Love Is Gone, So Am I novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Rent Is What You Can Pay

Avis tells how Davis's grandfather jilted her and kept her ring, pays Willa a fair price over Gus's lowball, and offers her the empty shop next door if she can say what she'd sell.

Nobody in the shop moved.

Gus looked at his grandmother, then at the ring.

Then he looked at me.

"Gram," he said. "What do you mean, for you?"

Avis turned the band so I could see inside it.

Under the swirly Merriam engraving was a tiny stamp. A T inside a little bell.

Beside it, worn almost flat, was a letter A.

"That's my father's mark," she said. "And that's me."

I had worn that ring for seven years. I had never once taken a loupe to it.

"I was twenty-two," Avis said. "A Boston boy summered here, and he asked me to marry him, so I set this stone myself."

"A week before the wedding, he wrote from Boston that he was marrying a shipping heiress."

"He never sent the ring back. His name was Merriam."

She said it the way you'd read off a grocery list.

Gus sat down on the stool beside her, hard.

"You never told me that."

"You never asked who I almost married."

"I assumed it was nobody."

"It was nobody," Avis said. "That's my point."

I put my hands flat on the glass so they'd stop shaking.

"His family calls it an heirloom," I said. "They say it goes to every Merriam bride."

Avis laughed. It was a short, dry sound.

"Every Merriam bride. Well. It went to one Tibbetts bride first, and she never got to wear it."

Gus cleared his throat and picked up the loupe. He was all business now, which I guessed was how he handled feelings.

"Old European cut," he said. "About one point six carats. Decent color. A chip on the girdle somebody hid under a prong."

"I hid it," Avis said. "I was twenty-two and I dropped it."

"Four thousand," Gus said to me.

I stared at him.

"It's a fair number for a buyback," he said. "Old cuts don't move. Nobody wants a stone with a chip."

"Gus."

He winced at his own name.

Avis took a checkbook out of the drawer under the register.

It was the long kind with the carbon copies, the kind nobody has used since 1990.

"Nine thousand," she said, and started writing.

"Gram, that's double what we'd get for it."

"I'm not buying it to sell it." She tore the check out and held it across the counter to me. "I'm buying it because it's mine and I want it to have been paid for once."

I looked at the number.

Nine thousand dollars.

I had eleven hundred and forty dollars in the only bank account with my name alone on it.

"I can't take that much from you."

"You're not taking it. You're selling. Sign the slip."

Gus slid a pink receipt pad toward me without a word. His ears had gone red.

I signed it.

My phone buzzed in my coat pocket for the ninth time that morning.

Davis.

I stepped out onto the sidewalk to answer it. The lake air hit my face like cold water.

"Where are you?" he said.

"Vermont."

"Vermont? Willa. Mother's been up all night. She's talking to the lawyers."

"About what?"

"About the stone. She says if you don't bring it back by tonight, it's theft."

Through the window I could see Avis, holding the ring up to the light with her glasses on, perfectly still.

"It was a gift, Davis. You said so on one knee, in front of two hundred people. You said it was mine."

"That was before."

"Before what?"

He didn't answer.

So I hung up.

I stood on the sidewalk with a check for nine thousand dollars and a phone that started buzzing again right away.

I turned it off.

The shop next door had brown paper taped over every window.

The striped awning was so faded it was almost pink.

A New Chapter, in old curly letters, peeling.

I put my face to a gap in the paper.

Empty shelves. A wooden counter.

Dust lit up gold in the morning sun.

An old radiator under the front window.

It had good light. That's the first thing a florist looks for.

The jewelry store door opened behind me and the bell rang.

"That was a bookshop," Avis said. "Closed eleven years ago. The man who ran it moved to Florida to die and then didn't."

"It's yours?"

"The whole building. That half's been empty since. There's a room upstairs with a bed in it. The bookseller slept up there when his wife threw him out, which was often."

Gus leaned in the doorway behind her with his arms crossed.

"Gram. No."

"I didn't say anything."

"You're about to."

Avis ignored him. She looked at me over her glasses.

"Rent's what you can pay," she said. "Tell me what you'd sell."

I looked back through the gap at the empty shelves.

I thought about the velvet box on my bread plate, with a copy of my own ring inside.

A woman's bare hand held out across my peonies.

I thought about seven years of bouquets carried down aisles by brides who would never know my name.

"Whatever love leaves behind," I said.

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