Page 18 of Piece By Piece

“It was a muscle spasm.”

“Fine, I’ll take it,” she said with a shrug.

She went back to the butcher paper, humming something under her breath.

Grant went back to sketching things out on his notepad.

He worked in silence for a while, and then suddenly the silence didn’t feel like a wall anymore.

It just felt like a shared room.

She looked up from her markers. “Can I ask you something?”

“Well, you’re going to regardless.”

“Why puzzles? Like of all the things you could sell in the world, why puzzles?”

He put his pencil down.

It was a simple question that had such a complicated answer, and he wasn’t sure how much of that complicated part he wanted to share.

So he gave her the simple version.

“Because every puzzle has a solution. You just have to find it. And for some reason, that’s comforting to me.”

She nodded slowly, as if she were putting that information away in some mental filing cabinet.

“Well, that makes sense. I think I’m the opposite. I like the mess before the solution. You know, the part where I don’t know what it’s going to be yet.”

“Well, that sounds terrifying.”

“Yeah, it kind of is,” she smiled. “But the mess is where all the good stuff happens.”

The two of them took a break when Dixie brought over some sandwiches from the deli. She put the plates down and looked at the butcher paper.

“Well, would you look at that? Y’all are actually getting along.”

“Don’t jinx it,” Liza said.

Dixie patted Grant on the shoulder as she passed by. He didn’t flinch, though he wanted to. “Eat your sandwich, puzzle boy. You look like you haven’t had a real meal in a while.”

She wasn’t wrong.

While they ate, Liza wandered over to one of the bookshelves near the register. She’d been exploring the store in between tasks, learning about the history Dixie had collected over so many decades. Old photographs were tucked between books. There were notes from customers taped to the cabinet doors. The store was less a business and more like a living scrapbook.

She pulled out a leather-bound guest book from the bottom shelf, one of the old ones with the lined pages. People had written notes in it going back years. She flipped through it, reading the entries from tourists and regulars and one person who had just drawn a picture of a seagull and written thank you underneath it.

Then a photograph fell out.

It was faded and a little bent at the corners and showed a younger Dixie, maybe thirty years ago, standing in front of the bookstore with a man. He was tall and broad-shouldered with a wide smile. His arm was around her waist. They looked like they belonged together in a way that some people just do.

“Hey, Grant, look at this.”

He walked over, his sandwich in hand, and looked at the photo.

“Is that Dixie?”

“I think so. I don’t know who this man is, though.”