The Analyst and the Ex

Milton Paterson was thirty-six years old and he owned eleven boxes of stuff. His life after three years of pretending to be fine consisted of that entire inventory. He cut the tape on box number four and pulled out a coffee mug with a cartoon whale on it.

He should have thrown that one away. He knew it standing there with the mug in both hands. He put it on the shelf anyway.

The apartment above the hardware store had a kitchenette, a bathroom with a crooked mirror, and a window that looked out on Main Street. Rent was cheap because the floor sloped a little toward the east wall. Milton didn't mind. Floors that sloped were honest about it.

He unpacked the dishes next. Then the books. A data analyst did not need many books, but he had them anyway, and he shelved them alphabetically because that was how his brain worked. Sorting was easier than thinking.

Three years ago he had come home to a note and an empty closet. No explanation. No goodbye. Sabine Cahill had been his whole life for five years, from when he was twenty-eight to when he was thirty-three, and then she was gone and the note said she was sorry and that was it. Two sentences. He had read that note maybe four hundred times.

He had learned things since. Things he still couldn't say out loud without sounding crazy. Things about seals and skins and a family on the coast he had never met. He pushed it down and kept unpacking.

The last box held winter coats. He hung them in the closet, stood back, and looked at the apartment. It was done. A bed, a table, one chair. A whale mug.

"New town," he said to the empty room. "New rules. No complications!"

He said it out loud because saying things out loud made them more real. That was something else he'd learned the hard way. Complications had a name and the name was Sabine, and he wasn't going to think about her anymore tonight.

He went to bed at nine. The floor sloped and the bed sat level and his brain would not shut up until almost eleven.

***

The diner on Main Street was called Marge's, though nobody named Marge had worked there in years. Milton went in on his second morning because his kitchen had a stove he hadn't tested and he didn't want to burn down his new landlord's building on day two.

The waitress was a small woman with dark hair pulled back and a name tag that said SIAN. She was twenty-eight, maybe, and she moved like somebody who had done this job a long time and gotten good at it.

"Coffee?" she asked before he even sat down.

"Please!"

"New in town." She said it like a fact, not a question. She poured his coffee. "Everybody's new in town or been here sixty years. There's no in between. You a sixty-year man?"

"Day two."

"Then you're new." She grinned. "Pancakes are good. So is the burger. The meatloaf is a gamble. I say that as a friend."

"Burger, then. Over easy on the side if you can manage it."

"A man who knows what he wants. I like that." She wrote nothing down, which was either a good sign or a bad one.

Milton watched her go and felt something in his chest unclench a little. A normal woman. A normal diner. Eggs and coffee and a name tag. This was the kind of life he wanted. Simple. Predictable. No mysteries.

Two booths down, an old man was holding court with the whole back half of the diner. He was sixty-something, big hands, cap pushed back on his head. His voice carried the way a voice carries when a man has spent decades not bothering to lower it.

"So she walks into the feed store yesterday," the old man was saying, "dressed like she's going to a funeral in the city, and she asks me for directions to the boarding house. I tell her, and she goes, and then I notice she left her glove on my counter."

He paused there, the way a man does when he knows everyone is listening.

"Silk. That glove. Real silk, cream colored. Nobody in Elm Grove owns a glove like that."

"So who is she, Reg?" somebody called from the kitchen.

"That's the question, isn't it." Reg picked up his own coffee. "Woman in her thirties. Pretty, if you go for that type. Talked proper. And this is the truth. I've seen her before. Thirty years I've run that store and I remember faces."

"You've seen her where?" Sian asked, coming back with Milton's burger.

"Can't place it. That's what's eating me." Reg jabbed a finger at her. "You ask around. You're friendly. People tell you things."

"People tell me things because I bring them pie," Sian said. "It's not the same as asking."

"It's the same thing, girl. Pie is just asking with a plate under it."

Sian laughed and set the burger down in front of Milton. "Sorry. That's Reg. He runs the feed store and he runs the town's whole information business out of it. You'll hear everything twice before Friday."

