Chapter 4
four
Beckett
We’re driving when Nora asks: "Can Miss Tessa come for dinner?"
"No."
Silence. I check the mirror. She's looking out the window. "Why?"
"Because I didn't ask her."
"You could ask her."
"I'm driving."
She goes quiet again. The trees go past. The road curves down toward town and the light is gold the way it gets around seven in June, everything tipped sideways with it.
"She likes pasta," Nora says. "Probably."
"You don't know that."
"She seems like a pasta person."
There is no good response to this that doesn't end with me calling a woman I've been trying not to think about and inviting her into my house.
"She tells Kaylee she likes pesto," Nora adds, conversationally. "I heard."
I look at her in the rearview mirror. She is five years old and she has cake in her hair and she is running an operation.
"You heard."
"By accident."
"Mm."
We drive the rest of the way in silence. I pull up to the cabin and get out and get Nora out and she goes up the porch steps without looking at me, the way she does when she's letting me sit with something. I taught her that. I don't know whether to be proud or alarmed.
Pesto. I have pesto.
I think about the way she says not right now when I ask if she's moping, like the absence of sadness is a new discovery she hasn't catalogued yet. I think about her hands on the book and Nora's knee pressed against hers and the crayon mark on her wrist.
Thankful I got her number, I text: Nora wants to know if you'll come for dinner. Pasta. Around seven.
I put the phone down. I clean the kitchen. The phone buzzes.
I'll bring bread.
I spend twenty minutes after that doing things that don't need doing.
I move the pile of trail survey maps off the table.
I find the two mugs Nora has left on the floor by the couch and wash them.
I stand in the doorway and look at the living room: the worn couch, the stack of Nora's books, Jace's old jacket still on the hook by the door because I haven't been able to put it away and I try to see it the way a stranger would.
It's fine. It's a cabin. It's lived in.
I go back to cooking.
Nora disappears to her room to change her shirt, which she does without being asked, which means she's putting her best foot forward, which means I'm now running the dinner party of a five-year-old.
The knock comes at seven on the dot.
She's carrying a paper bag from the bakery on Third with the bread, plus a small jar of honey with the comb still in it that Nora will try to eat with a spoon before the evening is out.
She's wearing jeans and a yellow shirt and her hair is down and she smiles at Nora, who has opened the door before I can get there and is already talking.
"We're having pesto," Nora says. "Uncle Beckett made it. He puts pine nuts in."
I take the bread bag. Our fingers are close but don't touch and I'm aware of that distance with a specificity I have no business feeling.
"Thanks for coming," I say.
She looks at me — quick, warm, direct. "Thanks for asking."
She's easy in the space.
She sits down at the table where Nora has placed her and that's it. She's here. She fits.
Nora shows her every drawing on the refrigerator.
There are eleven of them. Tessa looks at each one with the focused attention of a person who is genuinely interested in what a five-year-old draws, asks specific questions — "What's that in the corner?
" "Is that the fox?" — and doesn't rush any of it.
Nora blooms. She gets louder and more animated with each drawing, standing on her tiptoes to point at details, and by the time I put the pasta on the table she's got Tessa by the arm and is explaining the plot of the fox book in full.
I set the food down. Tessa helps Nora into her chair without looking like she's helping, just steadying, and then sits and picks up her fork.
"This smells incredible," she says.
"It's just pasta," I say.
"Pine nuts," Nora adds, authoritatively.
Tessa catches my eye across the table.
We eat. Nora talks. The light through the kitchen window goes amber and then deep gold and the birds are loud outside and it's the most normal dinner I've had in two years, which is not a comfortable thing to notice.
It's a good thing. The discomfort is because it's good and good things have been in short supply and I don't quite know what to do with the abundance of this — this woman, this table, this small person between us acting like the three of us have always eaten dinner together.
At some point I stop tracking time. Nora eats her pasta and at eight o'clock hits the exhaustion wall, the energy draining out of her mid-sentence like a plug pulled.
