam with a spoon. The girl had studied the leaf with the seriousness of a jeweler, and Theo had watched her over the rim of his own cup, and his mouth had done something complicated and quiet.

June had taken her coffee to the booth by the window, where the salt had crusted the glass enough to make the harbor look like a painting of itself. She had drunk slowly. She had let the warmth of the cup settle into her hands. She had, against her better judgment, allowed herself to consider the possibility that the town might, in its own slow way, be glad she had come.

That was when the door had opened again.

The woman who came in moved like someone who had spent a long time working at a small desk and had only recently remembered that her legs existed. She was slight, dark-haired, wearing a denim jacket that had been washed to the color of a winter sky, and she carried a paperboard tube under one arm the way a soldier carries a rifle, close to the body, essential, not quite comfortable.

She stopped just inside the door and looked around the diner the way a person looks around a room when they are not sure whether they are expected.

June knew the look. She had worn it for three weeks.

The woman went to the counter. She ordered tea, asked for honey on the side, and then sat down at the booth two tables away from June, setting the tube on the seat beside her with the care of someone handling something that had cost her more than its weight.

The server brought the tea. The woman unwrapped a honey packet with hands that were not quite steady, and June, who had spent a decade watching people whose hands were not quite steady for reasons that did not always make the eleven o'clock news, did not stare.

The wind pushed at the door. The bell above it chimed. The woman looked up and saw June, and June saw her, and there was a moment in which two people who had both, in their own ways, recently landed on unfamiliar ground took the measure of each other across two empty tables.

The woman smiled first. It was a tentative smile, the kind that expects to be returned but does not insist.

June returned it.

A minute passed. The harbor bell counted, faintly. The woman's tea cooled a degree. The server refilled June's cup without being asked, the way people do here, and the small kindness of it landed on June in a way she had not expected.

The woman spoke, finally, into the quiet.

"I'm sorry to interrupt. I don't mean to be. I just, well, I heard your voice on the radio this morning. The forecast. With the part about the fog." She turned the honey packet over in her fingers. "I grew up in fog. I mean, not here. In the city. But there was fog sometimes. And you said something about how fog is just the ocean deciding to come ashore and see what everyone is up to, and I thought, well, that is either the most wonderful thing I have heard this year or I have been in this town too long. I can't tell anymore."

June let a small silence gather.

"The first one," she said. "Definitely the first one."

The woman exhaled, and the tension in her shoulders let down by a visible degree.

"I'm Wren," she said. "Wren Castillo. I'm staying out at the cottage on Crescent Beach for a while. I do graphic design, mostly. Cards, mostly. I'm working on a line of, well, it doesn't matter what I'm working on. What matters is that I heard you, and I wanted to tell you that it mattered. That it helped." She tucked the honey packet into her jacket pocket. "Also, I ordered a scone from your aunt's recipe. Is it strange to eat a dead person's scone? It is not strange. It is delicious. I am eating it as we speak."

June laughed. She had not planned to. The laugh came from somewhere below the planning layer.

"It's not strange," she said. "She would have liked that you asked."

Wren took a small bite of the scone, considering.

"She had a gift for proportions," she said. "I have been trying to reverse-engineer the crumb for two days. I have notes. I have charts. I have lost the will to live over a teaspoon of baking powder." She gestured with the scone. "You are a scientist. You will understand. The variables are not cooperating."

"I'm a meteorologist," June said. "We deal in variables that actively plot against us. You have my sympathy."

Wren studied her for a moment with a clarity that was not unkind.

"You're the new one," she said. "Marge mentioned. She said you came from somewhere with a lot of letters in the alphabet and a lot of weather."

"I came from Cleveland," June said. "We have a lot of weather."

"I came from San Francisco," Wren said. "We have a lot of opinions."

They looked at each other across the two tables, and the distance between them, which had been a distance, was now a kind of introduction.

"Move over," June said.

Wren blinked. "What?"

"Move your things. Sit here. I have been sitting alone at tables in strange towns for a long time, and I would prefer not to do it for the next ten minutes. If that is acceptable."

Wren gathered the tube, the tea, the scone, and her dignity, and moved to June's booth with the careful haste of someone who has just been invited to something they were afraid to ask for.

They sat. They drank. The tea was hot and the coffee was stronger than it had any right to be, and the window salt made the harbor look like a memory of itself.

"I am Wren Castillo," Wren said, as if confirming it. "I make cards. I am not, as of this morning, sure that I am any good at it. But I am here."

"I am June Calloway," June said. "I was on television. I am not, as of last month, sure that I am any good at it either. But I am also here."

They looked at each other, and Wren laughed, and the laugh was startled out of her, and June smiled, and the smile was not a performance.

