Bonus Chapter One Year
Alma
The anniversary fell on a Tuesday.
It fell on a Tuesday in early September, the same Tuesday it had been the year before — September the seventh, the day Beckett and I had stood in front of Judge Pruitt in a courthouse off Mill Street and signed the paperwork that had been, at the time, only paperwork and had since become, by inches and by accident, the whole foundation of my life.
I had marked the date in the shop calendar back in June, in small pencil, the way you mark a thing you do not want to forget and also do not want to perform.
Anniversary. Just the word. No exclamation point.
No drawing. Just the word, in the lower corner of September seventh, in my left-handed pencil that I had been told, by a fourth-grade teacher in Denver, was artistic but illegible.
Beckett saw it in August.
He saw it because he came into the office one afternoon to ask me a question about a parts order, and he glanced at the calendar on the wall while I was answering, and he stopped speaking mid-sentence.
He looked at the date. He looked at me. He looked back at the date.
He did not say anything. He went out of the office without finishing the conversation.
He came back forty-five minutes later, took the calendar off the wall, and walked it back to the forge without explanation.
It reappeared the next morning, back on the wall.
The pencil notation in the corner of September seventh was still there. Anniversary. And underneath it, in Beckett's careful uppercase printing in black sharpie, three additional words.
BLOCK THE DAY.
That was all the conversation we had about it.
I blocked the day. I told Pilar she had the shop.
I told the customers we were closed September seventh for family business, which was the phrase Beckett and I had agreed on, in our second month of marriage, for the days we did not want to explain.
The customers did not ask. Customers in Ember Falls had stopped asking, sometime in the spring, whether Beckett and I were for real or whether the marriage was, as Sienna had once put it to me in the diner, the slowest burn she had ever witnessed in this town, by which she had meant the opposite of slow.
The town had decided we were real. The town was correct.
The morning of September seventh, I woke up at five-thirty.
I woke up because Beckett was not in the bed.
The space next to me was warm but empty, which meant he had been gone less than ten minutes.
I lay in the dim blue dark of the loft and listened.
I heard the small sounds of him in the kitchen — the coffee grinder, low, the way he ground beans when he was trying not to wake me up; the soft thunk of the cast iron pan on the stovetop; the small click of the gas burner; the refrigerator opening, then closing, then opening again.
I got up.
I pulled on the long flannel robe he had given me for my birthday and the slippers I had given him for his, which he never wore because he ran hot and which had migrated to my side of the closet by mutual silent agreement, and I went into the kitchen.
He was at the stove.
He had on his jeans and the soft gray t-shirt he wore on his days off, and he was making breakfast — the breakfast he made on Sundays, which was eggs scrambled with cheddar and small cubes of the country ham that Diesel's cousin sold out of a smokehouse in Damascus, and sourdough toast, and the strong dark coffee Beckett made with the chicory my mother had sent us from Denver, which had become, between us, the good coffee, the coffee we drank on the mornings that counted.
He turned when I came in.
He said, "Good morning, wife."
He had been calling me wife for approximately five months.
He did not call me wife in front of anyone.
He called me Alma in public, and honey in front of the older customers, and babe in front of the younger ones, but wife he saved for the loft, for the kitchen, for the early hours, for the moments when nobody else was around to hear it.
The word was, by his careful design, private.
It had taken me three weeks to realize what he was doing.
It had taken me another two weeks to stop tearing up every time he said it.
I said, "Good morning, husband."
He smiled.
He smiled the small interior smile, which I had come to think of, in the year since the iron ring, as my smile, the one that did not appear on his face for anyone else, the one that was, by the architecture of his face, reserved.
He said, "Sit. Coffee's almost ready."
I sat at the kitchen table.
The Mary Oliver poem from his father hung in its small frame above the table.
I had been waking up to it for ten months.
I had read it, in those ten months, approximately three hundred times, which was the small repeating reading you do when something good lives on the wall of your home.
Don't Hesitate. I had memorized it without trying.
