11. Erin #2
He stops. I reach across the quilt and put my hand over his.
He turns his hand slowly, palm up, and closes his fingers around mine.
Not hard. Just enough to mean something.
His thumb settles at the back of my wrist and stays there.
The cold thing in my chest is still where I left it.
I leave it at the back of the afternoon, and I sit with him on the flat gray rock while the mountain shadow comes down the far bank inch by inch.
The temperature drops another few degrees and neither of us speaks, and the lake holds the mountains back at us, upside-down and still.
He finally stands and pulls me up with him, our hands still together. He looks at my hand. Then he raises it and presses his mouth to my knuckles, once, brief, warm, the near edge of something neither of us can touch yet, and lets go.
We fold the quilt together in the cold, not talking. He carries the cooler back to the truck.
On the drive back, he puts his right hand over mine on the bench seat and leaves it there.
The full small weight of it, settled, warm through my sleeve.
I watch the road. I don’t look at his hand.
The cold thing from the lake is still at the back of things, where I put it, and I push it further back, behind the valley and the pull-off and two pounds fourteen and Mama, wake up, Mama .
I push it until I can’t feel it, and then I feel it again, and I push it back.
The valley goes by in the early-evening blue.
The light leaves the peaks last. I let it go.
I’ve been a night-shift person most of my adult life, and I’m still learning the particular quality of winter dark at altitude.
How fast it comes. How total it is. How the mountains become shapes and then outlines and then just a darker dark against the sky.
There is something in that I’ve been meaning to think about and haven’t gotten around to.
The canyon walls come up on either side. The road narrows. The headlights curve on the rock face, and I breathe.
At the Main Street stoplight, both his hands go back to the wheel, and I feel a touch lonely for it.
Cedar Hollow settles itself around us. Joan’s Diner lit and warm, the Magnolia sign steady, the clinic dark at this hour.
Two women I don’t know are coming out of the hardware store with a wreath between them.
A dog is crossing Main Street with the unhurried authority of a dog who has done this a thousand times.
David turns down my lane and into the gravel at six oh-two by my watch. He gets out and comes around before I’ve found the door handle. I’ve been here six weeks and I have not once beaten him to a door. I step down onto the frozen gravel.
He stands with his hands in his coat pockets while I find my keys.
I know I should say something. Maybe ask him to come in.
The afternoon has weight that wants to be acknowledged, and I’ve been composing sentences on the drive back, and every one of them is either too much or too small for what this day has actually been. I find the key. I fit it to the lock.
I turn to say goodnight, and he’s not on the porch.
He’s at the bottom of the steps. Hands in his coat. Eyes on me, in the porch light, level and steady, the same as the lake and the road and every quiet thing today he decided to look at me straight.
"Erin." He stops. "I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know if I’m doing it right."
My hand is on the doorframe. I look at him. The dark hair a little too long, the beard that looks like it has been kept the same length for a long time, the hazel eyes that have been warm since the night of the storm and haven’t changed since.
I think about the sandwich with my name in block print.
I think about the parking lot in Skagit County and the black coffee and the weight of his hand on the bench seat and two pounds fourteen ounces and the cold, still thing at the back of my chest that I haven’t looked at yet and don’t know how to.
"Neither do I," I say.
We look at each other for a moment, not long, just long enough that I’m aware of the porch light and the cedar trees and the fact that we are two people who have been circling something all day and are still circling it, and that is okay.
The corner of his mouth moves. Just the corner, just the beginning of something he hasn’t let himself have, a small careful shift, the precursor to a smile he hasn’t smiled in four years, and goes still again. He nods, once. He turns and walks back to his truck, unhurried.
The engine turns over. The taillights come on. He pulls out onto the lane, and the truck curves around the stand of aspen at the bottom, and the taillights disappear.
I stand on the porch with the doorframe in my hand. The cold sits down over Cedar Hollow, final and particular, and the porch light holds against it, and the mountains are holding in the dark. I stay a little longer than I need to, in the dark, with my hand still on the frame.