14. Chapter Fourteen #2
I leave the rest alone.
“A thing that should have happened,” I say. “I’m sorry it didn’t.”
She nods once, clean. Then she cuts another piece of steak.
We eat.
“What about you?” she says. And then, after a pause: “I looked up StillWater clan. After your first visit.”
I stop moving.
“You looked it up,” I say.
“I was curious.” The admission is the whole statement.
“What did you find?”
“Quiet. Deliberate. Internal.” She looks at me across the table. “I spent some time contemplating the discrepancy.”
This surprises a laugh out of me—a real one, not managed. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s a real discrepancy.”
“You seem comfortable with it.”
“Now I do.” I turn my iced tea glass in a slow circle in the condensation puddle it made on the table.
“Eight years ago, I thought I’d gotten out from under it.
Came through the Emergence, looked around, thought: stages, crowds, noise.
That’s what I want. StillWater felt like something I’d outgrown.
” A pause. “Turns out it’s more complicated than that.
Eight years and I’m still not sure I’ve worked out what I actually wanted and what I was running from. ”
She takes a moment. Then, “What made you stop fighting it?”
The honest answer has her in it, and I’m not ready to say that out loud at Delia’s with chicken-fried steak in front of us. So I say: “I’m still working on that.”
She lets the silence stretch between us. Then she picks up her iced tea.
“Fair enough,” she says.
Delia arrives with pie before either of us asks: apple, two slices, ice cream already softening in the heat. She sets it down between us. “On the house,” she says to me. “Come back.”
Then she’s gone.
Honey looks at the pie. Then at me. “She’s never done that.”
“I have a face people feed,” I say.
“You have a face people want to like.”
She says it directly, the way she says things, and then her expression shifts slightly. For a moment, something crosses her face that she didn’t mean to show. She picks up her fork instead of doing anything about it.
I let it land where it lands. “The ice cream’s turning to soup,” I say.
It’s a good pie. The crust comes from years of making it by feel instead of a recipe.
I eat it slowly because it deserves it and because the evening has become something I’m not ready to leave behind.
I think she feels it too. At some point in the last hour, she stopped managing quite so hard.
I would like to think I had something to do with that, but mostly I think it was the chicken-fried steak.
The band shifts into something slower. Not a ballad exactly—just a tempo change, the fiddle easing back, the guitar doing the work. Two couples on the floor adjust without breaking stride.
“Dance with me,” I say.
She examines the floor. Then glances at me. Something moves across her face that I can’t fully read—not reluctance, more like a calculation happening very fast behind her eyes. Then she sets her fork down.
“Okay,” she says.
I come around the booth and offer my hand, and she takes it, and we make our way to the edge of the floor. Honey moves through Delia’s the way she moves through the rest of the world: like she belongs there. I’m the one who doesn’t.
We find a spot on the floor, and I turn to her, and she comes into my arms with more ease than I expected, one hand in mine, one at my shoulder.
She barely reaches my chest. I adjust my frame down and around her, and we find the tempo, and then I just…
stop thinking. She’s warm and slight and real in a way that standing across a workbench from her or sitting across a booth from her didn’t prepare me for.
Her hand in mine is small enough that I have to be careful about how I hold it.
I am careful, and she doesn’t comment on the care, just settles into it as if it’s unremarkable.
Her shoulder fits under my arm, and her head is just below my chin, and I am aware, in a way I wasn’t thirty seconds ago, of every point of contact.
She smells clean and faintly like wood, which I should have expected and somehow didn’t.
She dances precisely, economically, no wasted motion.
Years of training are still in there. Of course there are.
A body trained to move doesn’t forget completely, and even after everything that changed, the training is in there somewhere, in the way she holds herself, the way she finds the beat.
She doesn’t keep her distance from me the way some people do when they’re uncertain.
She’s just here, present, moving with the music and with me.
I have spent eight years performing easy and right now I am not performing anything.
