Part One Recap:
Adrian Mercer left Gray’s Point at eighteen and did not come back. Forty years later he returns to bury his father, and finds Elias Thorne standing at the end of the breakwall, exactly where he left him. Part One ended with a night neither of them had let themselves want since 1986.
Part One is free to read in full, and it is the place to start. Read Part One
PART TWO: WHAT THE TOWN KEPT
Chapter Six
The Town Talks
He woke alone, which he had expected, and to full daylight, which he had not.
For a few seconds he lay there and took inventory the way a man does at fifty-eight, cataloguing what hurt and in what order. His shoulder. The back of his neck. A muscle along his ribs he had not consulted in years and which had opinions about last night. The room was cold at the edges and warm where he was, and the light through the curtains had that flat white quality that meant the cloud had come back in off the lake overnight.
The other side of the bed held the shape of someone and none of the heat.
Adrian put his hand flat on the sheet anyway, which was a ridiculous thing to do, and then got up before he could catch himself doing it.
There was a note on the kitchen table, weighted under the sugar bowl. Four lines in blue ink, the letters square and slightly backhanded, the handwriting of a man who mostly writes on forms.
Boats don’t care about your sleep schedule. Coffee’s made, the good one, not whatever your father was drinking. Haul-out starts at seven so I’ll be on the water most of the day. Come by if you want. E.
Adrian read it three times, and the third time was purely for the pleasure of it, and then he stood in his dead father’s kitchen holding a piece of notepaper and grinned like an idiot at the refrigerator.
The coffee was, in fact, the good one. He drank a cup standing up at the sink, looking out at the wet backyard and the neighbor’s fence and a cardinal working over the last of the crabapples, and he understood that he was happy. Not relieved, not vindicated, not any of the complicated near-relatives of the thing. Just happy, in a plain unremarkable way, on a Tuesday morning, at fifty-eight.
Then the second thought arrived, right on schedule, the way it always did.
Somebody saw the truck.
He set the mug down. The kitchen did not change. The cardinal went on with the crabapples. But something old had opened its eyes at the back of his skull, something that had been asleep for so long he had genuinely believed it was dead, and it was already doing arithmetic. Harbor Road to Maple Street. Parked out front, not in the drive. All night. In a town where the mail carrier knew whose prescriptions were whose.
“No,” Adrian said out loud, to nobody. “Absolutely not. Not at fifty-eight.”
He rinsed the mug and set it in the rack, and his hands were steady, and the thing at the back of his skull went on doing arithmetic anyway.
