Quiet evenings have been a given at the store since we moved here in the beginning of June. I’d assumed it was the norm year-round.
“I guess no one’s worried about getting their summer reading started.” The high school sent out the list a few weeks back. Paige snagged some copies for Margot and me, and I’m pretty sure they’re still sitting on the mantel in the living room, untouched.
“Yeah, they’re a little more concerned about their kids making it to the first day.” Nora’s tone is joking, but the words are barbed. At my twisted expression, she digs a receipt out of the bag at her feet and tucks it into the book, closing it.
“Sorry. Bad joke. There were some kids in here this afternoon asking if we had any books on the Blackridge Shadow Man.”
“I’m guessing we don’t?” There’s that name again. It sounds silly, like something out of a B-list horror movie.
Nora scoffs. “I directed them to the totally un-fact-checked conspiracy blogs. We’ve got stuff on everything from sasquatches to the Lady of the Lake, but no creepy shadow creature that snags kids.”
I lean against the edge of the thriller shelf, folding my arms. I almost press her. But, oddly, as little as I buy the scary story floating around the town, talking about it makes it feel like a possibility. Like there really is some supernatural entity responsible for the faces on the corkboard.
“You can head out if you want. It’ll be an easy close,” I say. Nora seems settled in her spot, book on her lap and bag at her feet.
“It cool if I hang here?” she asks. Her easy expression hardens. “I told my mom I was closing tonight. The less time in that house this week, the better.”
I frown. I know I should inquire; questions and answers, and all that. But the words get stuck, all deformed and stiff in my mouth.
As if she can tell, Nora gives me a thin-lipped smile. “Mom gets squirrely when we hit mid-July,” she says.
“Why?”
“Finn’s disappearance,” she says, all humor gone from her. She’s slipped off the mask, and lurking behind it is a cavern, deep and dark and full of grief. “July seventeenth. Three years now.”
I’ve seen his photo on the wall, but I’m not altogether convinced he isn’t some hallucination. Leftover damage from the accident making me see things. All my scans and checkups were clear, the concussion fully healed, but it’s impossible not to wonder.
“What was he like? Finn?”
I may have crossed a line. There are a dozen ways to handle grief. Some people wave it like a flag, keeping the space that person occupied filled by their memory. Others keep it tucked away, pretending the gap doesn’t exist at all.
“He was…” Nora pauses. “He always saw the good in everybody. I’m always looking for agendas, but Finn thought everyone was genuinely good, deep down. And he was sarcastic. Like, to thepoint it made it hard to talk with him about the hard stuff, but he was the one you wanted to be around when everything went bad. He never shut up, but it was a nice distraction from everything. For a long time, he was the only person who could make me smile. After he disappeared, I don’t think I laughed for a year.”
My stomach lurches. I match up her words with my own brief observations. Hoping to prove I didn’t fabricate him.
For a moment, I almost tell her about Finn. But she wouldn’t believe me. She’d probably go straight to my mom or Paige with concerns for my sanity.
I have enough of those on my own.
“There was a big hole when he left. Things got better when my mom met Shane, my stepdad, and we moved to the new house, but that hole is still there, you know?”
Nora clears her throat and blinks the glaze out of her eyes. She smiles, but it seems more reflex than genuine.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to get all sad on you.” She leans back into the love seat. “It’s hard to be home this time of year. That hole gets a little bigger. If I’m bugging you, I’ll go.”
“I won’t say no to the company” is what I settle for. I can’t give her assurances, nor am I all that good at sympathies. But I can understand.
Nora nods. Smiles. Reopens her book. “I’m not doing any cleaning, though,” she says. “I’m solely a customer now. Off the clock.”
“Customers pay,” I remark.
“Touché,” she says, and returns her attention to the novel.
A few minutes later, the bell dings above the door, and a familiar face steps inside, a stack of posters tucked under one arm. Before I can place the girl’s face, Nora peeks around the shelves, and says, “Hey, Cecily.”
Cecily. Holden’s daughter. She’s wearing a T-shirt with thename of a college across the chest; Holden mentioned she was starting her second year. Her smile is kind when she sees Nora, but the exhaustion I noted the first time we met is written under her eyes in the sickly pallor of her skin and the way it stretches taut over her joints.
“Hi,” she says, and nods at me as she approaches Nora where she’s curled on the love seat. She glances between us and pulls out her posters. “You mind if I put one of these up?”