"That's all right," Milton said. "I like quiet towns."

"You say that now!" Sian glanced back at Reg, then leaned in a little and dropped her voice. "But between you and me, he's right about the glove. I saw the woman too, yesterday evening, walking past the church. She asked me the way to the fairgrounds. She had a way of looking at you like she was deciding something. Gave me a chill, honestly."

"Maybe she's just visiting."

"Nobody just visits Elm Grove." Sian straightened up. "You need anything else, hon?"

"No, this is good. Thank you."

She moved off. Milton ate his burger and listened to Reg run through the rest of the town news. The Hendersons' barn roof. The church fair coming up in three weeks. The price of chicken feed, which Reg felt strongly about.

Milton paid his check at the register and walked out into the bright morning. Main Street was quiet. The hardware store, the feed store, the diner, the church. It was everything he had wanted when he'd picked the town off a map. Small. Ordinary. A place where the biggest mystery was a silk glove.

He was halfway to his car when it hit him.

He had not thought about the ocean in weeks. Months, maybe. He had built his life out of not thinking about it, and now some stranger in a funeral coat was asking directions to the boarding house, and something old and cold moved in his stomach.

No. He stopped, hand on the car door. He was not going to do this. A woman in nice gloves meant nothing. Reg made stories out of nothing every day of his life. The entire job of a small town was making stories.

Milton got in the car and drove the four blocks home. He went upstairs. He sat down at his table and opened his laptop and started work on the quarterly reports that had brought him to Elm Grove in the first place. Numbers. Clean, honest numbers that added up and never vanished in the night and never left two-sentence notes.

He worked until two. Around three there was a knock at his door, and he opened it to find Sian from the diner standing on the landing with a covered plate of pie.

"Don't look at me like that," she said. "It's leftover pie from the diner, it was going to get tossed, and you're new and I figured you hadn't had anyone bring you anything yet."

"That's... actually very kind. Thank you." He took the plate.

She peered past him into the apartment with the frank interest of someone who had already decided they were going to be friends. "You get settled okay?"

"Mostly. Still finding where things go."

"Give it a month. Elm Grove grows on people like moss." She hesitated on the top step. "So, hey. Real question. That woman Reg's been going on about. The one with the gloves. Did you happen to see her yesterday? Coming in on the bus or anything?"

"No. I got here two days ago and I haven't seen one stranger."

"Huh." She chewed her lip. "Okay. Well. Enjoy the pie. It's apple. It's not a gamble like the meatloaf."

She went down the stairs. Milton closed the door and set the pie on his table and looked at it for a while.

No complications, he had promised. He picked up a fork and ate the pie standing up, and it was very good, and he still had the bad feeling in his gut that the whole ride here had been too easy.

***

The feed store smelled like sawdust and alfalfa, and Milton had learned in his first week that Reg stocked two kinds of everything and would explain the difference whether you asked or not.

He went in on a Tuesday for more chicken feed. He had six hens now. He had not planned on six hens, but the coop came with the apartment lease somehow, and Reg had talked him into it over the course of three separate visits.

"Paterson," Reg called from behind the counter. "Your girls laying yet?"

"Four a week. Getting better."

"Atta boy. Fifty pound bag of layer pellets?"

"Please."

Reg hauled the bag off the stack with the ease of a man who had done it thirty thousand times. Milton was reaching for his wallet when the door chimed behind him.

He did not turn around right away. He heard heels on the wooden floor. That was the first thing. Nobody in Elm Grove wore heels. The second thing was the smell of salt, faint and wrong for a town four hundred miles from any coast, and his hand went flat on the counter before his brain caught up.

"Excuse me," said a voice he had heard every day for five years and then not at all for three. "Do you carry chicken feed? Real chicken feed. For chickens."

Reg squinted at her. "That's the only kind we carry, ma'am."

"Good. Because I read online that some feed stores carry things that are not strictly for chickens, and I have chickens, so."

Milton turned around.

