Chapter 6
Everett
I want to put down what it was like, those eleven days.
Eleven days from the Saturday night I held Harper's hand on the clubhouse porch to the Wednesday afternoon she took my eggs out at the farm in a rainstorm and we stopped being the people we'd been.
Eleven days. I tracked them. I tracked them the way a sailor tracks knots in a length of rope hand-over-hand, because every single day I needed to know how far I had come from the start of the rope and how much more rope there was, and Harper, the morning after the grand opening, had said we figure this out before we tell Cade, Boone, and we do not do anything we cannot undo until we tell him, and I had said yes, and we had shaken on it like two business partners signing a deal at a kitchen table, and we had spent the eleven days afterwards trying — with the kind of dedication people bring to religion — to not undo anything.
We were not very good at it.
Sunday I did not go to the bakery. That was the deal.
The bakery was closed on Sundays anyway, and Harper went to church with her folks like she did every Sunday since she was a baby, and I did not go to her parents' house for the after-church supper even though her mama had been inviting me for three weeks running and I had been finding reasons.
Cade was at the supper. Cade noticed I was not at the supper.
Cade texted me at three p.m. on Sunday and said where are you man Mama made roast and you blew her off and I texted back fixing a fence at the back forty, rain coming.
It was not a lie. There was rain coming.
There was a fence in the back forty. I had fixed the fence two months ago and it was holding fine.
I sat on my back porch on Sunday at four p.m. with a beer in my hand and watched the field instead, and I told myself this was day one of eleven.
Monday I went to the bakery at six a.m. to drop off the eggs and the honey.
I had to. I had a standing arrangement. Backing out of the standing arrangement was going to look strange to anyone watching.
Harper was alone in the kitchen when I came in the back door.
She was kneading dough. She had her sleeves shoved up past her elbows and her hair up in a knot and she had her back to me, and I stopped in the doorway with the basket of eggs in my hand and watched her work for maybe ten seconds before she turned around.
When she turned around she went very still.
I went very still.
We stood there about ten feet apart in her kitchen at six-fifteen a.m. on Monday morning, and we looked at each other, and neither of us moved, and I said, "Eggs."
"Eggs," she said.
"Where you want them."
"Back fridge."
I walked the eggs past her. She did not step back.
She stayed at the prep table with her hands deep in the dough, and I walked past her and the small of my back remembered the heat of her the way it had been remembering it for two weeks, and I put the eggs in the fridge, and I came back past her on the other side.
She did not, again, step back. We were both being very careful and we were both being very deliberate and we were both, I want to put down, failing at being normal so spectacularly that anyone with eyes would have clocked us in five seconds.
I said, "Honey on the counter?"
"Counter's good."
"Alright."
I put the honey on the counter. I stood at the door. I did not leave. She kept her hands in the dough. She did not look at me.
I said, very quietly, "Harp."
"Mm."
"This is gonna be hard."
"Yeah."
"Eleven days."
"Eleven days."
"Okay."
"Okay."
I left.
I came back Wednesday because I had to do a small repair on her front door — the latch was sticking — and I came back Friday because the new shelving I had ordered for her display case had been delivered to my farm by mistake, and on each visit I conducted myself like a man defusing a small explosive device, slow and careful and braced.
Harper, for her part, did the same. We did not touch each other on Monday or Wednesday or Friday of that first week.
We did not, in fact, get within a foot of each other on any of those days.
We talked like adults. We talked about her business, and about the chickens, and about the weather.
We were so polite to each other that on Friday afternoon Briar came by to drop off flowers for the front window and said, what's wrong with you two, did somebody die, and Harper laughed at her too quickly and I left soon after.
Cade noticed second.
Cade noticed on Saturday night. We were at the clubhouse for the regular Saturday-night thing, and Harper was not there because she was opening at five a.m. and she had gone to bed at nine, and Cade pulled me aside near the bar and said, very quiet, very direct —
"Are you and my sister fighting."
"What?"
"Are you fighting."
"No."
"Boone." He gave me a look. "I have been around the two of you all week.
Something is up. You are doing the polite distant thing and she is doing the polite distant thing and you have not eaten a meal together in seven days and she did not laugh at your bee joke at Mama's house last Sunday — which was not because the bee joke was not funny, I want to be clear, the bee joke was fine — and I am telling you as her brother, what happened .
Did you say something. Did you do something.
Did you" — he stopped. He stopped because something had just walked across his face, some idea he had not had thirty seconds ago, and I watched him have it, and I watched him decide what to do with it. "Boone."
"Yeah."
"You did not. Sleep with my sister."
"No, Cade."
"Are you telling me the truth."
"I am telling you the truth. I have not slept with your sister."
"Are you — Boone." He looked at me. He looked at me with the same eyes he had looked at me with on a deck six years ago when he'd said Harper asked about you , and I want to put down that for a half-second I thought he was about to ask me the real question, the question that ran underneath the slept-with-her question, and I braced for it.
I had told Harper I would not lie to her brother to his face.
I had not promised that I would tell him before the eleven days were up.
There was room, in the architecture of the promise, for yes, Cade, but — but Cade did not ask the real question.
Cade was a brother and a friend, and brothers and friends sometimes will not let themselves see a thing that is in front of their eyes because seeing it would re-arrange too much.
He looked at me a second longer and then he stepped back and pulled himself together and said —
"Be nice to my sister, brother. She's had a hard year. Don't make it harder."
"I am always nice to your sister, Cade."
He laughed.
He laughed and clapped me on the shoulder and said, "That's what worries me."
It was a joke.
It was a joke and we both heard it as a joke at the same time and we both heard it as not a joke at the same time, and the laugh did not entirely make it to my eyes and his did not entirely make it to his either, and the second after he turned away from me to go get another beer, I stood at the bar of the clubhouse on a Saturday night and felt the line I had not crossed move another inch.
That was the end of week one.
Week two was worse.
Week two we got tired of not touching each other and started doing the small things.
Brushing fingers passing a coffee mug. Standing close enough that her hip was against the side of my thigh while she was reading me a menu idea off a notebook in her front-of-house.
The way I would, without meaning to, put my hand on the small of her back to move her past me in the kitchen when the kitchen got crowded, and the way I'd take it away too slow when I did.
We did not kiss. We had agreed not to kiss.
We had agreed not to do anything we couldn't undo, and we were holding to that, but the small things — the touching that was not really touching, the standing too close, the laughing at a joke and meeting eyes a second longer than we'd let ourselves — those were happening every time we were in the same room.
Every time. I could not stop them. She could not stop them.
The eleven-day clock kept ticking. We had said eleven days before we tell Cade , and the eleven days had been a holding pattern, a window in which we were going to figure out, between us, what we were, before we blew everything up. The eleven days were not working.
We talked, the two of us, in pieces. We talked on her back stoop on Tuesday at two p.m. between the lunch and afternoon rushes for about twenty minutes.
We talked in my truck on Thursday after I'd given her a ride out to a supplier and back.
We talked in the small in-between minutes when there was no one in the bakery and Cade was not coming by, and I have been trying to figure out how to put down what we talked about, because the what of it sounds like nothing on paper.
We talked about the bakery. We talked about my chickens.
We talked about a book she had read in Nashville that I had also read.
We talked about her dad's blood pressure and my mom's last summer.
The thing that I want to put down is what was happening underneath the talking.
She was blooming.