Chapter 15
Winslow
The second week of June came in hot and green, smelling of cut grass off the far bank. She moved the assembly off the kitchen table, since they had started eating at it.
That was how it happened. Not a decision. A table.
He came out on a Thursday and she'd made a chicken, badly, and there was nowhere to put it. She stacked eleven weeks of index cards into a shoebox and set two plates down. Callum looked at the plates for a second too long before he sat.
"Don't," she said.
"I didn't say anything."
"You looked at the plate."
"I'm going to look at the plate, Winslow," he said. "You can't take that away from me."
It was the first joke either of them had made on purpose in five months. It was not much of a joke. She laughed so hard she had to put the knife down, and then she stood at the counter with her back to him for a second and got herself sorted out.
After that the hour stopped being an hour.
He came out on a Saturday, which had not been discussed.
He got out of the car with a bag of tomatoes and no explanation for the tomatoes, and she did not ask for one.
He came out on the following Wednesday with two bags of groceries and a wrench, since the sink had started doing a thing.
He lay on his back under it for forty minutes swearing quietly while she sat on the floor against the dishwasher and read him the numbers off a part.
One night the power went out again for an hour, and neither of them mentioned that it had. They sat at the same table with the same four jars and talked about nothing whatsoever. When the lights came back on they were both a little sorry.
They ate on the dock. They ate at eleven at night, twice, standing up.
Tessa called on a Tuesday about the July calendar and Winslow answered from a kitchen floor with a wrench in her hand.
"Two seats," she said.
There was a pause on the Richmond end that lasted a full second and a half.
"Two seats, Mrs. Fairbanks."
"Tessa."
"Yes, ma'am."
"You've been very decent to me this year."
"I've been doing the calendar," Tessa said, in a voice that had gone thick, and got off the phone fast.
He watched the whole rough cut on a Sunday, ninety-four minutes of it, sitting forward on the couch with his elbows on his knees, and he did not check his phone once, and at the woman with the poly tank he said, "Oh," out loud, involuntarily, and then apologized for talking.
"Don't apologize."
"I talked over it."
"Callum. That's the sound I've been trying to get for four months."
On the second Saturday they drove to Buck Island for a shot she'd been chasing since February. Tolley was down at the ramp with the boat up on blocks. Callum shook his hand and got called son twice.
"That your wife?"
"That's my wife."
"She's been out here five, six times."
"I know it."
"She don't say much." Tolley went back to the hull. "That's how you know she's listening. Most of them talk."
Callum stood at the top of the ramp forty minutes with his hands in his pockets and did not once check his phone. On the drive home he asked her four questions about the cut. She answered all of them at length, and he did not offer one note.
She started leaving her hand where he could reach it. She was aware of doing it. She'd catch herself putting a cup down closer to his side of the table than it needed to go, and she'd think, look at you, and do it again.
Blaire came out on a Wednesday with the baby, ostensibly to drop off a dish, and stayed two hours, and said nothing at all about her brother's car being in the drive at eleven in the morning. On the porch she hugged Winslow hard and short.
"I'm not going to say anything."
"You're doing it right now."
"I'm saying I'm not saying it, which is different," Blaire said, and got in the car.
The June light went long and stayed. They got to nine at night with the sun still up.
They sat on the dock with their feet in the water.
He told her about his father in the office chair with the hat on his knee, all of it, the tremor, the four years, the room in his mother he'd never been let into.
Winslow cried and he didn't reach for her.
Afterward she was the one who moved four inches and put her shoulder against his arm.
They stayed out there until the water went black.
On the fourteenth of June she walked up to the top of the gravel to get the mail, and his car came up the road while she was standing in it.
He got out.
He stopped with the door open.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi."
Neither of them moved for a second.
Then she crossed four feet of gravel and put both hands down on his chest. Callum made a sound she had not heard out of him in six years. His forehead came down onto hers, and they stood in a road in the middle of the afternoon that way for a long time before either of them did anything about it.
"Winslow."
"Don't make a speech."
"I wasn't going to make a speech."
"You were about to."
"I was about to," he said, "and I'm not going to."
He kissed her at the top of a gravel road with the car door still hanging open and the mail in her other hand, and she dropped the mail.
