Chapter 12 #2
He comes inside, crouches at the third step, presses on it in two places. "Split in the riser. I can fix it in ten minutes if you have wood glue and something to clamp it." He looks up. "Do you have wood glue?"
"Under the sink," I say, because Elise kept wood glue under the sink along with everything else a person might need.
He fixes it in eight minutes while Dana leans against the hallway wall with the expression I am deliberately not looking at.
He lifts a hand and heads back to the neighbors, and I close the door, and Dana says: "That is your contractor."
"Yes."
“Laney,” She turns to face me. "That man looked at you like you are a load-bearing wall."
"You need to stop saying that."
"I said it once before, and I'll say it whenever it's accurate, which is apparently always." She goes back to the kitchen. "Gerald better be good."
"Gerald is excellent."
"He fixed Gerald." She opens the cabinet. "He looked at your porch railing just now without being asked." She turns around. "What's his last name again?"
"Dana."
"I'm not doing anything. I'm learning a name."
"Mercer," I say, because there's no version of this conversation where I win.
"Great cottage. You seem happy here." She pauses. "You know what would be nice? February."
She makes coffee from Gerald and does not say another word about it.
She says it with her eyes for the rest of the weekend, but not with words.
Wednesday, I get an email from the Asheville client.
They want to expand the project scope — full website copy in addition to the brand identity, which is more work but also more money and exactly the kind of work I love, the kind where the visual and the written exist in the same space and inform each other.
I read the email twice to make sure I'm not misreading it. I'm not. They want more.
I close the laptop and sit in Elise's kitchen in November light, and I think: Hart Creative is working.
Not it might work or it seems to be going okay.
It's working. Three active clients, two inquiries in the pipeline, a scope expansion request from my best project so far.
I built this in six weeks in a town I barely knew, while going through the worst thing that's happened to me, working from a kitchen table in a cottage that needed a new roof.
Then I reach for my phone.
I'm going to text Dana.
That's the obvious move. Dana is my person, the one I call when something good happens, the one who answers on the first ring and means it.
But my thumb moves past Dana's name.
It moves to a different thread.
I stop.
I look at the screen.
I'm about to text Ethan.
Not Dana, who is my best friend of twenty years and the person who drove three hours in pajamas at ten o'clock at night and who has been in my corner since before I knew I needed a corner.
Ethan, who has been in my life for six weeks.
I put my phone face-down on the table.
I sit with that for a considerably longer minute.
Then I pick it back up and text Dana, because Dana is my person and the sequence of that matters, and I'm not ready to examine what it means that my thumb moved to a different thread.
Asheville wants to expand the scope, I text her. Website copy plus brand identity. It's working, Dana.
Dana
I KNOW IT IS. I've been waiting for you to say that. TELL ME EVERYTHING.
I smile. Big, real, whole face.
I tell her everything.
And later, when the phone call with Dana has run an hour and I'm full of her specific, fierce, articulate pride in me, I open the other thread.
The Asheville project just expanded scope; I text. Website copy plus the brand identity. First real "it's actually working" moment.
I look at what I just sent. The response comes seven minutes later, and I pretend I wasn’t waiting for that text for those seven minutes.
Ethan
That's well-earned. Congratulations, Delaney.
I look at my name. He uses it rarely — usually it's just the conversation, the back-and-forth without names. When he uses it, it lands.
Thank you
How's Gerald taking the news?
I laugh out loud at my kitchen table, alone in the cottage, at seven in the evening in early November, laughing at a text from a man who fixed my coffeemaker.
Gerald is insufferably pleased. He's making exceptional coffee in celebration.
Tell him he's earned it.
I set the phone down and look at the window over the sink in the kitchen, where the garden is going dark outside. He’s the first person I wanted to tell.
I didn't make the call to Dana until after my thumb moved to his thread. Dana got the actual call. Dana got the long, whole, complete telling of it. But the first impulse — the instinctive someone needs to know this right now — had his name on it.
That's information I'm not sure what to do with. I've been not sure what to do with several things for several weeks, and I've been handling that by letting the things exist without acting on them, which is a strategy with a limited shelf life, and I know it.
But not tonight.
Tonight I have a scope expansion, and Gerald is making exceptional coffee, and I have something to look forward to in late November, and I'm going to let that be enough.
I pour the coffee and look out at the garden. I think this is what building something looks like. All of it.