I carry her to bed while she's still telling me about something that happens at the birthday party, and by the time I've got her in pyjamas she's half asleep, and I sit on the edge of her bed and put my hand on her hair and she's gone in under a minute.
I sit there in the quiet for a moment. The familiar weight of safety.
I look at the hockey trophies on Jace's shelf, the photo on the dresser, and I think: he would have liked Tessa.
The thought arrives whole and certain and I set it down carefully, because I can feel what it means, and go back out to the kitchen.
Tessa is rinsing dishes.
"You don't have to do that."
"I know." She doesn't stop. "Is she down?"
"Yeah. Fast."
"Long day." She stacks the last dish, dries her hands, looks at me.
I get some decaf coffee going. It's something to do with my hands, which need something to do. She leans against the counter and watches, not filling the silence for once, and the kitchen is small and warm and there are maybe eighteen inches between us and I am aware of every one of them.
"Come outside," I say.
The porch faces west. The mountains catch the last light in layers — indigo at the top, warm grey below, the tree line black and solid.
The river is audible if it's quiet enough and tonight it's quiet enough.
I bring two mugs and we sit in the old cedar chairs, and she holds her mug in both hands and looks at the mountains and doesn't say anything and I find I don't need her to.
After a while she says: "Tell me about Jace."
Nobody asks me that. Everyone in town knew Jace; when they want to talk about him it's to tell me what he was like, not to find out. She's asking because she wants to know through me, which is different.
"Younger by three years," I say. "Funnier. Better with people. He could walk into a room and be someone's best friend inside ten minutes." I look at the tree line. "I took years."
"I believe that."
"Nora has his eyes. The way she sizes you up before she decides you're worth talking to." A beat. "He would've figured you out in about thirty seconds."
"What would he have figured out?"
"That you mean it. That you're not performing it. A lot of people perform it around kids. You don't."
She's quiet for a moment. "I've been performing a lot of things lately," she says.
"Or I was. The relationship — the whole last year of it — I'm trying to be someone who didn't need the things I needed.
Kept telling myself I was being flexible, that it was love.
Then one night I just — run out of performance.
Say it out loud. I want children. I have wanted them since I was old enough to know what wanting something meant.
And he looks at me like I'm finally getting around to a conversation he's been dreading for years. "
She wraps both hands tighter around the mug. "And now, I don't have a plan. I just need to be somewhere that isn't my apartment."
The porch light is off. There's still enough sky-glow to see her face.
"Good that you came here," I say.
She turns her head to look at me and I look back and the evening is very warm and very still and I can smell the pine from the tree line and faintly, underneath it, the particular warm clean smell that is hers.
She says: "Nora's lucky. To have someone who shows up every day."
I put my mug down. I lean forward. She doesn't move back.
The kiss is quiet. Her mouth is warm and she makes a sound low in her throat when I cup her jaw and she tips into it, and for a moment it's just that: the porch and the dark mountains and her hand coming up to my arm, gripping lightly.
I pull back.
I don't want to, but I pull back.
She looks at me. Her eyes are dark and her lips are slightly parted and she doesn't say anything yet, giving me room.
"You're leaving soon," I say.
The warmth doesn't leave her face. "I know," she says.
Neither of us moves. The river goes on below the tree line. The last birds go quiet. The mountains hold the dark.
"Beckett," she says.
"Yeah."
"I know," she says again. Softer. Complicated.
She picks up her mug. Finishes her cold coffee.
We sit for another twenty minutes and talk about ordinary things — the reading program, the trail I've been working on past the ridge, whether Nora's fox will find his way home.
Normal things. The kind of easy conversation I haven't had with another adult in a long time, and that fact sits in my chest right alongside the fact that she’s not going to stay, and I hold both of them and don't know what to do with either.
When she leaves I walk her to her car and she says goodnight and drives back toward town. I stand in the gravel and watch the taillights disappear through the trees and I stand there for a while after that too.