The Breakwater

She had the six boxes stacked on the porch rail at half past nine, tied with kitchen string, and she would not let him carry more than three.

“I carry the ones I’m going to open,” Camille said. “You carry the spares. If you drop yours, I can still sell.”

“I’ve never dropped a box.”

“You’ve never carried one of mine.”

Gideon put his three on the back seat and wedged them with his overcoat. She got into the front with hers on her knees. She wore a clean white jacket with her name stitched over the pocket, and dark trousers, and the blue bandana. She had no folder with her, and no price list he could see. He had brought a notebook, and he put it in the door pocket where it would not look like much.

It was a bright, cool Thursday, the sixth of May, with a north wind and small hard clouds. The mud in the drive had finally set. On the north wing Paquette’s nephews were on the last of the step flashing, and the new valley shone like a penny from the road.

“He says tomorrow,” Gideon said. “Tight by the seventh, as written.”

“On what did he write it?”

“The back of a lumber receipt. It’s in the office.”

She nearly smiled at the windscreen, and then she looked out of her own window instead.

They had not been alone since the cold pantry. He had kept to his side of the lawn for five days and thought about very little else. He did not bring it up, and neither did she. She talked about the route. She wanted Shelburne Road and not the highway, because the highway had a frost heave north of Charlotte that would shake a kouign-amann out of its shape.

“Tell me the rules again,” he said, when they had passed Vergennes.

“You’re the driver. You carry. If somebody asks who you are, I’ll say you’re from the hotel company, which is true. You don’t mention a price or nod at one, and you don’t look pleased when I name it.”

“Do I look pleased?”

“On Saturday you looked pleased every time somebody bought a dozen. It’s a nice quality in a man at a till. It’s fatal in a negotiation.”

“I’ve done a few negotiations.”

“With banks. Banks expect you to look like that.” She settled the boxes on her knees. “These are people who buy butter. They can tell when somebody’s giving it away.”

The first café was on a side street off Church Street, with a red door and a chalkboard and a queue of students. It was called the Daily Round. The owner was a broad, cheerful woman of about fifty named Marguerite Roy, with reading glasses pushed up into grey hair, and she came round the counter with her arms out.

“You said no to me three years running. I’d given up.”

“I had nothing to sell you three years running,” Camille said. “Now I might. Have you ten minutes and a clean plate?”

They went to a table at the back. Gideon stood by the wall with his three boxes and tried to look like a driver.

Camille untied the string on the first box and did not say a word about what was in it. She put one croissant on the plate, tore it in half and held the cut side toward the window, so that the light came through it. Then she set it down in front of Marguerite Roy and waited.

He had sat through a great many pitches, and most of them began with a slide. He had never seen anyone open with silence. The woman ate half the croissant. She looked at the crumbs on the plate. She ate the other half.

“What are you getting for them at your window?”

“Four seventy-five.”

“I sell mine for four. They come off a truck from Montreal, frozen, and I bake them off.”

“I know. I’ve eaten one.” Camille said it without any edge. “You’ll sell mine for five and a quarter, and you’ll put a card by the till that says where they come from. People in this town already drive forty minutes for them. You’ll be saving them the drive.”

“And what do you want from me?”

“Two seventy-five each for croissants. Three fifty for kouign-amann. Ten dozen a delivery at the least, Tuesdays and Fridays, on your counter by seven. It starts Tuesday, the first of June.”

Marguerite Roy pulled her glasses down onto her nose. “My Montreal man is a dollar ninety.”

“Your Montreal man uses a butter blend. I use eighty-three percent butter from a creamery in Addison County, and a third of the weight of that croissant is butter. I can show you the invoice. My cost on what you just ate is eighty-two cents before anybody’s wages. I don’t go below two seventy-five, because below it I’m paying you to take them.”

“Sale or return?”

“No. What you order, you’ve bought. If you have six left at closing, order less on Friday. I’d sooner you sold out at ten than threw mine in a bin at four.”

“That’s a hard bargain for a first order.”

“It’s the same for the tenth one. I don’t have an opening price and a real price.” Camille put a kouign-amann on the plate. “And I’d ask one more thing. The inn has a card. It’s the size of a postcard, and it says there are rooms. I’d like it by your till.”

Marguerite Roy bit into the kouign-amann. The caramel cracked. She shut her eyes and said something devout in French, and Camille answered in the same language, and they both laughed.

“Ten dozen, twice a week,” the woman said. “Six of the croissants and four of these. If I sell out by nine I’m calling you and raising it.”

“If you sell out by nine I’ll have raised it before you call.”

They shook hands. Camille took an order pad from her jacket pocket, the white-and-yellow kind, wrote it out and tore off the copy. Gideon looked at the yellow page in the other woman’s hand and felt it in his back pocket.

“Who’s the tall one?” Marguerite Roy asked, at the door.

