Chapter 8
My brand-new adding machine clattered through a column of figures and spat out the tape, and I tore it off and laid it flat beside the invoice it belonged to.
January, Dawson’s Auto Body. The numbers added.
They had added the first time, too — I ran every column twice to be certain.
Dante wasn’t the only careful one in our relationship.
The apartment was quiet in the way the cabin had been quiet.
That was the first thing I had noticed, moving in.
Different quiet — town quiet, with the occasional truck going past and the occasional laugh from the sidewalk below — but the same feeling underneath.
A room that didn’t demand anything. A room that let me think.
It sat two streets off the tavern, above Molsen’s Hardware, and the floors smelled faintly of machine oil that drifted up through the boards on warm days.
Dante had found it. He had walked me through it the first time with his hands in his jacket pockets and his eyes doing the thing they did — the reading, the cataloguing — and when we came back down the narrow stairs he had said, That one works, if you want it.
Not I think. Not we should. If I wanted it.
He made me choose it. He made me choose everything, which was its own kind of patience, and which I had not understood until I had been on the receiving end of it for a month.
I wanted it. I signed the lease in my own name. He paid nothing.
The desk sat in the corner by the window.
A proper one, secondhand, with a drawer that stuck and a scar across the top where a previous owner had cut something with a knife.
Above it, on a narrow shelf I had put up myself using his drill and his level and his quiet instructions from the doorway, sat my small assembled world.
A library book — The Count of Monte Cristo, which I was reading in fits and was two hundred pages into.
A succulent in a terracotta pot the size of an egg cup.
Clover, in the middle, propped upright against the wall, both of her eyes facing the room.
The succulent had arrived in his hand one Wednesday in September.
He had come up the stairs, set it on my desk, said they didn’t have flowers, and gone to wash his hands.
I had watched him from my chair with my pen paused above an invoice and I had not known what to do with my face.
He had come back from the sink drying his hands on a dish towel and had looked at the little plant on my desk, and then he had gone to read in the other room.
I had kept it alive. It was still alive. It had put out a new leaf in January, small and pale and startled-looking, and I had not told him, and he had noticed anyway a week later and said, the plant’s growing, and then gone to make coffee.
That was most of how he spoke. I had learned to hear it.
Above the shelf, above Clover’s head, the fairy lights ran along the wall in a warm white loop.
I looked at them sometimes when I was working.
I had come home on a Tuesday in October — a client meeting in town, forty minutes, nothing — and walked up the stairs and opened the door and stopped.
The lights had been strung. Tacked carefully along the top edge of the wall, around the shelf, back along to the window.
The plug ran down behind the desk to the outlet.
Dante had been at the kitchen table, not looking up, and the lights had been on in the afternoon like he had only switched them on to check and then forgotten to turn them off, which I knew was not true because Dante didn’t forget things.
I had stood in the doorway for a long time.
Then I had crossed to the shelf and taken Clover down and sat on the floor with my back against the bed and cried into her fur for ten minutes.
Not performing it. Not suppressing it. Just crying, the way I had started being able to cry in the cabin and had not yet figured out how to stop.
When I came out of the bedroom, he was still at the kitchen table.
He had not moved. He did not look up from his mug when I passed.
He said nothing. I went to the sink and splashed water on my face and made myself a coffee and sat down across from him and opened the newspaper, and he turned a page, and we did not speak about it then or later, and that was the correct answer.
That was exactly the correct answer, and the fact that he had known it was the correct answer was the thing that set me off crying again later that night, quietly, against his shoulder in the dark, while he traced circles on my back and said nothing at all.
The lights were still on now. I kept them on in the daytime because nobody had told me not to.
I finished the Dawson invoice. Filed it in the green folder.
Five clients now — Dawson, Hollander, the bakery on Fifth, a landscaper, and King’s Tavern itself, which I kept separate in a blue folder because mixing club business with anything else was the kind of mistake you only made once.
