When she almost dropped her book, he felt guilty for startling her, but then she smiled. After marking her page with her library card, she tucked the book into a canvas bag on the ground next to her. It had the Whitford Public Library logo on the front and appeared to be straining at the seams.
“I only meant to sit here a minute, but it’s so nice out and I pulled out a book.” She looked at her watch. “And there goes an hour.”
“There are worse ways to spend an hour. Did you leave any books for the rest of us?”
She laughed. “I don’t have cable, so I read while everybody else is watching TV.”
“I don’t read as much as I’d like to. There are a few thriller writers I like, so I download their books to my phone and sneak pages when I can.”
“My cell phone makes calls and that’s it. I have to have internet for the diner and, since I spend most of my life there, I don’t need to carry it around with me.”
He leaned back against the bench, turning his face up to the sun. He didn’t get to sit and do nothing very often. It felt good. “Tell me how you ended up in Whitford. It’s not exactly a hot destination.”
“I already told you. Was driving through and my car broke down and I never left.”
“There’s more to it than that.”
She shrugged. “Not really.”
“You didn’t already have a home and a job or any other reason to go back to where you were before the car died?”
“I had a crappy job and a crappy apartment. Obviously my car wasn’t all that hot, either.”
He turned his head to look at her, intrigued by her vague answers rather than put off by them. “Most people love to talk about themselves, you know.”
“Go for it.”
He grinned and shook his head. “I don’t think so. I want to hear your story. I already know mine.”
“We all know yours,” she said pointedly, making him snort. Wasn’t that the truth? “I was living in Vermont, but I was notified I’d been left some money in a will. They had the check but the man’s wife really wanted to meet me, so I drove to Portland.”
The man’s wife? “How did you know this guy?”
“Not that way. He was my stepfather for a while, when I was little. I barely remember him, but his wife said he talked about me a lot. I guess he tried to keep in touch with me, but my mother made it difficult and eventually he gave up and had a family of his own. She said he worried about me a lot, though, over the years.”
She looked sad, as though she was sorry to have missed out on somebody caring enough about her to worry. “So he left you some money?”
“Yeah. They had kids of their own, but he did some software thing and they were pretty well-off. So I was driving back, trying to imagine how my life would have been different if my mother hadn’t run off on Joel and what it would have been like to be his and raised in one place like his kids, when my car broke down.”
“And you used the money he left you to buy the diner?”
She nodded. “Katie happened to drive by right after I broke down. Total stranger, but she gave me a ride into town. Butch took care of my car. Fran called Rose, and then Josh drove down and picked me up. Said I could have a room at the Northern Star until my car was fixed. And then Mallory showed up the next day because she’d heard about me and didn’t want me stuck at the lodge with no way to do errands. Before my car was fixed I knew I wanted Whitford to be my home.”
He looked back up at the sky. “Funny, all that adds up to the main reason I stay away so much.”
“It’s a great town.”
“You wouldn’t think it was so great if everybody remembered and talked about everything you’d ever done wrong in your life.”
“At least you’ve always had a place to call home. It took me a while, but Whitford is that place for me now.”
He didn’t call anyplace home for long. Hometown, yes. But home, no, and he liked it that way. “Where are you from? You don’t sound like you’ve always lived in Vermont, but I can’t quite pin down your accent.”
“That’s because I don’t have an accent. I have a whole smashup of accents. I was born in Nevada, but we left there before I was a year old and we were never in one place long. My mother’s a bit nomadic, I guess.”
“You keep calling her ‘my mother.’ Never Mom or Ma.”
“I guess I call her Mom when I talk to her. Her name’s Donna, but I can’t quite bring myself to use it.”
“Not close?”
“We’re…not not close. But she’s always been more wrapped up in her own life, so I don’t hear from her a lot.”
Mitch liked to think if his mom was still alive, he’d talk to her as often as he could. As it was, he never went more than a few weeks without talking to Rosie or his aunt Mary on the phone.
His cell phone chimed and he checked it to find a text from Josh. Done.
He didn’t want his brother to be done. He wanted to sit in the sunshine with Paige and get her to tell him more about her. Like why she didn’t date, as far as the good citizens of Whitford could see. And they saw pretty much everything.