"You'll do," Wren said.

"You'll do," June said.

Outside, the wind picked up, and the bell at the harbor rang three times, and somewhere down the beach a man was stacking driftwood for a fire that would not be lit until Friday, and a girl with two braids was helping him, and she was asking him if the fire would be tall enough to touch the bottom of the moon, and he was telling her that he would do his best, but the moon was very high.

Friday came the way Fridays come in small towns, which is to say it came with a list.

Theo's list had been written on the back of a Coast Guard receipt by a woman at the harbormaster's office who had known him since he was the kind of boy who tried to rescue gulls from fishing line. The list said: kindling, marshmallows, a chair that did not squeak, a willingness to admit when one is wrong, and the name of the woman from the radio whose voice did things to the air over the bay that he was not prepared to discuss.

The first four items were easy. The fifth was not.

He had done the lumber run on Thursday, in a pickup that smelled of salt and old rope, and the lumber yard had been run by a man named Calder who asked no questions and stacked the boards with the efficiency of a man who had stopped being impressed by other people's projects decades ago. Theo had paid in cash. He had refused the help carrying it to the truck. He had stood in the parking lot for a full minute after Calder had gone back inside, because the list was still in his jacket pocket and the fifth item was still unwritten, and the silence in the cab of the truck was the kind that waits for you to say something you do not want to say.

On Friday morning, he had woken early. He had stood at the kitchen counter in socks, pouring coffee into a mug that had been his wife's, and he had looked out the window at the bay, where the fog was doing exactly what June had said it would do, which was deciding to come ashore and see what everyone was up to.

He had driven to the beach at four in the afternoon. He had set the chair on the sand, the one that did not squeak, and the kindling beside it, and the marshmallows in a paper bag weighted with a stone. He had built the fire pit in a careful circle of rocks he had carried down from the bluff, one at a time, because his daughter had asked if he could build the fire without hurting anything, and he had wanted to say yes.

His daughter had helped. She had dragged small pieces of driftwood into a pile. She had asked him, twice, if the fire would be tall enough to touch the bottom of the moon. He had told her, twice, that he would do his best, but the moon was very high.

At half past five, the fire was laid but not lit. The light on the water was the color of a bruise that is beginning to heal. The wind had dropped to almost nothing. His daughter was sitting cross-legged on the blanket he had brought, arranging pebbles in a row according to a system she had not explained.

He heard the footsteps before he saw her.

They were not the footsteps of a person in a hurry. They were the footsteps of a person who had decided to come and was now reconciling herself to the decision one step at a time.

He did not turn around.

"Elliot said you were down here," June said, from somewhere behind him and to the left. "He said there was a fire."

"There will be," Theo said, to the fire that was not yet a fire. "When someone lights it."

"I can do that," June said, and she stepped forward, and he felt the air move as she passed, and she smelled of the diner and of something green that might have been the herbs she had bought from Marge, and he said nothing for a long moment.

"The list," she said, sitting down in the chair that did not squeak, "called for a willingness to admit when one is wrong. I am willing to admit that I was wrong about the chair. It does not squeak."

"My wife bought it," he said. "It was the one thing in our house that never made a sound."

He did not know why he had said that. It was not the kind of thing he said to people he had just met. It was the kind of thing he said to the bay when no one was listening.

June was quiet.

"I lost someone too," she said. "Not the same way. But the same general direction."

He did not ask what she meant. He looked at the fire that was not yet a fire, and he thought about how the list had been right, and he thought about how the list had been insufficient, and he reached into the paper bag and took out a marshmallow and held it out to her without looking.

"Eat this," he said. "It will help."

She took it.

His daughter, who had been watching this entire exchange from behind the row of pebbles with the attention of a small, competent spy, stood up and walked over and stood in front of June and studied her face with the seriousness of a jeweler.

"You are the weather lady," she said.

"I am," June said.

"Do you know if it is going to rain on the fire?"

"It is not going to rain on the fire," June said.

"How do you know?"

"I am a scientist," June said. "I will bet you a marshmallow."

The girl considered this.

"Two marshmallows," she said.

"Deal," June said, and they shook on it, and the girl's hand was small and warm and entirely without guile, and June's eyes met Theo's over the girl's head, and for one unguarded second he let himself look at her the way he had not let himself look at anyone in a long time, which was to say, with the full weight of what he was not saying.

Then the girl let go of June's hand, went back to her pebbles, and the second passed.

June lit the fire. She did it with a single match, the way her great-aunt had taught her, which was not with the match but with the patience. The flame caught. The kindling took. The driftwood followed, reluctantly, the way driftwood does, and then the fire was a fire, and the smoke went straight up because there was no wind to bend it, and the smell of it was wood and salt and the last of the sun.

