Ferry Weather

The first book he wrote about her was true. He left it on her step, and nothing came back. This one is fiction, and he says so on page one.

Wes Guidry keeps the lawns on Fishers Island - nine miles of grass cut all winter for people who come in July. He lives at the dead end of a short lane in Mystic, Connecticut, across a cedar fence from Céline Marchetti, a French teacher from Lyon who keeps the minutes for the town's zoning board, and who ends four years with him in three lines on school paper. Please don't come to the house.

He doesn't. That is the whole of the plot, and the hardest thing he has ever done.

He stands at her gate with her key in the lock for eleven minutes and doesn't turn it. He walks a letter to the mailbox and puts it in the glove box instead. He raises the fence a foot so he'll stop looking at her window, takes it down nine days later, and is fined for it before a Board where she types every word he says and never looks up. And slowly the town begins to read like a letter addressed to him: a ferry schedule that moves twenty-five minutes, a French film on the marquee, a radio playing in a shuttered house that the caretaker swears he turned off.

Between the chapters are the Rooms - the places where Wes writes Céline from the inside. The first ones are wrong. A retired cop in a church basement tells him why: You keep writing her nicer than she is. The rest of the book is a man learning to write a woman with her back to him, and finding out that it is the only thing she ever asked of him.

Ferry Weather is a novel about keeping a place ready for someone who isn't coming - a key not turned, a letter not sent, a chair on an island sat in once, and a gate that stays shut. It ends with one sentence in French, understood two years too late, and a library date-due card with nothing stamped on it.

A love story told by a man who has learned to leave the woman alone. For readers of Kent Haruf, Elizabeth Strout and Haruki Murakami, and for anyone who has ever lived forty feet from the person who left them.