From the front cover, it looked unremarkable. It was simply a first edition of the first book in the Greenwood Castle Saga:The Door in the Garden Wall. But then Ms.Pryor turned to the title page, which was signed:
Helen Albright Longacre
She looked up at him, her mouth just slightly open and her eyes newly narrowed.
“There’s more,” Whit said, indicating with his hand that she should continue turning pages.
She did, her eyes widening behind her green glasses as she looked through page after page of handwritten annotations, allinscribed by one of the English-speaking world’s most prominent children’s fantasy writers.
“But how did she—?”
Ms.Pryor looked up at him again, and Whit surprised himself by laughing.
“What? How did she get this? She made it. She wrote it.”
Ms.Pryor looked down at the book again, then up once more. “She—?”
“She wrote the inscription and annotations herself. And the book.”
A realization washed over Ms.Pryor’s face: that his wife was the author of the Greenwood Castle books, Helen Albright Longacre, who had died a little over a year ago in that most quotidian way—undetected Stage 4 cancer. Which made him the bereaved husband who was giving her librarian mother a precious gift.
Her eyes took on a liveliness different from that of the front-office ladies. To Whit, they seemed to convey genuine compassion, but then she set her face once more and whipped her eyes back to the book.
“But this is amazing,” she said. “This is...”
She ended with an awed sigh. Whit shrugged. How did you respond to that?
“Well,” he said, realizing that Ms.Pryor the fan would probably enjoy sifting through the annotations without the late author’s husband watching her do it. “Please make sure your mom knows about it as soon as possible. Helen thought she’d be excited.”
“Are you kidding? She’ll die.”
Whit smiled softly, and then Ms.Pryor realized what she’d said, and then Whit realized what she’d said. She looked ready to apologize, but she stopped herself, and Whit, for some reason, liked that.
“All right,” he said. “Thank you. I hope you have a good day.”
“Thankyou,” Ms. Pryor said, and then she was lost to the notesHelen had written from her chemo chair about such-and-such elf and such-and-such warlock, and Whit rallied himself to once again faceit, the monumental, all-consuming task he’d successfully avoided thinking about for the last hour, which was a much longer break than usual. But first, there were the front-office ladies to deal with and the unexpected thought that maybe a steaming baked ziti on the doorstep wouldn’t be so bad after all.
Chapter Three
Tuesdays were writing group days, which were at turns wonderful and excruciating. Wonderful, of course, because writing is a solitary art, and joining with one’s peers—particularly peers who wrote in different fields and therefore were not competitors but fellow creators—was life-giving to Whit. But writing group days were also terrible, horrible, because they meant sharing a bit about what you’d written since the last meeting and what your goals were for the day. Then they would write together, and lately, for Whit, that meant staring at his blank computer screen while his writing partner tap-tap-tapped away next to him.
As Whit walked toward Carafe, the coffee shop where the group met, he made his mental lists:
What I’ve Written Since Last Time:
Nothing.
Goals for Today:
Avoid being crushed beneath the monumental weight of potential failure, the possibility I may never write anything worthwhile again, the reverberating notion that maybe I should have learned a real trade, the not-terribly-slim chance my agent and/or publisher will drop me, all made exponentially worse by my wife’s death and everything that comes withthat.
Respond to emails.
He’d start with number 2.
Carafe was located on Cork Street, which was not technically the main street of Whelk Harbor, though everyone in town treated it that way. This came down to cuteness. The brick sidewalks were lined with beech trees, and in about a month the street would be decorated with multicolored Christmas lights and coniferous greenery. Red bows would be wrapped around lampposts, arranged in arches over doorframes, and perched in the display windows of the boutique, the bakery, the bookstore, the bistro, and the ice cream shop, all of which had taken over the white colonial-style buildings with black roofs. The church and the town hall, as well as the bank and a real estate agency, backed up to Cork Street, which was a favorite spot for wintry strolls (a paper cup of hot cocoa in hand) or, in summer, swimsuited bike rides (towels draped over necks and hanging from beach bags). Today the trees were shifting, in a gentle October way, from green to orange, yellow, and red, and every doorstep and staircase was crowded with warty pumpkins and elongated gourds.
Carafe even had a scarecrow out front. The shop, a relatively new addition to town, had taken over a former sunglasses store, which had taken over a former video rental store, which had once, somewhere far down the line, belonged to a blacksmith. There was some talk at first, among the locals, about how a coffee shop was simply an attempt to please tourists, how the bistro and bakery already functioned in much the same way that a coffee shop would. The town’s first selectman had even tried to mount a protest at the grand opening, but the owners, who turned out to be lovely, lifelong New Englanders, provided the paltry group of activists with coffee as well as scones sourced from the bakery and breakfast sandwiches from the bistro, all gratis. Needless to say, the protest ended in a lot of well-fed, contented sighs. And now, with its flagstone floors and ever-warm fireplace, its constant hum of Chet Baker standbys and the orderly shelves of small-batchsingle-origin offerings, the coffee shop had become a symbiotic partner in the town’s ecosystem.