Sabine Cahill stood between the seed racks in a gray coat and cream-colored gloves, thirty-four years old, hair shorter than he remembered, eyes exactly the same. She was holding a clipboard she had clearly brought from somewhere else to make the errand look official.

"Hello, Milton," she said.

Reg looked at Milton. Then at her. Then at Milton again, with the expression of a man filing away material for the next decade.

"Ma'am," Reg said, "that'll be fourteen fifty for the feed. Mister Paterson, you want me to load that in your truck?"

"I've got it," Milton said, and his voice came out steadier than he had any right to expect. "Thanks, Reg."

Reg did not move. "You sure?"

"Very sure."

Reg took the money from Sabine, made change slowly, and retired to the back room with a studious lack of speed. The curtain swayed behind him. Milton would have bet his quarterly reports that his ear was pressed somewhere near it.

"What are you doing here," Milton said.

"I need chicken feed."

"You don't have chickens."

"I might get chickens. People change." She set the clipboard down on a barrel of oyster shell. "Okay. That was bad. I've been practicing that in the mirror of the boarding house for a week and it sounded better there."

"You've been at the boarding house for over a week."

"Nine days. Tuesday makes nine." She pulled off one glove, finger by finger. Her hands were bare underneath. No rings. "Sian told me you bought six hens. She didn't know they were yours, she just said the new fellow with the whale mug had chickens, and I thought, well, that's a start."

"You came here because of a mug."

"I came here because of you. The mug was intelligence." She folded the glove and put it in her coat pocket. "Milton. I know what this looks like. I know what it felt like. The note was cowardly and two sentences was cowardly squared, and I have spent three years being sorry in a place where sorry does me no good at all."

"Three years, Sabine. You were my whole life for five years and then you were gone before the coffee got cold."

"I know."

"I read that note maybe four hundred times. I learned things about seals. About skins. About a family on the coast I've never met and still couldn't pick out of a lineup. I built an entire understanding of the world out of a two-sentence note, and then I moved here to get away from all of it, and now you're buying chicken feed at me."

"That's fair."

"It's not a question of fair."

"No. It's not." She looked at the feed bags stacked along the wall, at the horseshoe nailed over the door, at anything but him. Then she looked back. "I got my skin back, Milton. That's what the note meant. That's what I couldn't explain on paper, because who would believe it, and who would I have been to ask you to believe it. I got it back, and I put it in a box, and I have not opened the box in a year. I want this. The feed store version. The hens version. The version where I'm a person who lives in a town and buys things."

Milton picked up his feed bag. It weighed fifty pounds and it was the only solid thing in the building.

"You can't just show up," he said. "There has to be a process. You don't get to vanish and reappear and have it be fine because you're sorry now."

"I agree."

"There should be, I don't know. Probation."

"Like a job?"

"Like a parole hearing. I'm the parole board. It's me. I'm the whole board."

The corner of her mouth moved. "Noted. What does the board require?"

"I don't know yet. I'll get back to you." He paid Reg on the way out, over Reg's objections, and carried the bag to his truck, and she walked beside him the whole way without being asked and without asking. At the tailgate he stopped. "What happened to the council? The people who took your skin in the first place. Are they going to follow you here?"

Something crossed her face. "They don't know where I am. And if they did, they'd have rules about it. Rules are most of what they have." She said it too lightly. He heard the too-light in it, the same way he used to hear it when she talked about her mother.

"Okay," he said. "So here's my thought. Since you're here, and since I'm apparently the entire parole board, I think we should get revenge."

She blinked. "On the council?"

"On the council. For taking my five years. I'm owed five years, Sabine. I want interest."

She stared at him. Then she laughed, and it was the old laugh, the one that used to come out of her sideways, and it did something to the air between them that he resented.

"You're joking," she said.

"Entirely. But it's a good joke. Think about it. They're these grave, ancient sea-people with robes and rules. And we're two adults in a landlocked farm town with a truck and a bag of chicken feed. What are they going to do, sense our intentions? I say we start a file. Operation something. We document their mundane lives and we commit small acts of petty