The work was steady. The work was mine. I had a business license in my own name and a checking account in my own name and a key to my own front door, and the key sat on a hook by the door with the other keys, and sometimes I looked at it and forgot to breathe for a second.
This morning I had eaten breakfast.
Eggs. Toast. A small dish of blackberry jam. Sitting down. At the table. With both feet on the floor and a napkin across my lap like I was a person at a restaurant.
I stretched my wrists out over the desk. The tape from the adding machine curled against my knuckles. Outside, a truck downshifted going up Ridge Street, and the sound came through the window the way town sounds came now — as a thing happening near me, not to me.
I noticed, sitting there, that I wanted a different pen.
Not a big want. A small one — the black one in the drawer had gone dry, and the blue one I was using bled through the paper, and what I wanted was one of the fine-point gels he kept in the kitchen drawer where he did his own paperwork.
I could get up and get one. I could just do that.
I was twenty-four years old in an apartment I had signed for and I was allowed to cross a room and take a pen out of a drawer.
I did it.
I crossed to the kitchen and opened the drawer and took the pen. I came back and sat down. The small completed transaction sat in my chest like a coin dropped into a jar, and I logged it and went back to the next invoice.
***
The bike came up Ridge Street at a quarter past four.
I knew the sound of that particular engine like I knew my own heartbeat. My pen was already down before I knew I had put it down. My head had come up from the invoice. I was listening to the shift in his RPMs as he slowed for the turn into the alley behind the hardware store.
The engine cut. The alley door banged. His boots on the stairs, the small favoring on the fourth step from the top where his knee still didn’t love the angle.
Then the key in the lock.
He came in with snow on his shoulders.
We had gotten a last freak storm that morning that had dumped three inches and then thought better of it, but the ride up from King’s Tavern crossed the one exposed stretch along the creek and the wind had held the last of it on him.
The snow sat in small white clumps along the dark leather of his cuts, melting as I watched.
His hair was damp. His eyes found me at the desk and held.
The cuts.
He had come home one Tuesday in February with a brown paper parcel under his arm and had laid the cuts on the bed unwrapped and I had seen, for the first time, the patch stitched along the bottom right of the back panel in the same cream thread as the rest.
WIZ.
Three letters. Small, clean, the kind of road name that didn’t announce itself and didn’t have to.
The club had voted it and Marcus had sewn it on himself, apparently, which I had not known until a brother had mentioned it at the bar in passing, and which Dante had not volunteered because Dante did not volunteer things like that.
I had watched him put the cuts on for the first time and my throat had done a thing, and he had seen it, and he had kissed the top of my head and gone to work.
Now the three letters came through the door and the man inside them shook the snow from his shoulders and hung the cuts on the hook by the door where his jacket used to hang, and he crossed to the desk.
I was already reading him.
His shoulders today were level. His jaw was set, but not the operational set — a different one, softer at the hinge. His eyes were doing the held-breath thing they had done the morning he told me about Creed, except quieter, turned in rather than out.
He was carrying something.
I sat very still at the desk.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, sweetheart.”
He stopped on the far side of the desk. He placed a brown paper bag down on the table, then took something out of it.
A box.
About the size of a shoebox. But this looked more like a treasure box.
Wood — walnut, by the color, the grain running in a slow dark wave across the lid.
Sanded to a finish so smooth the light from the window moved across it in a single sliding band.
Stained dark. Dovetailed at the corners, each joint fitted so cleanly the seams read as lines of shadow rather than gaps.
A small brass catch at the front, no lock, just a latch.
Across the lid, in careful letters burned into the wood, my name.
Sadie.
I knew the hand.
I knew it the way I knew his engine. Knew it the way I knew the angle of his right boot when his knee was stiff.
The S was the same S that had stood at the top of the contract six months ago.
The same neat considered printing I had watched fill a wall of maps and a spiral notebook and the top of a page on a kitchen table in a mountain cabin.
He had made it. Or he had put my name on it. Either way, those were his letters.