Chapter 2
Everett
The first week, I told myself I was a craftsman.
That was the word I used inside my own head every morning when I rolled out at five-thirty, fed the chickens, put on a clean t-shirt and an old work flannel, and rode the seven miles into town to spend the day in Harper Kincaid's bakery.
Craftsman. I was a craftsman doing craftsman work.
I was rewiring an oven. I was running new conduit behind the back counter.
I was sanding and re-staining a six-foot stretch of butcher block that the previous tenant had let go to ruin.
I was a man with skills, and a friend who needed those skills, and there was no reason in the wide green world I shouldn't show up and apply those skills to the problem, the same as I would for any other brother in the club or any other neighbor in the town.
The fact that the friend in question was Harper Kincaid was, I told my brain, mathematically incidental.
I told my brain that pretty firmly. I told my brain that every morning.
My brain, by Wednesday, had stopped listening to me.
Wednesday was the oven.
The oven was a Hobart commercial unit from probably 1987, single deck, gas-fired, the kind of thing you couldn't kill with a tire iron.
The bones were good. The igniter was bad.
Harper had been trying to bake bread out of it on Monday and Tuesday with a long lighter from the gas station because the spark wasn't catching, and on Wednesday morning when I'd come in she was standing in front of it with her hands on her hips and a smear of butter on her forearm and a look on her face that suggested she was about thirty seconds from getting in her car and driving back to Nashville to murder the lighter herself.
"It hates me," she said when I walked in.
"It doesn't hate you."
"Boone. It hates me. It's personal."
"It's an igniter. It's a part. I'll have you bread by lunch."
She squinted at me. She was wearing an apron that had originally been white and had given up on whiteness sometime in the previous year, and a t-shirt under it the color of fresh peaches, and her hair was up in two braids that she pinned around her head like a crown, and there was, on the bridge of her nose, a single faint dust of flour that had been there since seven a.m. when she'd given up on yeast bread and switched to scones for the friends who were coming by at noon, and I want to tell you that I clocked all of this on the way to the oven.
I want to tell you that I logged her like data points.
The peach t-shirt. The braids. The flour.
I want to tell you that because if I logged her I might keep some of myself, and if I didn't, I was already losing.
I went to the oven. I crouched. I asked her for the screwdriver. She handed it to me.
It was a small kitchen. That's a thing I should mention.
Harper's commercial kitchen at the back of the storefront was a galley setup, maybe nine feet wide and twenty feet long, with the oven on the right wall and a long stainless prep table running down the center and the dish sink on the left.
Two people working in it had to dance, a little.
They had to lean past each other for a salt cellar.
They had to excuse me, behind you and coming through and step sideways and turn shoulder-on and pass each other in the narrow space like neighbors crossing on a footbridge.
I had been in this kitchen working with Harper for three days and we'd done that dance about a hundred times, and every single time, the small of my back had remembered the heat of her on the way past me, and every single time I had told the small of my back to stop having opinions, and every single time the small of my back had not.
I unscrewed the front panel of the oven. She crouched down next to me to watch.
"Show me," she said. "If it ever does this again I want to know what to do."
"Yes ma'am."
"Don't ma'am me, Boone."
"Sorry."
I pointed with the screwdriver. "See this little ceramic piece.
That's your igniter. It's got a wire running off the back of it that comes up to your controller.
When you turn the knob, you should hear it click, and that's an arc of electricity jumping across this gap right here, and that arc lights your gas.
Yours isn't clicking. Could be the igniter itself is shot, could be the wire's loose.
Easier to start with the wire. Reach in there for me. "
"Where?"
"Here." I tapped a spot inside the cavity.
She leaned in.
I want to be careful about how I tell this part because I'm trying to tell it honest. She leaned in past me to reach the wire, and the whole left side of her body came against the whole right side of my body, the way two people pressed in tight in a small space come up against each other, and her hair smelled like sugar and almond extract and something warmer underneath that I think was just her, and her shoulder was against my upper arm, and I could feel the heat coming off her skin through her t-shirt, and her braid swung forward and brushed the back of my hand where it was holding the screwdriver, and she said, "Like this? "
"Yeah. Just like that. Now turn it counterclockwise, gentle."
