Love Is Gone, So Am I novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: Staying

I unlocked the door and went in and picked up the tag.

Everything I'm selling is next door, in Gram's back room. I moved it at six this morning. I needed the window.

This isn't for sale.

I'd like to keep the woman who writes these tags.

I'm not asking anybody to pick her. She's had enough of being picked.

I'm asking her to stay.

G.

I read it four times.

Then I sat down on the floor of my empty window with the tag in both hands.

I laughed until I had to wipe my face on my sleeve.

I heard the bell next door.

I didn't go to him.

I went to my counter and cut a tag of my own.

I wrote on it with Avis's good pen.

Then I walked out onto the sidewalk and tied it to the handle of the jewelry shop door with a piece of florist's string.

Staying.

Nobody picked me. I picked here.

Rent is whatever I can pay. I can pay a lot.

W.

I went back inside and started putting the window back together, one teacup at a time.

I wanted to see how long he'd take.

He didn't take long.

The bell rang behind me.

He was in the doorway with my tag in his fist and his hair standing up, which he had.

"A lot?" he said.

"I've been told I'm very hardworking."

He crossed the shop in three steps and kissed me so hard I dropped the teacup.

It didn't break. It rolled under the counter.

"Gram's home," he said against my mouth. "She's asleep. The whole street's coming to the green at six. She doesn't know."

"Then I'd better do flowers."

"You'd better do flowers."

Front Street threw Avis a party on the green.

The waitress brought six pies. The widow brought her lace.

The man who used to own the hardware store set a cushioned folding chair in the middle of the grass.

The teacher and her farmer came. So did the college boy, who had sold every letter and was writing new ones.

Gus walked Avis down the hill on his arm at six o'clock, slowly.

She stopped at the edge of the green and looked at all of it.

Bunting on the bandstand. My peonies in every jar the diner owned. Half the town clapping.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," she said. "I had a heart attack, not a birthday."

She sat in the throne.

I knelt down beside it and gave her the gala program folded around a dollar bill.

She read the back of it with her glasses on.

Then she read it again with them off.

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