Chapter Thirty-Four
Lucy
He was already on the public dock when I pulled in, sitting on the very end of it with his legs hanging over the water and the black notebook held on his knee in both hands, like a man in a waiting room holding his own X-rays.
I sat in the car for a minute and watched him not open it.
Juniper didn’t wait for me. She put her nose against the back window and made the high, hopeful whine she used to save for the sound of his truck in the drive, and I gave up and let her out, and she went down the ramp and along the dock at her best rolling trot and sat down against his hip.
He put his arm around her without looking. He was still looking at the notebook.
It was the fourth Sunday. There was frost on the boards, white in the shadows and already going dark and wet where the sun touched it. The lake was dead calm. The mist was lifting off it in slow separate threads, like somebody was pulling basting stitches out of silk.
I walked down the dock with two coffees, not the fancy kind, because this week it had been my turn, and I handed him one, and sat down on the cold boards on the other side of the dog.
“Did you read it?”
“No.”
“Not even the first line?”
“I kept it in the glove box all week.” He turned the cup in his hands. “Then I moved it to the kitchen drawer so I’d stop looking at the glove box. Then I moved it back, because I kept opening the kitchen drawer.”
“So you didn’t read it.”
“Luce. I didn’t read it.” He looked at me for the first time. His eyes were red at the rims, like he hadn’t slept, or like he had and it hadn’t helped. “I’ve read everything I was handed for four months. Every page. I wasn’t going to start skipping on this one.”
I believed him. That surprised me more than anything. I just believed him, sitting on a frozen dock with my coffee, the way you believe a floor will hold you when you’ve walked across it enough times.
“Okay,” I said. “Out loud. All of it. Don’t skip the parts you don’t like.”
He opened the cover. No. 32, and the date, in my hand.
He unfolded the sheet of paper from inside it, carefully, the two creases I’d pressed with the back of a spoon at two in the morning.
It had taken me four drafts. The first three were in the wastebasket under my drafting table, and one of them had been mostly swearing.
He cleared his throat.
“‘One,’” he read. “‘My studio stays mine. Hart & Pine is independent. It does not become a Sterling anything. Not a division, not a partner, not a slide in a deck.’” He looked up. “Agreed.”
“Don’t agree yet. Read them all.”
He nodded and looked back down. “‘Two. My name goes on my work. Every time. If it’s mine, it says Lucy Hart. If it says anything else, it isn’t mine and you say so, out loud, to whoever’s in the room.’”
He didn’t say agreed this time. He just touched the line with his thumb, as if he was checking whether the ink was dry.
“‘Three. You tell me things the day you learn them. Not the next week. Not after you’ve fixed them. Not after somebody else has decided how I should hear it.’”
“Like the deck,” he said quietly.
“Like the deck. Like the contract. Like the scans. Like the email on Dev’s laptop.
” I held my cup against my chest. “I found out every single thing that happened to my own work from somebody who wasn’t you.
A magazine rack. A lawyer. Dev’s screen.
I don’t care if the news is bad. I care that it comes from you, and that it comes the same day. ”
“Same day.” He said it like he was writing it down somewhere inside himself. “Even if it’s bad.”
“Especially if it’s bad.”
He went on. “‘Four. You ask before you fix.’” The corner of his mouth moved. “The pencil.”
“The pencil was a good start. The pencil was a very small thing.”
“I know.”
“Most things aren’t pencils, Rhys.”
“I know.” He looked out at the water. “Most things I’ve already fixed before you knew they were broken. Then I tell you about it at dinner like a present.”
“That’s exactly it.” It came out of me sharper than I meant, and I let it stay sharp. “You don’t get to decide what’s broken in my life and then hand me the repair.”
He nodded slowly. Then he read the next one.
“‘Five. We go to counseling. Together. Somebody neither of us has ever sold anything to or bought anything from.’” He huffed out something like a laugh. “That rules out half of northern Nevada.”