She turned it counterclockwise, gentle.
She said, "I'm doing it?"
I said, "You're doing it."
I was not entirely talking about the wire.
She got the wire seated. I had her hand me a small length of new copper from my toolbag because the connection on the old wire was corroded all to hell, and we replaced the run, and I taught her how to test for continuity with the cheap multimeter I kept in my truck, and then I stood up and she stood up and I told her to fire it.
She turned the knob. The oven clicked. The blue ring of flame came up clean and even around the burner, the prettiest thing I'd seen all morning, and Harper Kincaid stood next to a commercial oven in a peach t-shirt and said oh my God, Boone, and threw her arms around my neck.
I caught her. I had to. She had launched.
My hands came up and went to her back automatically, the way a man's hands go to a person who's coming at him, and she was up on her toes with her arms around my neck and her cheek against my jaw and she was laughing — that big real laugh she had, the one that came up out of her belly and made everybody else in the room want to laugh too — and for two full seconds she was pressed against me from sternum to hipbone and I held her, and I held her, and I did not move my hands, and I did not move my feet, and I did not move anything except the muscles in my arms that I needed to keep her there, and then I felt her register what she'd done.
She didn't pull away. Not at first. She stayed there for a half-second longer than a person hugging her brother's best friend in thanks for fixing an oven would stay there.
Then she stepped back. She stepped back smooth, not embarrassed, smiling, and she patted my chest twice — patted , the way you'd pat a horse you'd just bought, good boy , good fellow — and she said, "I owe you a scone, Dalton. "
"You owe me three scones."
"Don't push your luck."
She turned back to her oven and started doing the things bakers do when they have a working oven, which is mostly humming and gathering trays and feeling, for the first time in days, like maybe the world wasn't out to get her.
I stood there with my screwdriver in my hand, and I told my brain to start back up.
That was Wednesday.
I should tell you about Cade.
Cade came by every day that week. He came at lunchtime, mostly, because his shift at the body shop ended at noon on the days he wasn't pulling overtime, and he'd swing by with a paper sack from Pearl's Diner and two sweet teas, and he'd plant himself on a stool at the front counter and watch his sister work while he ate.
He'd been doing it since she got here. He told himself, and he told me, that it was so he could be close in case she needed a hand.
The truth was he just hadn't seen her in eighteen months and he was making up for it.
He'd missed her. Cade was the youngest of two kids and Harper was his only sister and he had been, for the entire duration of our friendship, a man who would lay down in traffic for her without so much as a question about which traffic, and watching him on that stool every day eating his fried chicken sandwich and watching her chase her dreams around a kitchen — I want to say that watching him was its own kind of difficulty.
Wednesday, after the oven, after she had pulled a tray of brown-sugar scones out of it and we'd all stood around eating them off paper napkins like they were communion, Cade pulled me out onto the sidewalk for a smoke.
He didn't smoke. He hadn't smoked in four years.
I knew what that meant. He wanted to talk.
The street was quiet. Late morning in Clover Ridge on a Wednesday in June is just about the quietest stretch of time you can buy in this country, all the kids in summer day camp, all the adults at work, the lunch crowd not yet rolling in.
The trees were full and green and dropping their pollen everywhere.
Briar's striped awning down the street was rippling in a little breeze.
Cade leaned against the brick wall outside Harper's bakery and stuck his hands in his pockets.
"She's not telling me something," he said.
"What."
"I don't know. That's the problem. She's not telling me." He kicked at a crack in the sidewalk. "She came home with that U-Haul like she'd been kicked. She's not eating right. She lost weight, Boone."
"She did."
"Cinnamon roll for breakfast and not a real meal till supper. I watched her yesterday. She had a cup of black coffee and half a scone. That's not — that's not how Harper eats."
"You want me to take her to dinner?"