Page 40 of Brewbies
COFFEE PURCHASED FROM FARMERS AT A "FAIR" PRICE AS DEFINED BY INTERNATIONAL AGENCIES
“Those wereyour wife’s hats, weren’t they?” Darby sat on an old steamer trunk next to the grandfather clock, her knees still wobbly with shock at Roy’s asking her to sit in the aftermath of her compulsive confession.
He nodded and handed her one of the two delicate porcelain teacups he’d rinsed under the hot tap of a water cooler that had seen better days. Decades of them, from the look of it. “Gwen loved antiques.”
Darby smiled as she took the cue, enjoying the warmth that radiated from its delicate surface. She gave Roy a sidelong glance as he poured them each a generous helping of whisky from a tarnished silver flask in his shirt pocket.
“Is that how you got into the secondhand business?” Darby asked before taking her first sip. The smoky-sweet liquid slid down her throat like honey.
“Sort of.” Roy’s silvery mustache brushed the brim of his teacup as he lifted it to his lips.
“How’d you end up in Townsend Harbor?”
“Came here on our honeymoon. Gwen always talked about moving here once we retired. Said we’d open a little antiques shop. Buy some land and build guest cabins.”
Darby suspected it wasn’t the whisky that deepened his voice.
“Some land like Raven Creek?” she ventured.
Roy’s bushy silver brows lifted above the foggy lenses of his glasses. “Yes.” He took another sip of his whisky. “We’d already bought this place when she got sick.”
Sick.
Such a deceptively simple word for the battery of conditions it comprised.
“May I ask with what?”
A crease appeared in Roy’s ponderous forehead. “Breast cancer,” he said. “Same as you. Not like I’d have driven all the way out of town every morning to pay for overpriced coffee from a half-naked woman otherwise.”
Darby’s cup paused halfway to her mouth.
That Brewbies donated a portion of its proceeds to breast cancer research was included in the general information available to anyone who happened to go looking, but she hadn’t wanted to make it her entire marketing strategy any more than she wanted to make being a “survivor” her entire identity.
Learning Roy had somehow come across this information and elected to drag his curmudgeonly ass out of town to buy his coffee from her shop each morning to honor the wife he’d lost to the same disease was blowing her entire mind.
She figured his backhanded insult just now and her suspicion that he might have a secret hat fetish earlier just about canceled out.
“She went fast.”
Darby watched as Roy’s blue eyes misted over, his gaze fixed on the hatboxes stacked in the corner of the room. She wondered how many memories were stored in those boxes, how many stories they held. The silence stretched between them once again, broken only by the ticking of the grandfather clock and the distant sound of cars passing by on Water Street.
“I’m sorry,” Darby murmured, not sure what else to say. She had never been great at comforting people, and especially not people who had openly expressed dislike for her general person. But something about Roy’s quiet grief tugged at her battle-scarred heartstrings.
He waved a hand as if brushing away her sympathy. “Helen didn’t want any pity, and neither do I.”
“I understand,” Darby said. And she did. To a painful degree.
They both took healthy swallows of their whisky.
“Anyway, since I made it through that, I decided I would just do whatever the hell I want.” Darby shrugged. “And that’s what landed me in my current mess.”
Roy looked her intently in the eye, his expression softening. “You’re a brave kid,” he said. “I’ll give you that.”
“Please,” she scoffed. “I can’t even—”
“Son of a bitch.” The venom in Roy’s tone brought her up short. His knobby knuckles had gone white as he clutched the teacup. His jaw creaked and popped as his teeth ground together.
Darby pried the cup from his hand, afraid he might be having a stroke, until she followed his gaze. Through the murky window, she saw Ethan and a stunning middle-aged woman with a chic blonde bob standing on the sidewalk across the street from Roy’s shop. The woman had her arms crossed and was shaking her head emphatically while Ethan gestured wildly with his hands.
