“What?” My mind was on the pear spread. I’d already made it the night before, over at Arturo’s. It was sitting in a bowl in his refrigerator looking radioactive.
“The Whitmans. Arturo Whitman’s family. Are they treating you well?”
“Oh. Yes. Gerald keeps issuing orders to Arturo not to let me get away and Viv’s very sisterly and Olivia’s very motherly and — it’s nice.”
She nodded. “Olivia Whitman looks so young, doesn’t she?”
“Yup.”
I typed I hope this finds you well, which was pretty high up on the list of phrases Mrs. Fletcher would never include in a letter if she was writing it herself.
She lifted a lock of her hair with a pencil and gave it a baleful stare. This was the first gesture of concern about her appearance that I’d seen from her. She cut her own hair carelessly, with regular kitchen scissors, and it showed. The ends looked like a bar graph. The hair itself was fine, though — rich brown streaked with gray. “I’m about the same age as she is,” she said. “I just don’t know how she does it.”
Olivia made Mrs. Fletcher nervous. That was difficult to process. I’d recently come across a proverb about not speaking unless you’d thought of something that was better than silence. So I kept typing.
Mrs. Fletcher wanted to know if she could ask me a personal question. I gave her an “mmm hmmm” that Snow would’ve been proud of.
“Do you know what it is you want from Arturo?”
An impressive U-turn, but I didn’t look up from my work. “You guessed right, Mrs. Fletcher. I’m a gold digger. If you know anyone richer and more gullible, let me at him.”
The bell above the shop door jangled — Sidonie or a customer. There was a quiet exchange of words in the next room, followed by the sound of caps falling off soda bottles. Sidonie, then.
“Nobody’s calling you a gold digger,” Mrs. Fletcher said. “Let me explain myself.”
“You don’t have to.”
She reached over and took my hand, patted it. “But if I don’t, you’ll poison me tonight, won’t you? I want to be able to enjoy my cocktail, just as the International Association of Bartenders recommends. Listen — I’m not a Flax Hill original, either. I’m from a market town in the South of England.”
“So that’s why you talk like that!”
“Well, what did you think?”
“I thought you just went to one of those… schools.”
“Oh, good grief. I’m not in the mood for this. Don’t interrupt me anymore. My husband died nine years ago, and I came here looking for some trace of him. He was my right-hand man for twenty-three years. No children; we married late, liked books, and liked each other and that was all. His heart was dodgy — anatomically speaking, I mean — and it killed him. I was all undone. That man. The first time we met, he called me cookie. I said ‘I beg your pardon?’ and he said ‘You heard. When are we having dinner?’ so I said ‘We might as well have it now.’ Then a week later he agreed to marry me—”
“You asked him?”
“I don’t mess about.”
“And he never brought you here while he was alive?”
“No. He told me he was a misfit in his hometown. But it wasn’t true. I barged into people’s homes and found him in their photo albums, being carried around on people’s shoulders. Homecoming King! People here are nice to me just because I’m his wife — was his wife, I mean. When I opened this store, so many people came by and bought books. Not to read them, I don’t think. Well, Joe Webster might read The Canterbury Tales one day… anyway, it was a gesture, to help me set up. I’d never seen anything like it.”
“I didn’t know you cared about being liked.”
“It isn’t a matter of like or dislike, and you know it. People are nice to me for his sake. They remember him. It’s a different Leonard they remember — he was becoming the man I ended up falling head over heels in love with. But that’s fine. We’ve all got different pieces of him to put together. It means I’m closer to him here than I would be in Newton Abbot.”
I squeezed her hand. From where I was sitting I could see the chess set on her window seat. It was always there; once I asked her if she liked chess and she just sort of hissed and left it at that. The black army faced the white army across their field of checkered squares; the kings and queens seemed resigned, companionable. There was never any change in their configuration. But no dust, either. No neglect.
“I’m only going to say this once, so don’t fly off the handle,” she said. “Flax Hill is home to me because I loved Leonard Fletcher. Not the other way around.”
“Right, but I’m not trying to — Arturo’s not — the air tastes of palinka, you see,” I said, idiotically. “Here in Flax Hill, I mean.”
Mrs. Fletcher took this in her stride. “Does it indeed? It tastes like lemon curd to me. Needless to say, I consider lemon curd to be an excellent comfort food. Now get back to work. Here are customers, and you’re behind.”
—
that day I walked Phoebe and Sidonie all the way home instead of just three-quarters of the way. As usual I walked on the outside of our trio, taking the position of a gentleman protecting ladies from roadside traffic. As usual Phoebe’s siblings were waiting for us outside the elementary school, three rowdy little girls of indeterminate age and the shortest of short-term memories. Every school day they asked if they could play with my hair, and I let them. Every school day they squealed: “It’s just like sunshine!” and I wished they’d find a new sensation. Ordinarily I stopped when we reached the corner of Tubman and Jefferson — less because there was a tangible change in the neighborhood and more because that was when we started seeing groups of colored boys leaning against walls with their arms folded, not talking or doing anything else but leaning. I figured they were the Neighborhood Watch, and left them to it. So did the white boys who followed us along Jefferson calling out Sidonie’s name. We got to Tubman Street and the catcallers evaporated. But that day I kept going because I wanted Sidonie to come to dinner. Phoebe had already excused herself on account of having to watch her sisters while her mom was at work. But Sidonie was an only child, and hesitated. “Ma probably needs me to help her tonight,” she said. “But maybe if you came and asked her yourself…”
I wavered, needing time to get everything on the menu wrong and then get it right. Sidonie said: “Hey, you’ve got a lot to do before dinnertime, right? Save me a slice of that chiffon cake; it’s going to be in my dreams tonight.”
Phoebe said, “Me too!” and her sisters said, “Me too, me too!” I told them it’d be Sidonie who brought them the cake, and passed the Tubman Street Neighborhood Watch without incident. Farther along Tubman, a mixed group was crammed into a motorcar; girls sat on boys’ laps, waving transistor radios in time to the music that poured out of them. These kids looked a little older than Sidonie, and ignored us completely. The houses were smaller and newer and better cared for than in Arturo’s part of town. Their doors were pastel painted, the front yards were meticulously well-swept, and their windows sparkled in the way that only the truly house-proud seem able to achieve. We passed other groups. Boys and girls, singing, wisecracking. Lone dutiful daughters and sons laden with groceries. One boy with a buzz cut was carrying what looked like a week’s supplies for an old lady who called him “Tortoise” and “Useless.” His friends pulled faces at him when the old lady wasn’t looking, and he grinned good-humoredly. “That’s Sam,” Phoebe said. “He’s my boyfriend. He just doesn’t know it yet.” And she and Sidonie giggled.