“But mostly I can’t believe that you didn’t tell me. Big news like that.” He was squeezing her shoulder now, just a little bit at first, and then a little bit more, and then hard enough that it really hurt, and then enough that it really, really hurt. She tried to wiggle out from under his grasp but she couldn’t, he had her too tight, his face was close to hers and she could smell his beery breath. She could see the red vessels in the whites of his eyes.
Then the bell on the door dinged again—Mary still hadn’t turned the sign to the CLOSED side. Please please please she said to herself as she was turning around. Mary wasn’t a religious person and she’d never been taken to church as a child and she didn’t really know how to pray, so imagine her surprise when she saw an angel step through the door.
“Well now, look who it is,” said Josh. “It’s Charlie goddamn Sargent.”
“Hey,” said Charlie, nodding at the two of them. “I just came in looking to see if you had any of those lobster cookies, Mary.”
“No cookies,” said Josh. “Sorry.” He shrugged. “All out. We’re closing. Isn’t that right, Mary? It’s closing time.”
“You okay here, Mary?” asked Charlie, looking back and forth between the two of them. Josh had removed his hand from her shoulder and she reached up and rubbed the spot he’d been squeezing—geez, it hurt. She bet a bruise was forming, a big one.
“She’s okay,” said Josh. “She’s great. We’re discussing some happy news we just got, that’s all.”
Charlie coughed; the cough was obviously manufactured to buy a moment. That seemed suddenly ridiculously thoughtful to Mary, that fake little cough, and she felt her eyes fill. Charlie said, “I didn’t ask you, Josh. I asked Mary here.”
“Closing time, Charlie,” said Josh. “We’re all closed up here for the night.” He smiled, and Mary remembered how she used to think that smile was a sign of Josh’s charm. It seemed like another person who’d fallen for that. Well, it was another person: a younger, more innocent, less pregnant person.
“Thanks for your input, Josh, but I’m not leaving here until I hear from Mary herself. If it’s all the same to you.”
“It’s not,” said Josh. He came around from behind the counter and Mary saw that the two men were pretty evenly matched in height. “It’s not all the same to me at all.”
Charlie ignored that. “So I’m just going to ask again: You okay here, Mary?”
Right then it seemed like the world switched to slow motion from the regular speed it had been running on, giving Mary time to think and consider before she answered. Mary looked at Charlie Sargent and saw the gray stubble around his chin and the anchor tattoo on his forearm. She noticed how strong he was; his forearm was thick and muscled and biceps made hills in his upper arms. She saw the way he was looking at her—it was the way she imagined that a good father would look at his teenage daughter when he was trying to help her work out something confusing about the world. The unexpected kindness of that look from a man she barely knew was almost too much to take: here was an almost stranger, a good man, who wasn’t going to leave her alone if she needed him, who was asking if she was all right.
“I’m not sure,” she said finally, and Charlie stepped a little closer to Josh. Mary’s shoulder throbbed, and she touched it, and her head was throbbing too, and there was blood rushing into her ears, and then she said, “I mean, no. No, everything is not okay.”
She heard Josh’s sharp intake of breath. She thought of the lady in the clinic with her list of questions; she thought of the posters on the wall of the clinic’s bathroom. Silence hides violence. She could be one of those women in the blink of an eye, the twist of an arm behind a back. Anyone could. She cleared her throat and said, “Everything is not okay, and I don’t feel safe.”
“Got it,” said Charlie calmly. Mary didn’t meet Josh’s eyes, but she heard that under his breath he said, What the fuck, Mary? “Josh,” Charlie said. “I want you to get the hell out of here.”
Josh said, “Mare?” and she almost wavered then because his little-boy voice was back, the one that made Mary feel like she could take care of him, but then she touched her stomach and thought eleven weeks and palate and hair follicles.
“I’m not going anywhere,” said Josh. “Last time I checked, Charlie, you didn’t own this place.”
Mary stared at the anchor tattoo on Charlie’s forearm.
“Doesn’t matter what I own or don’t own,” said Charlie. “Matters what I told you to do.”
“She’s with me,” said Josh. “Motherfucker.”
Josh started toward Charlie then and Mary saw him raise his hand, his fist closed, and she thought, That’s it. He’s going to kill Charlie Sargent and then he’s going to kill me. Weirdly, she even had time to think: How am I going to tell Eliza that her father is dead because of me?
But Charlie was faster. And he punched Josh on the side of the face so hard that Mary heard a crunch and Josh fell back against table three, his elbows hitting the table, his feet sliding out from underneath. Two of the chairs clattered over and Josh struggled to get up. He had one hand on his chin, and Mary’s first stupid thought was to run for ice. Her second thought was that Charlie was leaning over Josh to help him up.
But although he was leaning over him, he wasn’t helping. He was talking to him almost softly, sort of gently, and he was saying, “I want you to get the hell out of this café and after that I want you to get the hell out of this town. We know you been messing with people’s traps, we know all about that, and now that I see how you’re treating Mary here….You can take a day or two to tie up your affairs, or whatever else you need to do, and then I want you to go, and I don’t want you to come back. We don’t ever want to see your face around this harbor again. We don’t need you here and we don’t want you here. You hear me?” Then Charlie stopped and looked at Mary and said, “Unless I made some sort of mistake. Mary?”
Mary touched her stomach and thought, Little fingers, little toes. She said, “No. No mistake.”
Josh had by then pulled himself to his feet and there was a stream of blood coming from his nose and maybe his mouth too but it was hard to tell. He made a noise that sounded almost like a growl and then he stomped his foot—he stomped his foot, like a child!—and he left the café; it was clear to Mary and probably to Charlie that he would have slammed the door if it hadn’t been the kind of quietly self-closing door that didn’t allow itself to be slammed. But he did punch the glass on the way out.
There was a moment after Josh was gone that Mary stared at Charlie and Charlie stared back at Mary and the only sound was the refrigerator and Mary’s breathing and Charlie’s too. Then whatever adrenaline had been shooting through Mary left all at once and she felt weak enough that she had to grip the counter again.
“Now, sit down,” said Charlie. He lowered himself heavily into a chair at table three. His cheeks had gone saggy and he tipped his head forward and closed his eyes.
“Are you okay?” asked Mary.
“Just a little dizzy.” He squeezed his eyes shut. “It’ll pass. Sit with me.”
Mary said, “There’s blood on the floor, I have to clean it up.”
“Later.”