For about thirty seconds it’s just this: the music, the floor, the summer night coming through the open windows, her hand in mine.
Then I feel it.
A slight shift in her weight. Almost nothing.
The kind of thing you’d miss if you weren’t holding someone, if you weren’t paying attention to what their body is doing rather than what their face is showing.
Her left side tightens, a small, involuntary compensation, the hip compensating, the old brace of muscle memory.
I feel it through my hand at her back before I see anything in her face.
It shows on her face half a second later. Just a flicker. There and gone, the way she makes things go. But I caught it.
I don’t stop. I don’t make it a thing. I simply turn us, a natural lead, the kind that happens in dancing all the time, one partner redirecting the other, and in the turning I bring her closer, shifting her weight briefly onto me, taking what the left side was carrying.
It lasts two seconds. We come out of the turn, and the music keeps going, and I keep her close, my arm around her, and I don’t look at her face.
I talk instead. Something about the fiddle player, the way he’s handling the bow. She answers. Her voice is level. Whatever it cost her to take that turn, she has already put it somewhere I can’t see, and I file that too: the speed of it, the completeness, years of practice at exactly this.
The song ends. The band pauses between numbers, the fiddle player saying something to the guitarist. I steer us back toward the booth without hurry, my hand at her back, and when we get there I let her slide in first and sit down across from her and pick up my tea and drink some of it, and she does the same, and neither of us says anything about the dance floor.
She looks out the window. The gravel lot is fully dark now, the last of the evening light gone, the trucks visible only as shapes. “Everything good here is someone’s mother’s recipe,” she says.
She says it without weight, looking out the window, and I don’t know yet what her mother is to her: present or absent or something more complicated, but something in the sentence lands in me in a way I wasn’t prepared for.
I study her profile and think: I want to know everything about this woman.
Not as a project. Not out of curiosity. The way you want to know someone you’re not going to be able to stop thinking about.
“My mother worked here,” she says, gaze focused out the window. “Fifteen years, maybe more. She wasn’t a cook, but she knew every regular’s order by heart. She liked the people.” A pause. “She used to sit in this booth on her breaks. Said it had the best light.”
I eat the last of my pie and don’t say anything.
I drive her home through the Missouri dark, no streetlights, just headlights and tree lines and the occasional eye reflecting from the ditch. She’s settled beside me in the way she settles when she’s comfortable.
Different from the drive to the diner, when she was pleasant and careful, sitting very correctly, asking sensible questions. Now she’s just here. Relaxed like a person who’s forgotten to monitor herself, not someone performing comfort.
She’s also sitting differently than she was at the start of the evening.
Just slightly. Weight redistributed, her left hand resting on her knee rather than in her lap.
I notice it the way I notice things, without deciding to, and I don’t say anything about it because there’s nothing to say.
She managed the evening. Came out anyway. Danced.
I think about that moment on the gravel drive when we were walking to the car, where the drive dips and her gait went careful for just a second, and I filed it without knowing what I was filing. I know now. I’m glad I turned when I turned and said nothing when there was nothing to say.
“Thank you for Delia’s,” I say.
“Thank you for asking.”
“You could have said Applebee’s.”
A pause. Then, “I could have.”
She looks out the window, and I look at the road, and neither of us says anything else because the sentence is complete and we both know it.
I turn onto her drive. The house is lit from inside, the warm amber of the lamps visible through the lace curtains, the workshop dark beside it.
I stop the car and come around to her side and open the door.
She steps out, and we’re standing in the dark in front of her grandmother’s house with the creek running down the hill and the summer night loud with crickets and the smell of cut grass and the snowball bushes coming into bloom.
She looks up at me.
“Do you want to come in?” she asks.
I do. “Yes,” I say.
She leads me up the porch steps and through the front door, and the house closes around us, warm and amber and full of four generations of staying. I duck the doorframe and I’m inside.