I open the reply.
Nora,
Terrified.
Charlie
The queue moves forward again. He’s next up to order. I don’t have long to make my escape without being seen, with even less time to confirm or dispel my fears.
Charlie,
What about Bigfoot erotica? Have some queries in my slush pile. Good fit for you?
Nora
As soon as I hit send, I snap to my senses. Why, of all the words available to me, is this what I said? Maybe my brain is organized by the Dewey decimal system, but right now all the shelves seem to be on fire. Embarrassment courses through my veins at the sudden image of Charlie opening that email and instantly gaining the professional high ground.
The man pulls his phone out. The teenage boy in front of him has just finished paying. The barista summons Maybe Charlie forward with a cheery smile, but he mumbles something and steps out of line.
He’s halfway facing me now. He gives his head a firm shake, the corner of his mouth twisting into a grimace. It’s got to be him. I’m sure of it now, but if I run for the door, I’ll only draw his eye.
What could he possibly be doing here? My middle-class party trick tallies him up from head to toe: five hundred dollars of neutral tones, but if he was going for camouflage, it’s not working. He might as well be standing under a movie-theater marquee advertising THE OUT-OF-TOWNER with an arrow pointed straight at his peppery hair.
I face the bookshelf, putting my back to him and pretending to peruse the games.
Considering how short, not to mention asinine, my message was, he takes a surprisingly long time to reply.
Of course, he could be reading any number of emails other than mine.
I nearly drop my phone in my frenzy to open the next message.
No firm opinions as of yet, but extreme curiosity. Feel free to forward to me.
I check over my shoulder. Charlie has rejoined the queue.
How many times can I keep making him get out of line? I wonder with a thrill. I understand being glued to your phone when it comes to important work-related things, but I’m surprised the instinct runs so deep that he thinks a message about Bigfoot erotica requires an immediate response.
I do actually have a Bigfoot erotica submission in my inbox. Sometimes when my boss is having a rocky day, I’ll do a dramatic reading from Bigfoot’s Big Feet to cheer her up.
It would be unethical to share the manuscript outside the agency.
But the author actually included a link to his website, where a handful of self-published novellas are available for purchase. I copy the link to one and send it to Charlie without context.
I glance back to see him scowling down at his phone. A reply buzzes in.
This costs 99 cents. . . . . . . . . . . .
I reply, I know — such a bargain! If my professionalism is a gel manicure, then Charlie Lastra is apparently the industrial-grade acetone capable of burning right through it.
I search his name on Venmo and send him ninety-nine cents. Another email comes in a second later. He’s sent the dollar back to me, with the note, I’m a grown man, Nora. I can buy my own Bigfoot erotica, thank you very much.
The cashier greets him again, and this time he shoves his phone into his pocket and steps up to order. While he’s distracted, I take my chance.
I am famished.
I am desperate to know what he’s doing here.
And I am half running toward the door.
“No freaking way!” Libby cries. We’re sitting at the rough-hewn wooden table in the cottage, devouring the breadsticks and salads we ordered from Antonio’s Pizza. I had to trek back down to the mailbox to collect the order when the delivery guy said he wasn’t allowed to climb the stairs “for insurance reasons.”
Sounds made-up, but okay.
“The guy who was so rude about Dusty’s book?” Libby clarifies.
I nod and stab a surprisingly juicy tomato in the salad, popping it into my mouth.
“What’s he doing here?” she asks.
“I don’t know.”
“Ohmygosh,” she says, “what if he’s a Once in a Lifetime superfan?”
I snort. “I think that’s the one possibility we can rule out.”
“Maybe he’s like Old Man Whittaker in Once. Just afraid to show his true feelings. Secretly, he loves this town. And the book. And the widowed Mrs. Wilder.”
I’m actually unbearably curious, but we’re not going to solve the mystery by guessing. “What do you want to do tonight?”
“Shall we consult the list?” She digs the sheet out of her bag and smooths it on the table. “Okay, I’m too tired for any of this.”
“Too tired?” I say. “To pet a horse and save a local business? Even after your nap?”
“You think forty minutes is enough to make up for the three weeks of Bea crawling into bed with us after a nightmare?”
I wince. Those girls must have an internal body temperature of at least three hundred degrees. You can’t sleep next to them without waking up drenched in sweat, with a tiny, adorable foot digging into your rib cage.
“You need a bigger bed,” I tell Libby, pulling my phone out to start the search.
“Oh, please,” Libby says. “We can’t fit a bigger bed in that room. Not if we plan on ever opening our dresser drawers.”
I feel a spark of relief right then. Because the change in Libby — the fatigue; the strange, intangible distance — suddenly makes sense. It has a cause, which means it has a solution.
“You need a bigger place.” Especially with Baby Number Three on the way. One bathroom, for a family of five, is my idea of purgatory.
“We couldn’t afford a bigger place if it were parked on top of a trash barge forty-five minutes into Jersey,” Libby says. “Last time I looked at apartment listings, everything was like, One-bedroom, zero-bath crawl space inside a serial killer’s wall; utilities included but you provide the victims! And even that was outside our price range.”
I wave a hand. “Don’t worry about the money. I can help out.”
She rolls her eyes. “I don’t need your help. I am a whole adult woman. All I need is a night in, followed by a month of rest and relaxation, okay?”
She’s always hated taking money from me, but the whole reason to have money is to take care of us. If she won’t accept another loan, then I’ll just have to find her an apartment she can afford. Problem halfway solved.
“Fine,” I say. “We’ll stay in. Hepburn night?”
She gives a genuine grin. “Hepburn night.”
Whenever Mom was stressed or heartbroken, she used to allow herself one night to lean into that feeling.
She’d call it a Hepburn night. She loved Hepburn. Katharine, not Audrey, not that she had anything against Audrey. That’s how I wound up with the name Nora Katharine Stephens, while Libby got Elizabeth Baby Stephens, the “Baby” part being after the leopard in Bringing Up Baby.
On Hepburn nights, the three of us would each pick out one of Mom’s over-the-top vintage robes and curl up in front of the TV with a root beer float and a pizza, or decaf and chocolate pie, and watch an old black-and-white movie.
Mom would cry during her favorite scenes, and when Libby or I caught her, she’d laugh, wiping away her tears with the back of one hand, and say, I’m such a softy.
I loved those nights. They taught me that heartbreak, like most things, was a solvable puzzle. A checklist could guide a person through mourning. There was an actionable plan for moving on. Mom mastered that, but never quite got to the next step: weeding out the assholes.