Chapter 9
Holly
A silver Lexus sits in the Anchor's parking lot with Oregon plates and not a speck of road grit on the fenders. I spot it through the kitchen window while I'm rinsing my coffee mug. Nobody in Nightfall Cove drives a car that clean. The dock workers drive trucks with salt rust eating the wheel wells. Betty drives a station wagon older than half her menu.
A woman steps out in a camel wool coat and pearl earrings, and the mug slips in my hand. I catch it before it hits the sink.
My mother stands in the parking lot of a monster bar and studies the facade the way she'd study a wine list at a charity auction. Her eyes moving from the repaired front window to the Scales & Ales sign to Griz's stone silhouette in the doorway, noting every detail with the same sharp eye I inherited. She smooths a crease in her coat and walks toward the entrance the way she'd walk into a fundraiser she didn't organize—prepared to judge every choice that led to this.
I set the mug in the sink, press both hands flat on the counter, and breathe.
She told me she'd come. She said she'd come, and I believed her because my mother keeps her word the way other people keep grudges.
The rational part of my brain didn't think she'd do it.
My apron hangs on the hook by the door. I grab it and head downstairs.
The door chimes and Mom walks into the Rusty Anchor like she's visiting a foreign country and refusing to let it intimidate her. Griz shifts at the entrance, his stone jaw angling down, and she meets his gaze and holds it. She doesn't flinch at Griz. Doesn't even pause. She gives him the same once-over I've watched her give contractors who show up late and caterers who use the wrong napkins, and then she steps past him and lets the door close behind her.
I'm behind the bar with a towel over my shoulder and my hands already moving, because if I stop moving I'll have to figure out what to do with them when she sits down.
"Chardonnay, please." She settles onto a barstool and sets her handbag on the bar top. Sal glances up from the register, pours without comment, and sets the glass on a napkin.
Mom picks it up. Takes a small sip. Sets it down. Looks at me across three feet of bar top.
"You look different, Hol."
"I look like myself."
She doesn't argue. Her eyes track the tattoo sleeve on my left arm, the one I started in Boise and finished in Nightfall Cove, the ink she's never seen because I got it after I stopped coming home. Her mouth tightens at the edges but she doesn't comment, and I don't explain, and we sit in that silence.
"Thanks for coming," I say, and I mean it, which surprises us both.
"You called me." She traces the rim of her glass. "You haven't called me in four years, Holly. So, I got on a plane."
The words land in the space between us, quiet and precise. The Summers family doesn't scream. We withdraw phone calls and holiday invitations and birthday cards until the absence becomes its own argument, airtight and impossible to counter because you can't fight something that isn't there.
"Friend of yours?" Sal asks, her eyes on Mom's wool coat.
"My mother."
Sal takes the towel off my shoulder and tosses it behind the register. "Go. Take the night."
"I can come back after—"
"You can come back tomorrow, girl." She reaches for a fresh pint glass. "Go be with your mother, Holly."
I untie my apron and fold it on the bar.
My apartment smells like darkroom chemicals and coffee. I hold the door open and Mom steps inside and stops in the center of the kitchen, turning in a slow circle. The photographs pinned to the clothesline, the camera equipment on every flat surface, the contact sheets on the table beside a coffee mug with a ring stain I should have cleaned this morning.
Mom studies the photographs the way I've watched her study art at gallery openings: composition first, emotion second. Her head tilts at the harbor-at-dawn series, the one I shot from the end of the pier with the fishing boats silhouetted against the early light. She steps closer to a print of Griz in the Anchor's doorway, red neon splitting across his stone face, and her fingers hover an inch from the paper.
"These are really good."
"Don't sound surprised."
"I'm not surprised you're talented." She turns from the photograph and looks at me. "I'm surprised you're still here. You never stay anywhere longer than a year."
