The Matchmakers of Minnow Bay (17 page)

We all turn our heads to the gallery's front bay windows, as though we'll see through them, across the street, to the café, to poor Simone's heart breaking in two. I tip my head back, feeling bad for my young barista friend. “Poor strange Simone. She's going to be so mad at me.”

“I wouldn't eat anything she serves you for the next week or so,” Jenny says, laughing.

Colleen gives me a wan smile. “Same at River Street Brewery. Chris was hoping he was a switch hitter. Maybe the bistro too. Aimee can really hold a grudge. Actually, half this town is either Hutchinson family or is half in love with one of the Hutchinsons,” she says.

“But not you two?” I ask.

“I'm gay,” says Jenny, and I start. She laughs. “I thought artists were supposed to be observant. And Colleen's got history with Ben's cousin.”

Colleen nods a little sadly. “Mason Hutchinson. You think Ben is hot…”

My eyes get big. “Really?”

“Really.”

“What happened?”

“Meh,” says Colleen, so I guess she doesn't want to talk about it. “It's late. I've got a super-pesky guest at the inn right now, so I better get to bed.”

“Me too,” Jenny says. “This horribly demanding artist wants me to find buyers for her so-called ‘pieces of art.'”

“She sounds awful,” I say with a laugh, and we all head to our respective quarters. Colleen to her mysterious attic apartment full of tiny booties at the inn, Jenny upstairs where she keeps a small apartment above the gallery, and me to my pretty white-and-pink room facing River Street. Once there, I lay down on the butter-soft high-thread-count pillow, close my eyes, and slip into that wonderful dark deep sleep of a city girl in the country.

But I get only about twenty minutes of shut-eye before I am awakened by a noise. A racket, in fact.

It is the unmistakable sound of pebbles on my bedroom window.

 

Nine

 

Pebbles on the window. They creep into my subconscious slowly, taking some weird part in my dream, until I wake up all the way, and try to figure out what I'm hearing. There's silence, then another spray. Rat-a-tat-tat. I'm in a teen romance, I suddenly realize, though I have no idea who would be attempting to get me to sneak out of my frothy chintz bedroom to neck in the woods.

It's Ben Hutchinson,
says my subconscious.
Dreamy!

No, idiot,
I say back to my subconscious, who is, apparently, thirteen years old. Ben Hutchinson hates my guts.

I get out of bed—ooh, how warm my bed was, how inconvenient teen romance can be—and pad to the window on tiptoes because the floor is too chilly to put my whole foot down. I pull back the gauzy curtains just as my admirer lets loose a handful of projectiles—I see now that it's a handful of loosely packed slush coming my way, which of course makes sense because where would someone get pebbles when the ground is covered in two feet of snow?—and they slop over the window, making it momentarily impossible to see out. Then ice and wet slide down out of the way and I see him. Okay, subconscious, you win this round. It is Ben Hutchinson, and he is dreamy.

He is waving sort of ridiculously. Obviously he wants me to come outside. I get that. I wave back noncommittally. I don't know if it's such a good idea for me to meet this guy in a dark empty street in the dead of night. In the Motive, Means, Opportunity department, this would be a perfect hat trick. But he keeps waving, and he is using both hands so I know for sure there's no axe. And he looks sort of beseeching. And cold.

I am wearing a white racerback tank top, a pair of well-worn blue cotton pajama pants, and nothing more. I'm not going out there. But I can let him in. I give him the universal “hang on a sec” finger, wrap a big gray cashmere cardigan around myself, and trot quietly downstairs, keeping my feet on the narrow carpet runner the whole way down to avoid frostbite. My, but Colleen does set the thermostat back at night, doesn't she?

I throw open the front door. The cold rushes in on me. I see Ben, standing back about five feet from the door, still looking up at my window, standing in a swirl of snowflakes, letting them land on his shoulders and cheeks undeterred. He looks a little startled at the sight of me so underdressed, but doesn't make for the door.

“I am going to freeze solid and then die if you don't get in here right now,” I announce. And then I shut the door in his face to save a little heat in the microseconds it might take him to approach.

A heartbeat later he is peeking in, saying, “Is it okay if I come in?” and I nod violently.

“Hurry. You're letting all the fifty-degree air out.”

