STELLA

Abe had large hands that he didn’t know how to handle and a beard that made him look like a lumberjack. His eyes were quick and scared like live brown creatures trapped under the glass of his pupils. That’s every one of us, I thought. Trapped. For those first weeks he lumbered through his own rooms with shy surprise, nervous and uncertain, blinking at us like strangers. He apologized for his place, how it wasn’t very nice. Personal was what he said. It wasn’t very personal.

In truth, it was empty. His voice had a skittering quality, like it was running away from the huge shadow of his body.

The first day Tilly couldn’t stop touching his marble counters. “You’ve got a pretty place,” she said. “I knew you would.”

We brought home noodles for dinner, but he was late. The noodles got cold. We watched the clock. We didn’t eat for two hours, and then we finally did. We had to reheat the food. Brown gravy splattered the inside of the microwave, and Tilly spent ten minutes scrubbing it clean. She nearly cried from too much hot sauce. Her gaze was pained and restless, moving to the door and back again, flicking to her wrist to check the pass of hours, minutes, the ticking hand of single seconds.

“Maybe he’s not coming,” I said. “He could be spending the night somewhere else.”

“He’s shy with women,” she said. “I’ve never heard about anyone.” She hesitated. “He said he was coming home.”

I know he did come home eventually, though I don’t know when. I didn’t see much of him for a few weeks. He was gone early and home late. I saw his cereal bowls in the sink. He walked to work at dawn.

“Cereal in the dark!” Tilly said. “Unbelievable.”

The first thing she did every morning was wash his bowl and put it on the rack to dry. But it was clear he made her proud. “He turned out like his dad,” she said. “Never stops to take a breath.” She knew it wasn’t the money that kept him going. It was something else. “He had a lot of shame growing up,” she said. “That can make a person, if it’s strong enough.”

I got a job at a bed-and-breakfast called the Seven Sisters Inn. I found an advertisement in the local paper. The job title was “Innkeeper (Assistant).”

My shift ended at midnight, but the inn was pretty quiet after the end of our twilight wine and cheese. Mainly I answered the phone, booking rooms and helping people figure out what they wanted: a view of the bridge, a view of the bay, a canopy bed, or a Jacuzzi. “We need king-size,” one woman told me firmly. “We can’t do any smaller.”