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Then a widow named Delia Voss, who had a hip and a granddaughter and an opinion about the pecans in Marge’s pie and shared all three. Then a young woman with wheat-colored hair to her waist, who came in with a bucket of flowers for the counter and leaned on it beside Sunny.
“Lauren. Mason’s. Twelve days.” Low: “Has she got the list out yet?”
“Yes.”
Lauren laughed so hard she had to put the bucket down.
“She had me on it. I’d been in the county a week.”
“Who were you supposed to marry?”
“Ryder Davis. He’s on everybody’s.” Lauren looked down the counter at Pearl, who was pretending not to listen and failing at it. “She’s still not over the wedding. Don’t let her tell you about the wedding.”
“What about the wedding?” Sunny said, and Pearl came down the counter so fast she left the pot behind.
“Eleven days,” Pearl said. “Eleven days’ notice. Engaged at Easter and married by June and I found out from the florist, and the florist”—she pointed the pencil at Lauren—“was the bride.”
“I was going to tell you.”
“Sure you were. Honey, I had the sparklers for Dean’s in a box three towns over before that girl had said yes. I had Marge’s cake done in her head. And you go do it in a greenhouse with twenty people and I get a phone call from Delia Voss, who got it from the pharmacy, who got it from your own husband buying a razor.”
“It was a lovely wedding,” Lauren said, to Sunny.
“I’m sure it was. I wasn’t at it.”
“You were at it. You were in the second row.”
“I was at it,” Pearl allowed, “under protest,” and went back for the pot, and Lauren put her forehead down on the counter and shook, and Sunny sat between them and laughed out loud, the big one, the one she’d been told her whole life was too much for the size of her, and two stools down a man dropped his fork.
The bell rang again and a girl in her early twenties came in with a truck key in her teeth and horses on her shirt and took the key out to say, “Is that her,” and Lauren said, “That’s her,” and the girl put out a hand.
“Ainsley. Clay’s. The youngest, the only girl, the only one with any sense, ask anybody.” She had a grip on her. “Tuesday nights we’re at Elena’s. Back porch, seven, there’s a fan. Lara comes when her feet let her, Olivia when school’s not on, Lauren when she’s not busy, which is never now, Remi when she’s home. You’re coming.”
“I’m the housekeeper.”
“Helen came. Fifteen years. She brought the pie.” Ainsley let go of her hand. “You don’t have to bring anything. You have to bring something. That’s the rule. Elena says it’s a rule. Elena makes them up.”
“I heard that,” said Elena, from three stools down.
“She hears everything, it’s a medical thing. Tuesday.” And Ainsley took a coffee from Pearl without paying for it and went back out with the key in her teeth, and Lauren said, “That’s the circle. You’re in it now. There’s no getting out, I’ve tried,” and Sunny sat there and understood she’d just been put on a porch by a girl who’d been in the building forty seconds, sideways, on purpose, so she couldn’t say no. It had worked.
She’d counted, without meaning to, the way she counted everything. A cup of coffee she hadn’t paid for. A slice of pie. A doctor’s number. A florist’s shoulder against hers at a counter. Levi’s pancakes, which Pearl waved off when she went for her purse. A Tuesday night on a porch she hadn’t asked for. She was keeping a list of her own, and by the time she stood up it was a page long. She’d pay every item on it back before Thanksgiving. She wasn’t going to leave this county owing it anything. Owing was how a place got its hooks in you.
Her phone lit up on the counter. Face up, for once, because she’d been laughing and had forgot to turn it. An Indiana number, no name. She looked at it, and pressed the side button, and it went dark, and she put it in her back pocket, and Elena Santos, three stools down and talking to Delia Voss about a hip, didn’t look over and saw it anyway.
“Levi,” Sunny said. “Wipe your face. We’ve got a list.”
She was in the doorway with a paper sack of coffee and a boy with syrup on him when the bell rang over her head and Brody Royston walked into her.
He didn’t walk into her. He walked into the doorway she was in, with two men behind him and three ahead of her, because at eleven on a Friday the door at Pearl’s was a place people went through in both directions at once and nobody had ever thought to make it wider. He’d come from Clay’s. Sun on him, dust on his boots, the sleeves of his shirt turned back. He saw her the same second she saw him, and his face did the thing it had done at the fridge, which was not smile, and then it smiled anyway.
“Sunny Tyler.”
“Move.”
“I’m trying to.”
He was. There was a man with a toothpick coming in behind him and Delia Voss going out behind her and nowhere for anybody to go. So he did what any man in that county would have done in that doorway with a woman in front of him and a crowd behind. He put his hand flat at the small of her back and moved her through.
