Chapter 3
Alma
I said yes on a Wednesday.
I'd spent Tuesday night not sleeping, which is what a person who lives by lists does when the list refuses to resolve.
I had drawn the pros and cons column on a yellow legal pad at eleven p.m. and I had stared at it until two in the morning, and at two in the morning I had crossed out the only entry in the cons column and written manageable risk over it, and I had gone to bed with the absolute conviction that I had decided, and then I had lain in bed for three more hours debating the decision I had absolutely decided.
By morning, I was the kind of tired that is its own clarity. I made coffee. I drank it standing up. I called Beckett at seven-fifteen because Beckett, I had learned over fifteen days, was a man who was already awake and working by six, and I did not want this conversation to find him groggy.
I said, "Can you come by the office at nine? Not the shop. The office."
He said, "I can be there at nine."
I said, "Thank you."
He said, "Alma."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Are you about to say yes or are you about to say no."
I said, "I'll see you at nine."
He said, "Fair."
He arrived at eight-fifty-eight. I had moved the second chair so that it faced my desk rather than sat alongside it, which I realize, looking back, was a small thing that telegraphed a great deal.
I had not made coffee for him. I had made coffee for myself, because making coffee for him felt like hospitality and this was not a hospitality meeting.
This was a meeting. He sat down in the chair.
He set his keys on the corner of my desk.
He folded his hands in his lap. He waited.
I said, "Yes."
He said, "Okay."
I said, "With conditions."
He said, "Of course."
I took out a yellow legal pad. Not the one with the pros and cons. A clean one. I had written across the top, in my smallest, most legible hand: TERMS — NAVARRO/HOLT.
I said, "I want to walk through this systematically. If at any point you want to push back, push back. If at any point you want to leave, leave. I will not be offended."
He said, "Understood."
I said, "Duration. Six months at a minimum. Extendable if Diego's legal challenge requires additional documentation. We dissolve cleanly by mutual agreement once the shop is legally and permanently mine."
He nodded. He did not say anything. I had not asked a question yet, so I appreciated that he was not pretending to be in a conversation.
I said, "Living arrangements. You move into the apartment above the shop.
Two bedrooms. You take the second one. We share kitchen, living room, bathroom.
We co-exist. I am not requiring you to sublet your forge property.
I assume you'll keep it as your primary place of business and visit as needed. "
He said, "I'll move in. I'll keep the forge land. The barn loft can sit empty for six months."
I said, "Finances. Separate accounts. We file jointly only for the duration, because the tax penalty for filing single in this state and bracket is — never mind.
The shop's accounts stay mine and under my management.
I will compensate you a fair monthly stipend for time spent on documentation, public appearances, anything that takes you away from the forge.
I have it calculated. It's on the second page. "
He flipped to the second page. He looked at the number. He looked at me.
He said, "I don't want the stipend."
I said, "Beckett."
He said, "I'm not doing this for money."
I said, "Why are you doing it."
The question came out before I'd planned to ask it. I had not put Why are you doing this? on the agenda, because that question lived in the unprofessional column of my notebook and I had specifically built this meeting to operate exclusively in the professional column.
He thought about it. He thought about it long enough that I started to want to fill the silence and had to physically hold my pen still on the page.
He said, "Because I like the way you organize a shoebox of index cards. Because Tomás was decent to me. Because Diego is not. Because I have an empty loft and you have a problem I can fix, and the math of that just works."
I said, "Beckett. Be serious."
He said, "I am serious. The math just works."
I said, "Okay."
He said, "I'm willing to take the stipend if it helps you sleep at night. If you'd feel better having a paper trail showing I was compensated for time, I'll cash the checks and put the money in a savings account and at the end of six months I'll give it back to you, less taxes."
I said, "That's deceptive."
He said, "It's bookkeeping."
I almost smiled. The almost was getting harder to maintain.
I said, "Public presentation. We are convincingly married.
