year, so their parents had made other plans.
“Are you going to temple?” he asks now.
“No,” says Muriel. “But there’s a show uptown tonight, a kinky burlesque hybrid, and I’m pretty sure there’s going to be some fire play. I’ll light a candle on someone.”
“Mom and Dad would be so proud,” he says dryly, but in truth, he suspects they would. Muriel Strauss can do no wrong.
She shrugs. “We all celebrate in our own way.” She twists the scarf back into place with a flourish. “I’ll see you for Yom Kippur.”
Muriel reaches for the door, then turns back toward him, and stretches up to ruffle Henry’s hair. “My little storm cloud,” she says. “Don’t let it get too dark in there.”
And then she’s gone, and Henry sags back against the door, dazed, tired, and thoroughly confused.
* * *
Henry has heard that grief has stages.
He wonders if the same is true for love.
If it’s normal to feel lost, and angry, and sad, hollow and somehow, horribly, relieved. Maybe it’s the thud of the hangover muddling all the things he should be feeling, churning them into what he does.
He stops at Roast, the bustling coffee shop a block shy of the store. It has good muffins, halfway decent drinks, and terrible service, which is pretty much par for the course in this part of Brooklyn, and sees Vanessa working at the till.
New York is full of beautiful people, actors and models moonlighting as bartenders and baristas, making drinks to cover rent until their first big break. He’s always assumed Vanessa is one of those, a waifish blonde with a small infinity symbol tattooed inside one wrist. He also assumes her name is Vanessa—that’s the name on the tag pinned to her apron—but she’s never actually told him. Has never said anything to him, for that matter, besides, “What can I get you?”
Henry will stand at the counter, and she will ask his order and his name (even though he has been coming here six days a week for the last three years, and she’s been there for two of them), and from the time she punches in his flat white to the time she writes his name on the cup and calls out for the next order, she will never look at him. Her gaze will flit from his shirt to the computer to his chin, and Henry will feel like he isn’t even there.
That’s how it always goes.
Only, today, it doesn’t.
Today, when she takes his order, she looks up.
It’s such a small change, the difference of two inches, maybe three, but now he can see her eyes, which are a startling blue, and the barista looks at him, not his chin. She holds his gaze, and smiles.
“Hi there,” she says, “what can I get you?”
He orders a flat white, and says his name, and that is where it ends.
Then it doesn’t.
“Fun day planned?” she asks, making small talk as she writes his name on the cup.
Vanessa has never made small talk with him before.
“Just work,” he says, and her attention flicks back to his face. This time he catches a faint shimmer—a wrongness—in her eyes. It’s a trick of the light, it must be, but for a second, it looks like frost, or fog.
“What do you do?” she asks, sounding genuinely interested, and he tells her about The Last Word, and her eyes light up a little. She has always been a reader, and she cannot think of anywhere better than a bookstore. When he pays for the order, their fingers brush, and she cuts him another glance. “See you tomorrow, Henry.”
The barista says his name like she stole it, mischief tugging at her smile.
And he can’t tell if she’s flirting until he gets his drink, and sees the little black arrow she’s drawn, pointing to the bottom, and when he tips it up to see, his heart gives a little thud like an engine turning over.
She’s written her name and number on the bottom of the cup.
* * *
At The Last Word, Henry unlocks the grate, and the door, while finishing his coffee. He turns the sign and goes through the motions of feeding Book and opening the store and shelving new stock until the bell chimes, announcing his first customer.
Henry winds through the stacks to find an older woman, toddling between the aisles, from HISTORICAL to MYSTERY to ROMANCE and back again. He gives her a few minutes, but when she makes the loop a third time, he steps in.
“Can