Page 30 of Beachfront Pages

"I like the idea of people," he said. "It's the specifics that wear on me." But he said it watching her, and she chose not to examine that.

They argued about books, mostly. It was the safest ground she had.

"Welty understood that the whole world lives in one front porch," he told her one afternoon, hunting a volume off a high shelf. "She didn't need a body in an alley. She needed a woman shelling beans and something she wasn't saying."

"That's a mystery," Fiona said. "You just described a mystery."

"It is not a mystery."

"There's a secret. There's a person withholding it. There's a reader leaning in to find out." She ticked them off on her fingers. "You've simply got a snob's allergy to calling it what it is."

He turned around with the book in his hand and a look on his face like she'd pinched him.

"Agatha Christie did the front porch and the body," Fiona went on, because she was enjoying herself too much to stop. "Dorothy Sayers gave you the front porch, the body, and a man quoting John Donne over it. You can sneer all you want. You've read every one of them."

"I have not read every one of them."

"You've read most of them, and you liked them, and it keeps you up at night."

He set the book down a little harder than he needed to. "Sayers had a classical education. That's different."

"Oh, it's only literature if they went to Oxford for it."

"I didn't say⁠—"

"You were thinking it."

He opened his mouth. Shut it. Pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, where they would sit forgotten. "Christie," he admitted, like the word cost him something, "had an ear. The plotting was a machine, but the ear was real."

"There. Was that so hard?"

"Excruciating," he said, and this time he did smile, the laugh lines crowding up around his eyes, and Fiona had to look down at her coffee.

She knew this game. A person avoiding the thing they weren't ready to say. She just hadn't expected to be sitting across the board from one who played it as well as she did.

On Thursday it was raining. A gray, warm rain that kept the shop empty.

She brought the coffee in damp, and they settled into their corners. She asked him what she thought was an easy question. How a literature professor ended up behind a register at the edge of the Gulf.

She expected the easy answer. Bad weather up north, a deal on the building, a man wanting a change.

"My wife died," Marty said instead.

Fiona went still.

"Annette." He looked down at his cup. "Cancer. Six months, start to finish. She was thirty-eight." He said it plainly, the way a man says a thing he's said before and survived. "I went back to teaching that fall. Stood up in front of a room of nineteen-year-olds and tried to explain why a comma in Faulkner mattered."

"And it didn't," Fiona said quietly.

"It mattered enormously, the week before she got sick. That was the strange part." He finally looked up. "I'd spent eighteen years on literary criticism. Building the case for why this book was serious and another wasn't. And I stood there with chalk in my hand and I couldn't remember why any of it was worth saying out loud."

She let him continue at his own pace.

"I made it one semester. Then I sold the house and drove until the road ran out." He tipped his cup toward the window, the smeared light, the rain. "Bought a failing bookshop on a feeling. First impulsive thing I'd done in my life."

"That's not nothing," Fiona said. "Driving until the road ran out."

"It felt like running."