He slides in. His jeans are snowy up to midcalf. Over his top half he has a lined flannel shirt that buttons up with snaps. It's navy blue plaid. Of course it is. Mountain-man standard issue. His blond hair is smushed under a light gray watch cap and he's got about a fifteen-o'clock shadow going.

“Where is your coat?” I ask him, as though that is the most pressing question his appearance presents.

“I was in a bar that doesn't rigorously enforce Wisconsin's smoking policy,” he tells me. “I didn't want it to get smoky.”

“Oh,” I say. “So you're drunk?”

“No! Well. I'm not super-sober. I'm, like, forty-five percent sober.”

“That sounds drunk to me.”

He nods. “I think I'm exactly as drunk as I was when I suggested we get married.”

“Oh,” I say again. “Well. That's an excellent point of reference.”

“I need to talk to you, before I get more sober,” he says.

“How flattering.”

“Go get your coat and boots.”

“Are you crazy? No, I'm not going outside.”

“It's not that cold out.”

“Maybe not if you're full of scotch.”

“It was just three Snowshoe Ales,” he says. “And anyway, it's twenty-five degrees out there. No one is dying of exposure tonight.”

“Wow, twenty-five degrees? I should have brought my bikini. Let's go huddle by Colleen's gas fireplace.”

He shakes his head. “No, there's something I need to show you. And say to you. Come on, you can bundle up.”

For reasons completely beyond my understanding, I go put on my shearling coat and the zillions of bundlements I've procured in Minnow Bay. I cram my icy bare feet into the soft, fur-lined Sorels. It feels like heaven. When I come back from the coat closet Ben looks at me and laughs. “Well, you'll be plenty warm in that getup,” he says. “Come on.”

Outside, now that I'm swaddled in fur and polar fleece and the wooly warmth of my thrummed mittens, I have to agree with Ben. It's not that bad. There's no wind, so the air just feels sweet and crisp and invigorating. The last of my sleepiness fades away. Our boots crunch crunch in the soft new snow and the streetlights turn it into fairy dust. “This is actually kind of pretty,” I say.

“Minnow Bay looks good in white,” he says. “And green too. And orange and red and gold for that matter. It's heaven on earth, and no one knows it, so it stays that way.”

“Is that why you moved back here?”

“What? No. I moved back here because my mom was dying.”

I swallow. Him too? Some of my resentment is instantly replaced by empathy. “I'm so sorry.”

“Don't be,” he says dryly. “She couldn't pull it off. She's still alive and driving us all bonkers.”

I look at him, alarmed. Colleen is completely wrong about this guy—he really is the asshole I suspect him to be.

“I'm kidding. It was a miracle. She's in remission. But at the time, we didn't know how strong she was so we were braced for the worst.”

“Oh,” I say. I can't help but feel stung by his words. He has no idea about my mother, but she was strong too. As strong as anybody. Just not as lucky.

I try not to let this bug me. He doesn't know. If he did, maybe he wouldn't say it that way. Or maybe he would, I think, remembering the way he behaved last night in his cold unwinterized shack. Maybe he thinks he's not just better than me, maybe he thinks his whole family is better than my whole family. Maybe he went and got liquored up with all his four hundred brothers at the bar and now he's here to take me down another notch. Why else would he be here? I bristle. Without meaning to, my footsteps stop.

Ben gets a few steps ahead of me before he, too, stops walking and turns to me. “I'm sorry.”

Ah, so that's what this is. I exhale. The apology I insisted on this morning. It's less satisfying than I imagined.

“It's okay,” I say. Here it is. Time to give him the annulment. Time to go home.

“No, it's not. I had you investigated, remember? They told me about your mother. I'm so sorry. It's a terrible thing. Even the scare was the worst thing I ever went through.”

“Oh, that,” I say. “Thank you for saying that. Wait, not thank you. Un-thank you! You had no right to have me investigated!”

Ben lets out a huge sigh and starts walking again. “Look, Lily. When we met ten years ago, I was something of a … ah … a player. I had just sold my first multimillion-dollar company, and I was too young to know how to handle all that money. I was reckless and impulsive and thought I could behave like I was in a music video all the time. I was surrounded by people who behaved the same way, who never ran out of money or women or drugs, for that matter. I got taken in.”