The town needs to believe it. The investigator Diego will inevitably hire needs to find no cracks.
We hold hands in public. We share food. We sleep in the same building.
We use each other's first names with the appropriate level of affection.
We attend social functions together. If anyone asks how we met, the story is: I was running the shop after Tomás died, you came in to install brackets he'd commissioned, we spent fifteen days getting to know each other, we got married because — " I stopped.
He said, "Because we wanted to."
I said, "Because we wanted to."
I wrote it down. The pen was a little less steady than I would have preferred.
I said, "Physical boundaries."
He said, "Alma."
I said, "We need to discuss it. I would rather discuss it now than have it become a problem later. I am an accountant. I plan for problems."
He said, "Okay."
I said, "I am not — I do not want this to be a romantic entanglement.
I am not in a position to enter a real relationship right now.
I am rebuilding a business. I am rebuilding a life.
I am not asking you to pretend that I am not — I am not blind to you, Beckett.
I know what I am asking. I am asking you to live in a small apartment with me for six months and not — and for us not — "
He said, "Alma."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "I agree. No romantic entanglement. Boundaries respected. The performance happens in public. Inside the apartment, we are roommates with a legal arrangement."
I said, "Thank you."
He said, "On one condition."
I said, "Yes."
He said, "If either of us wants to renegotiate, we say so. Out loud. We don't sit on it. We don't let it become a problem. We say so, and we have another meeting like this one, and we revise the terms."
I said, "Agreed."
I wrote it down. I underlined it. Then I underlined it again, because the second underline was for me.
I said, "This is a contract."
He said, "I understand contracts."
We shook hands. His hand was warm. It was calloused at the base of every finger and across the heel of the palm, the way a smith's hand is calloused, and it held mine — I noticed this and did not mention it — exactly one half-second longer than a handshake required.
The half-second was the size of a held breath.
I noticed it because I had been counting, the way I always counted, and the math told me what the rest of me already knew.
He left. I sat at my desk for a full minute without moving.
Then I put my forehead down on the legal pad and laughed, once, quietly, into the paper, because the absurdity of having just contractually arranged a marriage with a man who quoted Robert Frost when he was frustrated was the kind of thing that, if I did not laugh at it, was going to undo me.
We were married eleven days later.
The courthouse in Ember Falls is a small one.
White columns, brick face, the kind of municipal building that has been kept up because the town has pride.
We had an eleven o'clock appointment with Judge Linwood Pruitt, who was, I learned afterward, a man Tomás had played dominoes with on Thursday evenings for the better part of a decade.
The judge had given me a long, considering look when we walked in and said, "Miss Navarro.
I knew your uncle. I was sorry to hear." I said, "Thank you, Your Honor.
" He said, "He left you that shop." I said, "Yes, sir.
" He said, "Did he, by any chance, leave it to you with conditions?
" I said, "He did, sir." Judge Pruitt smiled — a small, dry, knowing smile — and said, "Then I imagine he is, at this moment, somewhere having himself a good laugh. Shall we begin?"
Diesel was a witness. Sienna was the other.
Sienna had insisted, and Sienna's insistences had the structural integrity of a load-bearing wall.
She wore a yellow dress. Diesel wore a clean black t-shirt and his cut, the cut hanging on him the way it had hung on him for thirty-some years, the leather softer than most leather and the patches sun-faded into a kind of gentle authority.
He stood at Beckett's elbow during the vows like a man holding the line at a wedding he understood the meaning of, even if no one else in the room did.
I wore blue. Not the blue I'd worn to Tomás's funeral.
A different blue. A dress my sister had sent me when I was twenty-four and which I had never worn because it was too pretty for any of the occasions I had been invited to.
It was sleeveless. It had small white buttons up the front.
I had not, until that morning, thought of myself as a woman who would wear a dress like this to her own wedding, but then I had not, until two months ago, thought of myself as a woman who would have a wedding for the express purpose of satisfying a clause.