Friday's Harbor by Diane Hammond Read Free Book Online Page B

doll-sized cookie cutter she’d found once at a garage sale. It was still one of her most precious possessions and she wore it sometimes on a chain like a necklace.
    He’d been the one and only man who’d found her beautiful. When he died she’d begged to have his corneas transplanted in place of hers so for the rest of her life she would always see the world through his eyes—he’d been an organ donor, it would have been be completely legal—but the doctors had refused and the corneas had ended up going to someone else. She’d thought she would die of grief, and the thought had brought her comfort, but instead her mother had come down to Salem, packed up their apartment, and brought her and their little dachshund, Nelson, back to Libertine’s childhood home, a tiny post-war house in Portland, Oregon. She’d stayed in bed for three weeks, until finally her mother had lost her temper and said, This poor dog misses Larry, too, but you don’t see him moping. Get up and take him for a walk. She’d gotten up.
    She shut her laptop and rubbed her face and eyes. It dawned on her that she hadn’t eaten a real meal since yesterday. She remembered seeing a café as she came into town, so she packed up her computer, pulled on rubber boots and a rain poncho, and by backtracking found it five blocks away: the Oat Maiden.
    The minute she ducked inside she was enveloped in the aromas of childhood: pizza and chocolate chip cookies. The look of the place was playful—boldly painted tables with mismatched, whimsically painted chairs. It was empty except for a young couple huddled over a computer.
    A tall, thin man in his early forties with wild hair and a wistful overbite appeared with a menu. “It’s just starting to get dark out,” he said helpfully, “so, you know, you might want the celestial table.”
    Libertine followed him to a round table beneath the streaming plate-glass window and said, “Oh, it’s beautiful!” And it was: a midnight-colored sky was painted with extraordinarily detailed stars and an aurora borealis spanning the whole table. The man smiled shyly. “Did you paint this?”
    He nodded, nervously rolling the paper menu into a tube. “You don’t have to sit here if you don’t want to.” He gestured vaguely around the room.
    Impulsively, and because she had a quick premonition that she’d be here often, she said, “How about I sit here this time, and then every time I come in I’ll sit at a different table until I’ve been at all of them.”
    “Okay,” he said, and bolted back to the kitchen, apparently having scared himself with his forwardness.
    Libertine reviewed the menu, which consisted of thirty different pizza combinations and fifteen different types of chocolate chip cookies. Though she hoped the man who’d first helped her would come back—it was a rarity to meet someone even more socially awkward than she was—a young woman came to take her order instead.
    “Are you here for the whale?” she asked Libertine.
    “Pardon me?”
    “A killer whale came here today from South America. Colombia—is that South America or Central America?”
    “South America,” Libertine said. “I think I just saw him arrive. Can you tell me anything about him?”
    “Well, for starters they say he’s dying, but how bad can he be, if they’re bringing him all the way here?”
    “Didn’t this zoo used to have an elephant?” She remembered a flap a few years ago about a lone captive elephant at a small Washington zoo she’d never heard of before.
    “Yep,” the waitress said ruefully. “That’s us.”
    By the time Libertine was finished with her meal—and it always amazed her, even after all these years, how little time it took to eat when you were by yourself—she was exhausted enough that even the prospect of her awful motel room didn’t seem so bad. Without another sign from the whale that had brought her so far from home, she fell into bed and a deep, dreamless sleep.
    O NCE THE LAST of