Chapter 2 #2
"Don't." He glanced at me. "I mean — yeah.
Make sure she eats. But what I'm saying is.
Something happened in Nashville. She told me on the phone that the bakery folded.
She didn't tell me — she didn't tell me how bad.
She didn't tell me what happened . I think there was a person and I think that person took her for a ride and I think she came home with nothing in her pockets but the dignity to not say so, and I want to —"
He stopped. He took his hands out of his pockets and put them back in.
"I want to fix it," he said. "And she's not going to let me."
"No," I said. "She's not."
"So I'm asking you something. As a friend."
"Yeah."
"Watch her for me. Just. Keep an eye on her.
Keep her fed. Keep an eye on the shop. If she's running into trouble — money trouble, person trouble, anything — you'll see it before she'll tell anybody.
And I'm asking you to tell me. Not 'cause I'm gonna march in and play big brother all over her, I know better than that anymore — but 'cause I want to know.
I want to know if my sister's drowning."
He looked at me. He looked at me with the steady country eyes he had inherited from his father, the same eyes that had watched me grow up next door to his life for twenty-seven years, the same eyes that had watched me fall apart at his mother's funeral and stand up beside him at his cousin's wedding and ride out across two states with him when his daddy had a heart attack.
The eyes of the man I trusted most in this world and the man who trusted me most back. He was asking me to watch his sister.
He was asking the wrong man.
He was asking the worst possible man.
He was asking the only man, in the entire county of Clover Ridge, who already could not stop watching her.
"Yeah," I said. "I got you."
"Thank you, brother."
"Of course."
He clapped me on the shoulder. He went back inside the bakery and ate his second scone and gave Harper a kiss on the top of her head and rode his bike back to the shop.
I stood on the sidewalk a minute by myself.
I looked down the street at Briar's awning.
I looked up the street at the courthouse.
I felt the sun on the back of my neck and I thought Everett, you're a goddamn fool, and you said yes to the wrong job.
I went back inside.
I want to tell you about the second moment.
The second moment was Friday afternoon, late, after Cade had gone home for the day and the women friends had come and gone — Briar with more flowers, Nadia with a clipboard and a planning grid for the soft opening, a tall brunette with kind eyes named Wren who'd brought a thermos of soup and said Maverick says hi, eat the soup before it gets cold and stayed an hour and left, and a quieter blonde named Elara who'd opened a laptop on the front counter and helped Harper set up a basic bookkeeping system in about ninety minutes and then closed the laptop and said call me if anything panics you, I do this for fun in a tone that suggested she meant it.
The women of Clover Ridge had been parading through the bakery in shifts all week.
I want to say something about that, because it was a thing I noticed.
They had each known Harper less than a week.
They had each shown up like she'd been their sister for years.
I don't know what those four women had been through individually that had taught them to swarm around a new woman the way they were swarming around Harper, but it was a beautiful thing to watch, and it was making her bloom right in front of me.
I had watched her come into the bakery on Monday with her shoulders an inch higher than they should have been and her smile too quick at the edges, and on Friday afternoon, with the late sun cutting through the front windows and the smell of bread in the air and a fresh row of muffins cooling on the rack, she was a different woman.
She was a woman with her own light coming back on.
It was making my situation considerably worse.
I had been planing a long board for the back counter.
The board was eight feet of solid oak that I'd brought over from my own scrap pile because she'd needed a longer prep surface than the kitchen had come with, and I had been working on it on a pair of sawhorses set up in the middle of the front-of-house, planing the rough side smooth, breathing dust. I had taken my flannel off.
I was in the white t-shirt under it. I had sawdust on my forearms and in my hair and in my beard and probably down the back of my collar, and I had been at it for about forty minutes, and Harper had been at the front counter writing menu ideas in a notebook and looking up at me every once in a while and not saying anything, and I had been not looking back.
I had been working hard on not looking back.
"Boone."
"Mm."
"You're a disaster."
I straightened up. I ran a hand through my hair and watched a small cloud of sawdust come down around me. "Yeah."