“Cilla has a name in Sacramento. It’s a two-hour drive. That’s on purpose. You can’t take a call in the car if you’re driving over the summit in January.”
“You’ve thought about this.”
“I’ve thought about nothing else for three weeks.”
He found his place again. And then he stopped.
I knew which one it was. I’d written it on the fourth draft and nearly taken it out, and then put it back, and then gone and stood at the north window of the studio until the sky went gray, because I couldn’t sit at the table with it.
He read it to himself first. I watched his lips not move. Juniper shifted against his hip and put her chin on his thigh.
“Out loud,” I said. My voice wasn’t as steady as I wanted. “You promised.”
“‘Six.’” He had to stop. He started again. “‘We grieve the babies. Together. Out loud. Both of them.’”
The mist had almost all lifted. Across the lake a fishing boat was putting out from the far shore, the sound of it coming over the water late and small.
“I never said it out loud,” he said. “That there were two. I never said the number.”
“I know.”
“I went back to work on the Tuesday. Both times.” He was holding the paper so tightly the edge had started to crumple. “I thought if I kept moving, you wouldn’t have to watch me not be okay. I thought that was—I thought that was the kind thing.”
“I didn’t want you to be okay,” I said. “I wanted you to not be okay with me. In the same room. I wanted somebody else in the house to know what day it was.”
He put his hand over his eyes. Not to hide. Just to hold his face together.
“My mother told you about the parking lot.”
“She told me. She said you breathed for twenty minutes and then said pocket dial.”
“It was the lot behind the hospital.” His voice broke clean in half on hospital, and he let it.
“I sat in the truck. I couldn’t come back up.
I didn’t know how to walk into that room and not have anything to sell you.
Not a plan. Not a next step. Just—nothing.
Just being sad. So I called my mom and didn’t say anything, and then I came back up and told you I’d moved the investor call, like that was a gift. ”
I didn’t reach for him. I wanted to, and I didn’t, because the term said together and I wanted to know we could do it sitting side by side, without either of us having to rescue the other one first. So I just sat next to him on the cold dock with the dog between us and cried, and he cried, and neither of us fixed it, and the fishing boat went all the way across the lake and out of sight.
It took a long time. It was the first time. That was the whole point.
When he could, he wiped his face on the cuff of his jacket and looked back down at the page. He read the last one in a wrecked, careful voice.
“‘Seven. No selling at home.’” He blinked at it. “Define selling.”
“If you hear yourself doing the voice.”
“What voice?”
I straightened my back, put my coffee down, spread both hands out on the air in front of me, and smiled with all my teeth. “‘Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do.’”
He stared at me. Then he laughed, helplessly, with his wet face, so hard Juniper sat up to check on him.
“I don’t sound like that.”
“You sound exactly like that. You did it to me about the fire station. You did it about the studio. You did it about the dog food.”
“The dog food was a very good deal.”
“See?” I pointed at him. “Voice.”
He wiped his eyes again. There was one more line at the bottom of the page, under the seven, written smaller. I watched him find it.
“‘These are not a yes,’” he read. “‘They’re what a yes would cost.’”
He sat with that. He didn’t argue. He didn’t say I can do all of these, easy, which is what the old Rhys would have said before he’d finished reading, and it would have been the last honest thing he said about them.
He folded the paper back into thirds along my creases and held it on top of the notebook.
“Can I add one?” he asked.
I looked at him.
“I’m asking,” he said. “That’s me asking. You can say no.”
I took the pencil out of my jacket pocket.
It was the blunt one, from the first Sunday, the one I’d kept for fog.
I held it out, and he took it, and unfolded the page again, and under my seven, in his handwriting, which I’d once seen on a sketch in a notebook from 2018 promising me my name on a door, he wrote one line.
It took him a long time. He pressed hard.
Then he turned the page toward me, but he didn’t make me read it.
He read it to me himself, the way I’d asked him to read everything.
“Eight,” he said. “When you stop drawing, tell me. That’s how I’ll know I’m losing you.”