So had Beckett. We had not discussed memorizing it. We had simply, between us, absorbed it.
The kitchen was the kitchen.
It was the kitchen of the loft above the shop in Ember Falls, Virginia, in the year of our marriage, on the morning of the first anniversary of the day a judge had handed us a piece of paper that had said the thing we did not yet believe and that had, by patient slow work, become the thing we did believe, and would believe, and were going to keep believing, for as long as the believing held — which was, by my estimation that morning, indefinitely.
Beckett brought breakfast to the table.
He brought it on the blue plates we had bought together at an estate sale in Roanoke in July, which were old and slightly chipped and had a thin band of darker blue around the rim, and which had become the plates we used when we wanted the morning to feel like a small occasion.
He sat down across from me. He poured coffee.
He pushed the cream toward me. He looked at me across the table.
He said, "One year."
I said, "One year."
He said, "I have a gift."
I said, "I have a gift too."
He said, "Who first."
I said, "You."
He said, "No. You."
I said, "We could open them at the same time."
He said, "Adult."
I said, "Yes."
He got up. He went to the small writing desk by the window — the desk that had been Tomás's, that I had moved into the loft after I had moved in with Beckett, and which still had the small water ring on the upper left corner from a coffee cup Tomás had set down in 1986 and which I had decided not to refinish — and he pulled out a flat package.
The package was wrapped in brown butcher paper and tied with kitchen twine.
The kitchen twine had been tied in a small precise bow that I recognized immediately as a Marine Corps utility knot, which meant Beckett had not learned the knot from a craft book but from his father, which made the wrapping itself, before I had even opened it, a small gift.
He set it on the table in front of me.
I went to my coat hook. I lifted down the small package I had hidden in the deep pocket of my barn coat the night before.
Mine was in pale blue tissue paper. I had wrapped it badly, because I am not good at wrapping, and the tissue had small tears along the folds.
I set it on the table in front of Beckett.
He looked at it. He looked at me. He said, "Together."
I said, "On three."
He counted. He counted one, two, three in the slow flat way he counted at the forge when he was lining up a strike. We opened our gifts.
His was a book.
He had given me a book. The book was old.
The book was Upon the Anvil: A Brief History of the American Blacksmith, published in 1968, with a black cloth cover and gold lettering on the spine.
The book had belonged to Roy. I knew this because the inside cover had Roy's name in his particular faint pencil — R.
Calloway, 1971 — and because Beckett had told me, in our first month of marriage, that Roy's library had been distributed among his apprentices when he died, and that Beckett had received six books, and that one of them — the one Roy had loved most — Beckett was keeping until he had a person he wanted to give it to.
I had become that person.
I held the book in my hands. I opened the cover. I read Roy's faint pencil signature. Beneath it, Beckett had written in his careful printing:
For Alma. Wife. Keeper of the third bay, the spiral pegboard, and the man at the anvil. — B.
I did not cry. I had stopped, in the year of the iron ring, performing my crying.
Crying had become, between us, a private weather.
I did not need to perform anything in my own kitchen at six in the morning on the first anniversary of my marriage.
I just sat with the book in my hands and looked at Beckett, and Beckett looked back at me, and we let the book be what the book was.
His gift was a small piece of paper.
It was a printout. I had printed it the night before, in the office, after he had gone to bed.
The printout was a deed. The deed was for the small empty lot adjacent to the new forge — the lot that Beckett had been looking at, every morning for six months, with the careful sideways assessment of a man who wanted a thing and would not say so.
I had been watching him look at it. I had asked Liam to make some quiet inquiries in May.
I had purchased the lot in August, in cash, with the inheritance money that had been left over from the third bay. The deed was in his name.
He read it twice.
He set it down. He looked at me.
He said, "Alma."
I said, "You want to build the second forge. You won't say so. The lot was for sale. I bought it. It's yours. You can build whatever you want on it."
He said, "Alma."
I said, "Don't say it like that. The math worked. We had the money. It was the right move."
He said, "Alma."
I said, "Stop saying my name."
He said, "Alma."