Wren arrived at six, with a bag of lemons and a card she had made for the girl that said, in careful hand-lettering, "Property of the Moon: Please Return by Friday."

The girl took the card, studied it, and then said, "This is wrong. The moon does not return things. The moon keeps them."

Wren looked at June. June looked at Wren. Theo made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one.

"She has a point," Wren said.

"I know," June said.

Marge arrived at six-thirty, carrying a pie and a fold of beach blanket and the opinion that the fire was too small, which she said loudly enough for the fire to hear. She also brought Elliot, who had not been invited but who appeared anyway, the way the tide appears, because the pull was stronger than the plan.

Elliot sat down beside Marge on the blanket. He did not say anything. He watched the fire. He watched the bay. He watched the four people who had, in their own small ways, decided to be here, and he thought about the house on Dogfish Lane and the woman who had lived there and the woman who lived there now, and he was glad.

The fire grew. The light dimmed. The bay went from the color of a bruise to the color of ink. The first star came out, low, over the breakwater, and Theo's daughter pointed at it with a stick she had been using to draw in the sand.

"That is not the moon," she said.

"No," June said.

"That is a star," she said.

"Yes," June said.

"Do stars get lonely?"

June considered this.

"They have each other," she said. "That is the short answer."

The girl considered this in turn, with the seriousness of a jeweler, and then she put down the stick and leaned against her father's arm, and he put his hand on her head, and June looked at the two of them and then looked at the fire and did not say what she was thinking, which was that she had been wrong about the chair, and wrong about the list, and possibly wrong about the weather, and that being wrong, in the right company, was not the worst thing a person could be.

The pie was eaten. The marshmallows were roasted, and the girl won her bet, because June was right and the fire stayed dry, and two marshmallows were exchanged, and the girl ate them both with the solemnity of a person receiving an inheritance.

At nine, the fire was low. Marge and Elliot had left, because Marge's knees had announced their intention to do so. Wren had gone home along the beach, the paperboard tube under her arm, humming something June did not recognize. The girl had fallen asleep on the blanket with her shoes still on and her braids undone, the way children fall asleep when they have decided that the world is safe enough to leave for a while.

Theo carried her up the path, blanket and all, the way he had carried her a thousand times, with the practice of a man who had learned to do difficult things without complaint.

June stayed by the fire.

The embers were the color of a thing that has given what it had to give. The bay was black. The bell at the harbor was silent, because the hour was between hours. The fog had come in, as she had known it would, and it lay over the water like a hand laid gently on a shoulder, and the smell of it was salt and kelp and the cold breath of a place that had been here long before any of them and would be here long after.

She heard his boots on the path.

He came and stood beside her. He did not sit. He put his hands in his pockets and looked at the embers.

"My daughter wants to know if you are coming back tomorrow," he said.

"Tell her yes," June said.

He nodded. He did not look at her. He looked at the embers, and she looked at the embers, and the fog came in further, and the cold came in further, and neither of them moved.

"There is a question on the list," he said, finally, into the quiet. "About whether the fog is the ocean deciding to come ashore."

"Yes," she said.

"It is not, of course," he said.

"No," she said. "But it is what I said on the radio."

"And it mattered," he said. "To my daughter. And to me. And I have been trying to figure out why, and I have decided that it does not matter why. It just matters."

He turned and looked at her.

"Good night, June Calloway," he said.

"Good night, Theo Brennan," she said.

He walked up the path. She listened to the sound of his boots on the sand, and then on the grass, and then on the wooden steps of the cottage where his daughter was already asleep and the chair that did not squeak was waiting in the kitchen for the morning.

She sat by the fire until the last ember was only a memory of itself. She did not add wood. She did not need to. The cold had arrived, but it was a manageable cold, the kind a person could sit with.

She stood. She shook out the blanket. She walked back along the beach toward town, where her car was parked and her great-aunt's house was waiting and the question on the list was still in her coat pocket, unanswered but no longer urgent.

The fog came in to meet her. It came in slowly, the way the tide comes in, and it smelled of salt and kelp, and she walked into it the way a person walks into a place they have decided to belong to.

The bell at the harbor did not ring. The hour was past the hour. The town was asleep. The fire was out.

But the marshmallows were gone, and the chair had not squeaked, and the list had been honored in every particular except the one she had not yet been asked to honor, and she suspected, with the calm certainty of a person who had spent a long time watching weather, that the question would answer itself in time.

She did not know what the answer would be. She did not, yet, need to.

She went home. The fish on the label grinned at her from the porch. The fog settled over the house like a hand laid gently on a shoulder. The town slept.

The question waited.