Chapter 6
six
Everett
Sloane’s boots. Brown ankle boots, mud dried along the sole.
They've been there every morning this week when I come down to let Burl out.
I step around them and let the dog out and stand on the porch in the early quiet and look at the mountains while Burl does his slow circuit of the yard, and the boots are just there, and I have stopped pretending to myself that I don't notice them.
She's been here every day since the storm — sunburned, calloused, smelling of soil by noon.
She knows where I keep the feed. She knows which hens will take from her hand and which won't. She knows to check Burl's right hip first because it's worse than the left, and she does it without being asked, kneeling beside him in the mornings with her two fingers pressed gently into his flank while he leans into it and sighs.
She's in the pepper beds when the phone rings.
I'm two rows over. I hear the change in her before I look up — something in how she goes still. She glances at the screen and then at me and says, "I have to take this," and walks toward the fence line.
I keep staking. I'm not listening. I can hear the register of her voice, measured, professional, and I note it the way I note a change in the barometer.
She's gone fifteen minutes. When she comes back she stands at the edge of the garden bed and looks at the pepper plants and not at me, and she has her phone in both hands the way she holds things when she's working something out.
"Former colleague," she says. "Director position. Vancouver." A pause. "Better than what I left."
I set the stake I'm holding. Press the soil around the base. "What did you say?"
"That I needed to think about it. He's giving me until Monday."
"That's a real thing," I say. "You should think about it."
She's quiet for a moment. "That's all you're going to say?"
"It's your decision."
"I know it's my decision." Not sharp, but present. "I'm telling you, not asking permission."
"I know."
"Then you could say something."
I look up at her. She's standing in my garden with dirt on her forearms and her hair in a knot and the afternoon sun cutting across her face, and she's watching me with those eyes that don't miss anything, and I feel the full weight of what I'm about to do and I do it anyway.
"What do you want me to say?" I ask.
She tries and fails to hide the flash of emotion on her face. She puts the phone in her pocket. "Never mind," she says. "I'm going to check on the rabbit."
I watch her walk toward the barn. Then I go back to the peppers, and I work the rest of the bed in silence, and I stay there until the light shifts.
The pullback is quiet and deliberate.
From the inside it feels like self-preservation. I know how it looks from the outside.
Sloane is sharp enough to notice within the hour.
I can tell by how she goes slightly more careful herself, a degree of extra intention in how she moves around me, like she's decided not to push on something that might give way unexpectedly.
She doesn't ask. She has the instinct to ask everything, but she knows when not to, and she's choosing not to now, and somehow that makes it worse.
We work through the afternoon in a silence that is different from our usual silence. Our usual silence is easy, full of the sound of the farm. This one has something in it.
At some point Burl comes off the porch to find her.
The old dog makes the slow walk across the yard on his bad hips to wherever she is, and sits, and she accommodates him without breaking what she's doing.
Today she's sorting the bean harvest on the porch steps and he comes and stands at the bottom, looking up, and I watch her set down the beans and come down two steps to his level so he doesn't have to try the stairs.
She sits beside him. She puts her hand near his face and he stretches his chin toward it the way he does, the full slow reach of his old neck, and rests it against her palm.
She came back to the farm for a rabbit and somewhere along the way she started loving this old dog and my bees and the chickens and the way the borage looks in the evening light, and I know this because I have been paying attention with my whole self for three weeks and I have not missed a single thing.
That's the problem. Watching her with Burl is the thing that makes the wall I'm building feel both necessary and wrong, and I can't tell anymore which feeling to trust.
She stays for dinner. The kitchen is quiet. She sets the table without asking where things are because she knows, and I put food down and we eat, and the silence at the table has the same particular weight as the silence in the garden.
Halfway through she puts her fork down and looks at me.
"You're doing a thing," she says.
"What thing?"
"A thing where you go somewhere I can't follow." She says it plainly, no accusation in it. "You've been there since the phone call."
I look at my plate. "I'm right here."
"You're really not."
She's not wrong. She's also too perceptive to sit across from when you're trying to manage something, and I've known this about her since I met her but I keep forgetting it at crucial moments.
"There's a good job in Vancouver," I say. "That's real. Whatever you decide, I'm not going to stand in the way of it."
"I didn't ask you to stand in the way of it."
"I know."
"I asked you to have a position about it." She picks her fork back up. Then puts it down again. "Forget it."
"Sloane."
"Everett." She says my name the way she says things she means. "You pulled back. Today, after the call, you pulled back. I felt it. And I get it — I do, but don't tell me you're right here when you're not."
The kitchen is very quiet. Outside, Burl shifts on his blanket on the porch, the slow creak of an old dog resettling.
"The last person who I let into my heart," I say, "chose not to stay." I look at my hands on the table. "I'm not doing that to you. But I'm also not going to pretend I don't know how this kind of thing tends to go."
Sloan's quiet for a long moment. She looks at me and then she nods, once, and picks up her fork, and we finish dinner in a silence that is different from the one before. Not easier. But honest.
After, I carry Burl up the porch steps. Both hands under his hips, the way I've done it every night for two years since his back legs started failing him.
He's heavier than usual, or I'm more tired, or the weight is just more particular tonight.
He leans into my chest. I hold him there a moment before I set him down.
Sloane is in the doorway behind me, her boots in her hand, watching.
She comes to the porch rail and leans on it and looks at the mountains going dark, and I straighten up and we stand there together without touching, and the last of the light is on the valley and the bees are quiet and there is nowhere in the world I would rather be than this porch with this woman, which is exactly the problem.
"I haven't decided," she says. "About the job. I want you to know that."
"Okay."
"And I want you to know that whatever I decide, I'm deciding it. Not running from something." She glances at me. "Not leaving the way you think people leave. For now, I’m going back to the hotel. I need some… space."
She puts her boots on, one hand on the rail for balance, and goes down the porch steps and gets in her car and I watch the headlights sweep the yard and the gravel dust settle in the dark.
I've built this whole life around being the man who doesn't ask someone to stay.
I stand on the porch with my hand on Burl's head and I think about how sustainable that is.
Not very. As it turns out.