By Clara Langford. A free reader bonus.

Bonus Scene — The Walleye Supper

Common Ground at Mercy General · Clara Langford · Mercy General Series, Book 4 A newsletter reader-magnet bonus scene. Takes place a few weeks after the close of the book. Linda POV. ~1,500 words.

The place on Third did not have a name, or it had one and nobody used it, because Helen Wahlund’s niece had painted GOOD FOOD on the window in the same blue as the bakery down the block and the town had decided that was answer enough.

Linda got there first. She was always first. She had come from the hospital, though it was Saturday and she had promised herself and Olivia both that she would not, and she had stayed only twenty minutes past when she meant to, which for Linda Okafor was a kind of restraint she wanted noticed and knew nobody would notice, because that was the whole trouble with getting better at a thing quietly. She took the two-top by the window and hung her coat on the back of the chair and sat with her hands around a water glass and looked at the empty chair across from her, and did not feel the draft off it that she had spent sixteen years feeling off empty chairs.

That was the thing she kept catching herself checking, the way you keep testing a tooth that stopped aching. The chair was empty because a man was coming, and a coming is a different weight than a gone.

He came in loud, or he came in the way that was loud for a room this size, which was talking before the door had finished shutting behind him. He had stopped to say something to the niece at the counter and gotten her laughing, and he had stopped again at a table of farmers by the kitchen and been waved at by two of them who three months ago would not have known his name, and he arrived at the two-top with his coat already half off one shoulder and his hair doing the thing it did and a look on his face like he had gotten away with something.

“You beat me,” Gabe said, sitting.

“I always beat you.”

“I stopped for gas. And then Del Prokop wanted to tell me about his mother’s hip.” He got the coat the rest of the way off and hung it crooked over hers, and did not straighten it. “She’s doing fine. The hip. In case you were going to lose sleep.”

“Mm,” Linda said, and let the corner of her mouth do the thing, and watched him watch her do it, because he had learned over the summer to watch for it, the small tokens she spent instead of the big words other people used, and he collected them now the way some men collected the numbers on a scoreboard.

The niece came with the specials, which were the walleye and the walleye, and a soup Linda did not catch the name of because Gabe was already saying they would have the walleye, both of them, because he had been promised a walleye supper in an office in September with the county’s paper barely dry and he had been waiting three weeks and one canceled Saturday for it and he was not going to be talked into soup.

“There was no canceled Saturday,” Linda said, when the niece had gone.

“There was. The Friday the generator threw a code and you went in.”

“That was necessary.”

“It was Friday. This is the Saturday it pushed.” He said it without any edge on it, which was the part that got past her guard every time, the way he could name the thing she did and set it down between them gently, like a plate, and not make her defend it. “I’m not keeping score, Linda. I’m just glad we got here.”

She looked at him across the small table with the window going dark behind him and the town’s one main street doing its Saturday nothing outside, a truck, a dog, Bobby Kessler locking the hardware and rattling the door twice out of habit, and she thought about how many Saturdays she had let go by in sixteen years without once sitting at a two-top in her own town, because a woman who ran a hospital alone did not sit where the whole of Cedar Falls could see the empty chair across from her and do its quiet arithmetic. She had not been hiding. She would not have called it hiding. She had been sparing herself a thing, was all, the way you spare yourself the sight of a wound you have decided to just keep walking on.

“I’m glad we got here too,” she said. It came out plainer than she meant it, and she let it, because plain was the currency he had taught her landed, and she was practicing.

Her phone lit on the table between them. She turned it face down out of an old reflex, the director’s reflex, the whole building living in that small glass rectangle, and then she caught herself doing it and turned it back over, because it was Saturday, and she had promised, and the name on it was not the hospital.

It was a text from a number she did not have saved, and it took her a second to place it. Tell my dad the porch pictures were crooked and I fixed them and he owes me. And under it, a photo, a wall in a rented half-house on the edge of town, three framed things hung level, a hospital in a coat of blue paint, a girl and a man at a lake a long time ago, and a fourth nail with nothing on it yet.

Linda looked at it for a moment longer than the joke needed.

“Marisol,” she said, and turned the phone so he could see, and watched Gabe Navarro read three lines from his daughter and go still in the way he went still, which was rare, and always cost him something, and always looked, on him, like a man setting a heavy thing down carefully so it would not clatter.

“She’s got a key,” he said, to the phone, not to Linda. “I gave her a key. Last month. I didn’t want to make a thing of it in case she never used it.” He cleared his throat and it did not entirely work. “She used it.”

“She used it,” Linda agreed.

He put the phone down and did not answer it right away, which she understood, because some things you do not answer fast or you spend the feeling before you have finished having it. He looked out the window at the dark street, and then he looked back at her, and his eyes were doing a thing he was not going to comment on and neither was she, because they were both of them people who had learned to leave a person their privacy inside a public feeling.

“There’s a nail with nothing on it,” Linda said.

“There is.”

“You should put something on it.”

“I’ve got a summer’s worth of nothing on it,” Gabe said, and got his voice most of the way back. “I’m taking my time. Turns out I’ve got some.”

The walleye came. It was good, or it was the Cedar Falls good, which was the same thing said with less of a claim on it, fried the plain way with the lemon on the side and a scoop of something with dill in it that Linda decided not to ask about. Gabe ate like a man who had eaten in more motel rooms than kitchens and had only lately remembered that a meal could be an event and not a refueling, and he talked, the way he talked, about the co-op and the river town they had given to somebody else and the porch step he was still not sure he had fixed right, and Linda let it wash over her, the ordinary noise of a man who stayed, and put her fork down between bites the way she never did, because there was no one waiting on her tonight and nothing turning over slow in a basement she could hear from here.

“You’re quiet,” he said, at one point, not worried, just noticing, the way he noticed.

“I’m eating.”

“You’re doing a thing with your face.”

“I’m eating my supper,” Linda said, “in my town, on a Saturday, across a table from a man who talks too much, and I am, if you must have it spelled out, content, which is a word I have not had cause to use about myself in some years and would thank you not to make a fuss over.”

Gabe grinned like she had handed him the deed to the building, which was a look she was getting used to and had stopped pretending she disliked.

“I won’t make a fuss,” he said.

“You will.”

“I’ll make a small one.”

He reached across the little table, not for anything, just set his hand down open on the cloth near hers, an offer with no weight on it, the kind a person could take or leave, and Linda looked at it, that open hand of a man who had spent his whole life driving off in the morning and had decided, in front of a whole town, to stop, and she put her hand in it. Just for a moment. Just long enough. His fingers closed around hers the way you hold a thing you have been told is yours and are still, some late gold October, learning to believe it.

Outside, the town did its Saturday nothing. Nobody at the other tables made a thing of the director and the rumpled fella holding hands over the walleye. In Cedar Falls you did not make a thing of it. You noted it, and you set it beside the other things you knew, and you were, in your undemonstrative way, glad, and you passed the rye.

Thank you for coming back to Cedar Falls. If you’d like more scenes like this one, and to know when the next Mercy General book arrives, join Clara’s reader list at claralangfordauthor.com.