Jodie Picoult - Salem Falls

“Huh? Oh, you mean her mom dying. Actually, it gave her something to throw herself into, after Chloe.” Delilah looked up. “You do know about Chloe?”

Jack had heard Addie speaking to Chloe in the tender, idiomatic language of a mother. “Her daughter, right? I haven’t met her yet, but I figured she was around here somewhere.”

“Chloe was Addie’s little girl. She died when she was ten. Just about ruined Addie-she spent two years holed up in her house, nothing but her own upset for company. Until her mom passed and it was up to her to take care of Roy and the diner.”

Jack pressed the cloth against his cut so hard he could feel his pulse. He thought about the plate he’d stolen fries from today, heaped with food no one had touched. He thought of all the times he’d heard Addie talking to a girl who didn’t exist. “But-”

Delilah held up a hand. “I know. Most people around here think Addie’s gone off the deep end.”

“You don’t?”

The cook chewed on her lower lip for a moment, staring at Jack’s bandaged hand. “I think,” she said finally, “that all of us have got our ghosts.”

Before shutting off the grill and leaving with Darla, Delilah had made Jack a burger. He was sitting on the stool next to Chloe’s now, watching Addie close up. She moved from table to table like a bumblebee, refilling the sugar containers and the ketchup bottles, keeping time to the tune of a commercial on the overhead TV.

She’d come back from her dinner engagement silent and disturbed-so much so that at first Jack was certain she knew about him. But as he watched her attack her job with a near frenzy, he realized that she was only being penitent, as if she had to work twice as hard to make up for taking a few hours off.

Jack lifted the burger to his mouth and took a bite. Addie was now hard at work on the salt shakers, mixing the contents with rice so that the salt grains wouldn’t stick. On the television, the Jeopardy! theme music swelled through the speakers. Without intending to, Jack found himself sitting higher in his seat. Alex Trebek walked onto the stage in his natty suit and greeted the three contestants, then pointed to the board, where the computerized jingle heralded the first round’s categories.

A method of working this metal was not mastered until 1500 B.C.

“What is iron?” Jack said.

A contestant on the television rang in. “What is iron?” the woman repeated.

“That’s correct!” Alex Trebek answered.

Addie looked up at Jack, then at the TV, and smiled. “Jeopardy! fan?”

Jack shrugged. “I guess.”

In the 1950s, this Modesto, CA, company became the first winery with its own bottle-making plant.

“What is E. & J. Gallo?”

Addie set down the salt container she’d been holding. “You’re more than just a fan,” she said, coming to stand beside him. “You’re really good.”

Nine of the twelve chapters in this book of the Bible set in Babylon revolve around dreams and visions.

“What is Isaiah?” Addie guessed.

Jack shook his head. “What is Daniel?”

In the original Hebrew of his Lamentations, each verse in three chapters begins with a new letter, from aleph on.

“Who is Jeremiah?”

“You know a lot about the Bible,” Addie said. “Are you a priest or something?”

He had to laugh out loud at that. “No.”

“Some kind of professor?”

Jack blotted his mouth with a napkin. “I’m a dishwasher.”

“What were you yesterday, then?”

A prisoner, thought Jack, but he looked into his lap and said, “Just another guy doing something he didn’t really like doing.”

She smiled, content to let it go. “Lucky for me.” Addie took the mop that Jack had brought from the kitchen and she began to swish it over the linoleum.

“I’ll do it.”

“You go ahead and eat,” Addie said. “I don’t mind.”

It was these small kindnesses that would break him. Jack could feel the fissures beginning even now, the hard shell he’d promised to keep in place so that no one, ever, would get close enough to hurt him again. But here was Addie, taking him on faith, doing his work to boot-even though, according to Delilah, fate had screwed her over, too.

He wanted to tell her he understood, but after almost a year of near silence, words did not come easily for him. So very slowly, he took a handful of French fries and set them on Chloe’s untouched plate. After a moment, he added his pickle. When he finished, he found Addie staring at him, her hands balanced on top of the mop, her body poised for flight.

She believed he was mocking her; it was right there in the deepest part of her eyes, bruised and tender. Her fingers wrung the wooden handle.

“I . . . I owed her, from this afternoon,” he said.

“Who?” The word was less than a whisper.

Jack’s eyes never left hers. “Chloe.”

Addie didn’t respond. Instead, she picked up the mop and began to swab with a vengeance. She cleaned until the floor gleamed, until the lights of the ceiling bounced off the thin residue of Pine-Sol, until it hurt Jack to watch her acting fearless and indifferent because she reminded him so much of himself.

By the time Addie pulled the door shut and locked it behind her, it was snowing outside. Fist-size flakes, the kind that hooked together in midair like trick skydivers. Inwardly, she groaned. It meant getting up early tomorrow to shovel the walkways.

Jack stood a distance away, the lapels of his sports jacket pulled up to shield his neck from the cold. Addie was a firm believer that someone’s past deserved to stay in the past-she herself was surely a poster child for keeping secrets. She didn’t know what kind of man walked around in a New Hampshire winter without a coat; she’d never met someone who was bright enough to know the answers to every Jeopardy! question but willing to work for minimum wage in a menial job. If Jack wanted to lie low, she could offer him that.

And she wouldn’t think about his unprecedented reaction to Chloe.

“Well,” she said, “See you tomorrow morning.”

Jack didn’t seem to hear. His back was turned, his arms stretched out in front of him. Addie realized, with some shock, that he was catching snowflakes on his tongue.

When was the last time she’d thought of snow as anything but a hindrance?

She opened the door of her car, turned the ignition and carefully pulled the car away. In retrospect, she did not know what made her look back into the rearview mirror. If not for the yellow eye of the streetlight in front of the diner, she might never have seen him sitting on the bare curb with his head bowed.

With a curse, she took a hard left, curving around the green to the front of the diner again.“Do you need a ride?”

“No. Thanks, though.”

Addie’s fingers flexed on the steering wheel. “You haven’t got a place to stay, have you?” Before he could protest, she got out of the car. “It so happens I know of a room for rent. The bad news is you’re going to have a roommate whose disposition isn’t always very sunny. The good news is if you get hungry in the middle of the night, there’s a hell of a kitchen you can raid.” As Addie spoke, she unlocked the door of the diner again and stepped over the threshold. She found Jack holding back, haloed by the falling snow. “Look. My father could use the company. You’d actually be doing me a favor.”

Jack didn’t move a muscle. “Why?”

“Why? Well, because when he spends too much time alone he gets . . . upset.”

“No. Why are you doing this for me?”

Addie met his suspicion head-on. She was doing this because she knew what it was like to hit rock bottom and to need someone to give you a leg up. She was doing this because she understood how a world jammed with phones and e-mail and faxes could still leave you feeling utterly alone. But she also knew if she said either of these things, Jack’s pride would have him halfway down the street before she could take another breath.