Chapter 7: The Lean Years
The first winter after Lila left was the quietest Lou could remember. Snow came off the harbor in sideways sheets, and some days the lunch rush was three people and a dog that did not belong to any of them.
"You're mopping the same spot, boss," Bea said, not looking up from her crossword.
"I'm thinking."
"You're brooding. One of them scares the customers."
"What customers?"
Bea folded the paper and surveyed the room: Old Harlan asleep in his booth, a trucker nursing unpaid coffee, nobody else. "See. A crowd."
Lou leaned on the mop. "Harbor's half empty. The Coopers tied up their boat last month."
"The ocean ain't closing. It's taking a breather."
"Fish don't take breathers."
"Then get a new joke. That one's dying on the vine."
It was their rhythm, and it warmed the room better than the radiator did. At dusk Lou counted the register twice, the way a person double-checks a door that keeps getting kicked in.
She was behind on the mortgage. Marco's hospital bills had followed him out of this world, and Lou paid what she could and told Frankie the truth, because Frankie could smell a lie like a burnt roux.
"We could do a cheaper short rib," he said one slow Tuesday.
"My husband built this menu with a pencil and a grudge. I'm not cheapening it."
"Just saying."
"I heard what you said." She touched his shoulder, brief and hard. "You take a pay cut and I'll take it personally."
He nodded and went back to the onions. The onions made his eyes water and he did not wipe them. Lou pretended not to notice.
Spring came and the harbor woke up, but not all the way. Old Harlan cornered the trucker at the counter one April morning.
"Caught a cod off Pemaquid in seventy-eight, big as a Buick."
"You tell that one every April," Bea said.
"And every April it's truer."
"Harlan," Lou called from the pass, "if that cod was real, Port Ellery would have a statue."
"There's a plaque in the bait shop. The plaque don't lie."
The laughter was real, and for a minute the Beacon felt like itself. But the boats numbered fewer each year, and the fishermen who still tied up counted their change with the care of men doing long division in their heads.
Howard Pike was polite the way only a man holding a ledger can be polite, and when he called that October she already knew.
"Louise. We're showing two months."
"I know what you're showing, Howard."
"I'm not the villain in this."
"Nobody said villain." She twisted the phone cord until her fingertip went white. "Harbor's been slow. It'll come around."
"It always has," he said, almost kind, which was worse. "I can give you until the end of the quarter. After that my hands are tied."
"Your hands were tied in ninety-eight when Marco asked for the first loan, and you found the scissors."
"That was a different decade, Lou."
She hung up. Bea leaned in the doorway.
"That bad?"
"It's fine."
"Lou."
"It's fine," Lou said, and went back to the soup, because the soup never asked questions.
That summer, the first glossy letter arrived.
Thick cream envelope, sunrise logo stamped in gold. Lou was sorting bills when Bea slid it across with two fingers, like it might be contagious.
"Somebody thinks we're fancy," Bea said.
Lou turned it over. SUNRISE STACKS, Regional Development Office. She held it a long moment. She did not open it.
"Junk," she said.
"Lou."
"Junk." She filed it in the bottom drawer of the desk, under the unpaid invoices and on top of nothing, and stood there a minute with her hand on the wood.
"You want to talk about it?" Bea asked from the doorway.
"Nope."
"You know what Marco would have said about a franchise?"
"I know exactly what he would have said, and I can't repeat it in a place that serves children."
"There are no children here," Bea said. "There haven't been in a while."
The words landed blunt and true. Lou laughed, a short surprised sound that turned into something else halfway through, and wiped her eyes with the back of her wrist.
The years kept coming, and the Beacon kept its lights on, though some winters it felt like spite was paying the electric bill. Frankie patched the roof himself and would not take a dime. Harlan got thinner and his stories got longer.
And every night, after Bea hung up her apron and Frankie killed the grills, Lou left the back screen door unlocked. She told herself it was for the air, even in January, which fooled exactly no one. On the worst nights she set a plate under a tea towel by the pass, just in case, and threw it out in the morning.
Bea caught her at it in the fourth winter.
"She's in Rockland, Lou," Bea said, gentle in a way that almost hurt more than the blunt version. "She's not coming through that door."
"I know."
"Then why?"
Lou looked at the plate, at the door, at the painted rule above the pass that the years had faded but never erased. "Because somebody might," she said.
Bea came around the counter and stood beside her, then bumped Lou's shoulder, light as a boat nudging a dock.
"You fed her a hundred times. The ledger's square, boss."
"It was never a ledger," Lou said.
"I know." Bea carried the plate back to the kitchen. "That's why you're still standing."
Lou locked up, and on her way out she stopped at the pass and looked up at Marco's words. Nobody leaves hungry. The paint was chipped and the town was thinner and the bills were taller, but the rule was still there, and so was she. Not a victory. Something quieter, and maybe more stubborn: the light still on in the window, the door still unlocked, the soup still hot. Enough for one more year.