THE WORDS THAT WAITED

Only for a Few Days

She walked into town on Thursday morning because the rain had stopped and because she could not be in the house.

That was the honest reason and she let herself have it. The house had a smell — not bad, just her mother's, laundry soap and old paper and something underneath that Nora could not name and did not want to — and it got into her clothes within an hour, and around eleven she had put down the box of receipts she was sorting and picked up her jacket and left.

Main Street was three blocks long. She had a list: a padlock for the shed, contractor bags, a box knife. The hardware store was where it had been.

She got as far as the corner of Main and Cottrell.

The old Woolworth building had been empty her whole childhood, a dead tooth in the middle of the block with brown paper in the windows, and it was not empty now. Somebody had taken the paper down and put back the transom lights and stripped the storefront to the original cast iron and painted it a green so dark it read black until you were close. BELLWOOD BOOKS, in gold, hand-lettered, slightly imperfect at the terminal of the S.

Nora stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and looked at it with genuine, uncomplicated pleasure for about four seconds, the way she would have looked at it in any town on earth. Somebody had spent money in the right places and not spent it in the wrong ones. Somebody had known what they were doing.

Then the door opened and a man came out backward carrying a box.

He turned around.

Fifteen years is not a disguise. She would have known him across a parking lot at night. He was heavier through the shoulders and there was grey coming in at the sides and his face had gone from a boy's face to a face that had been outdoors for a living, and he was still Daniel, and the box in his arms said WHITAKER ESTATE — HISTORY on the side in marker.

He saw her.

Neither of them moved. A car came down Main and went past and neither of them looked at it. Somewhere behind the green door a bell was still swinging on its spring, and Nora heard it, and heard it stop.

He didn't smile. She was grateful for that later, and in the moment it went through her like cold water.

"You came back," he said.

His voice had dropped. That was the thing she had not braced for — she had braced for the face and not for the voice, and the voice was a man's now, and the four ordinary words came out of him with nothing on them at all. Not warmth. Not anger. Something set down carefully, the way you set down a box.

Her heart was going. She kept her hands in her jacket pockets so that this fact remained her own business.

"Only for a few days," she said.

Daniel Reed nodded once, slowly, as though she had confirmed something he'd have bet money on.

"All right," he said.

And he shifted the box up onto his hip and walked past her to the truck at the curb — a white F-250 with REED RESTORATION on the door in the same hand-lettering as the bookstore sign, she noticed, because she could not help noticing — and he put the box in the back and got in and pulled out.

He did not look at her again.

Nora stood on the corner of Main and Cottrell for a while after the truck was gone. A woman came out of the bookstore, saw her, started to say something, and thought better of it.

Eventually Nora remembered the padlock, and the contractor bags, and the box knife, and went and bought all three.