“He’s from the hotel company. He’s carrying boxes.”

“He carries them very nicely,” said Marguerite Roy.

The second café was down toward the lake, a narrow modern place called Ferry Dock Coffee, all pale wood and young men with beards. The owner was thirty at most and had a spreadsheet open before they sat down. He wanted a lower price for a longer contract. He wanted exclusivity south of Main Street. He wanted to know whether she would consider a smaller croissant.

Camille listened to all of it. Then she tore a croissant in half and held it to the light, exactly as before.

“No to the smaller one. No to exclusivity; the Daily Round is eight blocks from you and neither of you will notice. The price is two seventy-five.” She let him eat. “I’ll give you one thing, because you asked properly. If you take ten dozen twice a week for the whole season and never miss a payment, I’ll hold that price for you until the first of November, whatever butter does. Butter’s going up. That’s worth more to you than a dime off.”

The young man looked at his spreadsheet for some time. Then he closed the laptop and ordered ten dozen, twice a week.

That was forty dozen. It was the figure on the page in the office, in her handwriting, and she had hit it in two calls without moving a cent.

The third stop was the grocer, a handsome shop with a cheese counter on Pine Street. Gideon carried a box in and carried it out again nine minutes later, unopened. The man had wanted forty percent off her price and the right to send back whatever did not sell.

“You walked away,” Gideon said, on the pavement. It was the first thing he had said aloud in an hour and a half.

“He’d have had my croissants in a plastic clamshell under a strip light, going stale at half price by three in the afternoon, with the inn’s name on the label.” She was walking fast. “Everybody who bought one would have thought that was what I make. I’d lose more at the window than he’d ever pay me.”

“You price from the butter.”

“I price from what it costs to make it properly, and then from what happens to it after it leaves my hands. That second part isn’t a number, but it’s most of what I’m selling.” She glanced at him. “You may talk now. You were very good. You only looked pleased once.”

“When?”

“When she said the thing in French.”

“What did she say?”

“That it was a sin and she’d take ten dozen.” Camille stopped at the car. She was flushed, and her eyes were bright, and he thought he had never in his life seen anyone so entirely good at the thing they did. “Forty dozen a week. I said I could do it and I didn’t know. I have to be back by two for dinner prep.”

It was five to twelve. He looked down the hill at the lake.

“Give me half an hour first,” he said. “There’s something I should have told you on the first day, and it’s to do with the inn. It’s on your list, more or less. I’d like to say it somewhere that isn’t your kitchen.”

She considered him for a long moment. Then she took the spare box out of his hands, untied it and handed him a croissant.

“Half an hour,” she said. “Eat that. You haven’t had one since you came, and I’ve noticed.”

They walked down to the waterfront. At the north end of the park a breakwater of big grey stone blocks ran out into the lake, with the wind coming straight down it. There was nobody else on it. Across the water, twenty miles south of where he was used to seeing them, the Adirondacks stood up blue and sharp. He ate the croissant as they walked, and it was so much better than he remembered that he could not speak for a moment.

She sat down on a block near the end with her knees drawn up and her jacket collar turned against the wind. He stayed on his feet, because he had found it easier to say it standing.

“In May of 2021 I’d been in the company’s acquisitions office for four years,” he said. “I’d bought two hotels for my father and I’d done it well. I’d also spent a year on a plan of my own. Fourteen city hotels all make their money the same way, from the same people, and they all go down together when those people stop travelling. I wanted the company to buy small old inns. I wanted places a hundred years old with twenty or thirty rooms, in the kind of country people drive to, bought cheaply because nobody had looked after them. We’d leave the innkeepers in charge and spend our money on the roofs. I had forty pages on it. I had a list of properties.”

She had turned her head to look at him.

“He let me present it to the full board. I thought that was a good sign. He let me get to the last page. Then he took his glasses off and said, ‘Thank you, Gideon. That’s a boy’s hobby. When you want to talk about a business, the grown-ups will be here.’ One or two of them laughed, because he’d meant them to.”

“In front of everyone.”

“In front of everyone who’d known me since I was in short trousers. I was twenty-seven.” He could still see the table. “I’d like to tell you I answered him. I picked up my forty pages and walked out. I went home and put my phone in a drawer, so that he couldn’t ring it and I couldn’t hope he would. I took my mother’s name, because I didn’t want his for a while. Then I drove north with one bag. There was a list of inns in my head. The Larkspur had been on the third page of it. I stopped there for a night, and Winnie had a notice at the front desk for a sailing instructor.”

“You’d been sailing all your life.”

“Since I was six. It was the one thing I could do that had nothing to do with him.” The wind pulled at his coat. “I meant to stay a fortnight and be nobody. I wanted to find out whether there was anybody under the name. There was. He taught children to tie bowlines and ate at the staff table, and a cook used to run up the boathouse stair with something hot in a tea towel. I was happy, Camille. I’d never been happy before in any way I could have pointed to, and I haven’t been since. It lasted eleven weeks, and it was with you. I should have told you that on the first day, before the flour.”