"Come here."
I came over to the counter.
She put her notebook down. She came around the counter to my side.
She reached up — she had to reach, she's about five foot four and I'm a hand over six feet — and she ran her fingers through the front of my hair, brushing the sawdust out.
I felt her fingers run all the way back through my scalp.
I felt them catch on the curls at my collar.
I felt her come up onto her toes the way she had on a porch six years ago, only this time she wasn't holding a plate of brisket, this time she had both her hands in my hair, and her face was three inches from my face and her eyes were soft and steady on me and she was not, this time, looking away.
I caught her wrist.
I caught it with my whole hand, gentle, the way you catch a moth without crushing it. I held her wrist there at my temple. Her pulse was going, fast, against the meat of my thumb. I felt it.
I held it one second too long.
Two seconds.
Three.
I am going to be honest. There was a thing inside me, in those three seconds, that wanted very badly to put my other hand on the small of her back and pull her in to me and put my mouth on hers in the front of her bakery in the middle of a Friday afternoon and finish a thing that had been started on a porch six years ago and never finished.
The thing inside me was awake. It had been awake for three days.
It had been awake since she had come around the U-Haul on Monday and held my eyes in a doorway, and it had been getting louder every day, and on Friday afternoon at four-fifteen p.m. with her pulse against my thumb the thing inside me was screaming.
I let her wrist go.
I stepped back.
I said — and this is the dumbest thing I have ever said out loud in front of another human being, and I want to put it on the record so I have to live with it — I said, "You've got flour on your nose."
She did not have flour on her nose. There had not been flour on her nose since seven a.m. on Wednesday.
She knew it. She knew it the second I said it.
I watched her face do a small, slow, complicated thing — surprise first, then the briefest flicker of hurt, then something else underneath, something rueful and patient and unsurprised, the look of a woman who had just been confirmed in a long-held suspicion and was going to file it away without making it a fight.
She said, "Thanks, Dalton."
I said, "Yeah."
I picked up my flannel off the back of a chair.
I pulled it on over the sawdust. I said something about the light getting bad and needing to get out to my chickens, and I think I said goodbye, and I'm pretty sure I said see you Monday , and I walked out of her bakery and got on my bike and rode home, and I sat on my porch in the dark with the cicadas going in the field, and I did not eat.
I did not eat. I sat on the porch with a glass of water in my hand and I looked at the field and I thought —
Six years, Everett. Six years and one week.
You can do six years and one more week. You can do six years and one more month. You can do this. You promised yourself. You promised Cade tonight, without saying so, when you said yes to watching her. You promised that porch. You can hold the line.
The line had moved an inch on Friday.
The line had moved.
I sat on my porch and watched the dark and tried to figure out where I was going to put the line now, because the old place I had put it was no longer where I was standing.
Around eleven my phone buzzed. I picked it up. It was a text from Harper.
It said: thank you for the oven. and the counter. and the planing. you are a good man, everett dalton. that's not a question for you, that's just a fact about the world.
I stared at it a long time.
I stared at the Everett.
She had called me Boone for ten years.
She had called me Everett twice in her whole life that I could remember — once at our high school graduation in a card she'd given me, signed in pink gel pen with a smiley face, and once on a porch six years ago when she'd said you're welcome, Boone and not Everett, and I had been Boone to her ever since, the way I was Boone to everybody in this town except my mama and my old hands at the farm.
She had called me Everett.
I put my phone face-down on the porch rail.
I sat there a while.
I picked it up and I typed goodnight, Harper and I sent it and I put the phone back down, and I went inside, and I went to bed, and I did not sleep.
The line had moved an inch and I could feel her, sixty feet from the clubhouse and seven miles down the road, asleep or awake in her parents' guest room or maybe in a rented apartment she hadn't told me about yet, with her hair down out of its braids and her hands folded under her cheek the way I imagined she slept though I had never seen her sleep, and I thought —
Six years, Everett. Six years and a Friday.
God help me. I am in real trouble.