“That's not my fault. That doesn't make me an automatic suspect.”

“You have to understand. You caught me on a weird night. I had just had a falling out with someone I had trusted, someone who was using me. When I picked you up in that casino I thought, I don't know, I guess I thought it would be a nice distraction. When I talked to you and realized how guileless you were, well. I got taken in again.”

“I certainly didn't mean to ‘take you in,'” I say, offended.

“Exactly. Do you remember your expression when the check came after dinner? How you snatched it out of my hands and nearly fainted dead away at the total?”

“It was $250 for two people!” I exclaim. I remember that moment perfectly. I still feel a little stressed thinking about it.

“You were so freaked out and worried about how we would pay for it. You made that joke about us having to wash dishes, but you weren't really joking.”

“I was twenty-three and up to my earballs in debt paying for that stupid bachelorette party.”

“And that's the other thing. You were selflessly, without complaint, throwing a budget-busting bachelorette party to celebrate the marriage of your best friend to your ex-boyfriend. And you weren't whining about it much either. In fact, you seemed genuinely happy for them.”

“I was. I mean, I am. They have two kids now.”
And no time for me,
I think to myself.

“But you had clearly been dicked over.”

“I tried not to think of it that way. But yeah.” I guess I had been a little dicked over, if I had to put a label on it.

“So I guess what I'm saying is, I knew these things about you, even if I'd forgotten them in the ten years following. Knew you were not avaricious, knew you were selfless. Liked that about you enough to think it would be fun—and harmless—to let the romance of the night carry us away. But because you were part of a time in my life when the other people around me weren't anything like that, I grouped you with them when you showed up here last week.”

“This is your apology?” I ask. “It's not very good.”

He groans. “Come on. I'm trying here. This is kind of a weird situation. Not black and white, I'm wrong, you're right.”

“Which is why I drove up here, hat in hand, to try to apologize,” I say. The things about me he just listed off, those are good things, not liabilities. The sleazeballs he surrounded himself with aren't my problem, my inner bitch reminds me. “And I did apologize, a real apology, not some bullshit context lecture while being dragged through the freezing cold. Where are we even going?”

He turns to face me, takes my gloved hands in his, and looks me dead in the eyes. My heart stutters, the traitor.

“Lily,” he says. “I'm sorry. I'm sorry about treating you like a criminal since you arrived at Minnow Bay. I'm sorry I was so suspicious and questioned your motives. I'm sorry I sicced my lawyers on you and sorry I had you investigated and invaded your privacy.”

I nod, wordlessly accepting what he's said. There. That's better. That actually feels kind of satisfying.

“Will you please divorce me?” he asks.

“I will,” I manage to squeak out.

“Thank you. Now look.”

I break from his stare to look in the direction he's turning. It's a river. Of course, we've traipsed behind River Street now, and here is the titular river. But it's no ordinary river. It's a long crooked clearing in the tall maples, meandering off in both directions, about fifteen feet wide, with ice and snow coming about three feet shy of closing the whole thing off. The narrow still-liquid channel down the middle rushes fast, burbles beautifully, freezes and melts itself over and over against its edges. River stones glisten underneath. And I can see all of this because of two low long paths of very dim warm light, one on each side of the water, glistening a beautiful frosted warm yellow from underneath the snow.

“It's so pretty,” I say.

“Here,” he says, handing me his phone from his pocket. “Tap anywhere.”

On the screen is a round rainbow palette of color, the same you'd see in Photoshop or while making a desktop background. I tap on the blues and watch as, slowly and magically, the lights on the river in front of me turn from yellow to pink to lavender to, finally, the soft gray blue I touched on the phone's screen.

“Everyone within city limits can download this app,” he tells me. “I made it so you can come out here anytime, and make the lights fit your mood, your occasion. Set them to a loved one's birthstone. Celebrate National Wear Red Day, or Black History Month, or St. Patrick's. Look.” He reaches over and swipes to the left, and a keyboard pops up. “You can type in a message and the app translates it to Morse code.” Upside down he taps out, I M S O R R Y, and I watch as the lights, one by one in order, switch to what looks like a random pattern of dark and light. “and then you go to Google Earth,” he says as he navigates to that app, “and you can see it on the satellite.”