She did not say anything. Her arms were tight round her knees.

“On the sixteenth of August he had a stroke at his desk. It was a Monday. My sister got the inn’s number out of my mother, who’d guessed where I was, and Winnie came down the lawn with a flashlight to get me. I drove all night. He never woke up. I sat with him for four days and he never opened his eyes, and on the Friday he died. The last thing he ever said to me was about grown-ups.”

“Gideon.”

“I’m nearly done. I’m not telling you so you’ll be sorry for me.” He made himself keep looking at her. “I’d been hiding while it happened. I decided that was the crime. I thought if I’d been in that building he’d have had somebody to shout at, and it might have come out differently. That was nonsense, but I believed it for years. So I punished myself in the most thorough way I could find. I took the one good thing I’d had and I cut it off. I told myself I didn’t deserve to pick up a telephone and hear your voice. I called that conscience. It was cowardice, and I’m the one who dressed it up.”

A gull went over. Down the breakwater a halyard was slapping against a mast in the marina, a sound he had known all his life.

“The four inns we bought on the first of April are the plan,” he said. “It’s the same forty pages. It took me five and a half years to get it past the board, and I did it the week Northeast Heritage went under. I could have bid for three of their four. Everyone who advises me said three. The Larkspur is in the box because I put it there. I’d like to say I did it for the nineteen people. I did it because I couldn’t stand to see it go to someone who’d never been up the boathouse stair. That’s the truth, and you asked me for true numbers.”

She got up off the stone. She was not crying. She was white round the mouth, the way she had been in the kitchen the night of the butter, and he braced for it.

“You should have called the inn,” she said.

Her voice shook. It was the first time he had heard it shake.

“I walked to the mailbox every day until November. I’d have taken a telephone call from a man named anything. I’d have taken it from a coward. You didn’t have to deserve it. You only had to dial.”

“I know.”

“Did you ever once pick it up? Did you ever get as far as the number?”

“Every day,” he said.

She stared at him.

“Every day for the first year. I knew it by heart. I’d get to the last digit and put it down. After that it was most days. Then it was Sundays, and your birthday, and the Fourth of July.” His own voice was not doing what he told it. “I’ve dialled six digits of that number more times than I’ve done anything else in my life. I never dialled the seventh, and I’m not asking you to count the six.”

She did not say anything. She took the two steps between them.

She put her hand flat on his chest first, as if she meant to push him back. He stood absolutely still and kept his hands at his sides. Then her fingers closed in the front of his coat, and she came up on her toes and kissed him.

It was brief. Her mouth was cold from the wind and tasted of butter and salt. It was over before he had finished understanding it, and she had dropped back onto her heels with her fist still in his coat and her eyes wide and furious, an inch below his.

“Camille,” he said, in the way that was hers.

She made a small sound and kissed him again.

It was not brief this time. Her hand slid up from his coat to the back of his neck and pulled him down, and her mouth opened under his, warm now. He had kept his hands still for a month, and he could not do it any longer. He put one at her waist and the other against her cheek, where the loose curl was. He felt her press into his palm. She kissed the way she did everything, thoroughly, with her whole attention. He could feel her heart going through two coats. Six years went out of him all at once. His knees were not entirely steady, and he did not care who on the whole waterfront saw it.

She was the one who ended it. She took her mouth from his slowly and stood for a moment with her forehead against his collarbone, breathing hard. Then she stepped back out of his hands. He let her go at once.

The wind came between them again. Her lips were red, and she put the back of her wrist against them and took it away.

“I started that,” she said. “I’m not going to pretend I didn’t.”

“No.”

“And I’m not sorry, which is a problem I’ll deal with by myself.” She pulled her jacket straight. Her hands were shaking and she let him see it. “But listen to me, Gideon. It changes nothing about Saturdays.”

“I didn’t think it would.”

“It doesn’t buy you one, and it doesn’t knock one off. You’ve had two. The day after tomorrow is three, at eight o’clock, and if you aren’t on that dock she takes two pieces of glass out of a jar and I’ll watch her do it. What I do on a breakwater is about me. What she gets is about her. I won’t have them mixed.”

“Eight o’clock,” he said. “I’ll be standing on the grass by half past seven, in a life jacket, feeling like a fool. I was last week, too.”

She let out a breath that was nearly a laugh. Then she turned and looked down the long line of stone toward the town.

“I have to be back by two,” she said. “I’ve lamb to bone and forty dozen to work out. You can drive, but I’m still not ready to talk about it.”

“All right.”

She walked ahead of him down the breakwater with her collar up and the wind in her bandana. He followed two paces behind. She had called him Gideon twice in the last minute, and he did not think she had noticed.
***