It was not smooth. He got his hand caught in the strap of her camera bag. She laughed into his mouth and he said a thing that wasn't a word. Her whole chest was going as though she'd run somewhere. She got two fistfuls of the back of his shirt and would not let go of them.
The house was ninety feet down the hill. They did not do a good job of getting there.
The screen door had a spring on it that had been going since 2019, and it got them both. She laughed into his neck about it. He said a word she had not heard him say in front of another person in ten years.
At the door he stopped, with his hand on the frame and hers in his shirt, and looked at her. She understood in that half second what he was doing. He was giving her the last possible place to say no, and he was going to give it to her without one word about how generous it was.
"I know," Winslow said. "Come inside."
***
She woke at four with his arm heavy across her ribs and the window gray and a bird going insane in the dogwood outside.
She lay there and did an inventory, which she'd have been embarrassed to admit.
His arm was heavier than she remembered. There was more gray in him. His breathing had a catch in it on the intake now that had not been there in his thirties, and it had scared her at eleven o'clock and now it was just a sound in a room.
He was awake. She knew it from his hand.
"How long have you been up," she said.
"A while."
"Doing what?"
"Panicking, mostly."
She turned over. In the gray his face was very close and very ordinary, creased on one side, forty years old.
"About what?"
"That you'd wake up and it'd be March again."
"That's not—"
"I know it's not. That's why it's panicking and not thinking.
" He said it without any embarrassment in it at all, which was new, and she had not gotten used to it.
"I've been lying here for two hours doing arithmetic on how many Thursdays it took, and then telling myself to knock it off, and then doing it again. "
"How many was it?"
"Fourteen."
"You counted."
"Winslow, I counted the words." He said it into the pillow. "The third week you said fourteen words to me and I counted them in the car and then hated myself for eleven miles."
She laughed. She got her hand up between them and put it down on his sternum, which was damp, and left it there.
They lay there a while. The bird went on with it.
"I'm going to say the thing about June the ninth," she said.
"Okay."
"It was five days ago and I let it go by.
I didn't call him. I didn't call to say no, either, which was cowardly, and I'm going to fix that this week.
" She watched her own hand rise and fall on his chest. "But I want you to know that I let it go by before Sunday.
Before the road. I want that to be true when you go back over it later, and you will. "
He was quiet for a second.
"Why?"
"I sat on that dock and thought about nine months in Philadelphia with a good man who'd never once make me nervous," Winslow said, "and it sounded like a very nice life somebody else was going to have."
Callum's hand came up over hers on his chest and closed.
"Say the terms," he said.
"What?"
"You're going to have terms. You've been building them since April. I'd rather have them now than have you carrying them around."
"That's the most alarming thing you've ever said to me."
"Say them."
"Not at four in the morning."
"Okay."
"There's money of mine somewhere," she said anyway, into his shoulder. "Adair let it slip in April. A discretionary line I've had since 2016 that nobody ever told me the size of."
Callum went still under her hand.
"You didn't know?"
"I didn't know."
"Winslow, that's—" He stopped himself, and the stopping went through his chest under her hand. "How much did she say?"
"She sent the number. I haven't opened it."
"Why not?"
"Because whatever it is, it's going to be the answer to a question I never got asked," Winslow said. "I'll open it in September. That's my second one, and it's not really a term, it's a warning."
"Understood."
"I'm keeping the camera," she said. "That's the first one and it's not negotiable, and I want it said in a bed so neither of us can pretend it was a mood." "That's the first one and it's not negotiable and I want it said in a bed so neither of us can pretend it was a mood."
"It's not negotiable."
"Say it back to me in September and I'll believe it."
"All right," Callum said. "September."
The gray came up in the window until it wasn't gray.
At some point she went back under. When she surfaced the room was full of light and he was gone out of the bed.
The rest of it she'd remember in pieces for the whole of her life.
The window going from gray to not gray. A boat starting up somewhere down the shoreline at five and running out toward the middle.
His hand coming back to the same place on her hip twice, and the second time she put hers over it.
She came down the stairs at eight and found him at the kitchen table with the shoebox open and her index cards laid out in rows in the wrong order entirely, frowning at them, holding his coffee with both hands.
"You've moved my cards."
"I have not moved your cards. I have looked at your cards."
"They're in a different order, Callum."
"They're in a better order," he said, and did not look up. She stood at the bottom of her own stairs in his shirt and had to hold the newel post for a second.