Chapter 6 #2
I had watched her go through fourteen days of war and then I had watched her open a bakery to a line down the block and then I had watched her receive the news that a Tennessee judge had dismissed Joelle's case, and somewhere in all of that — and continuing into week two of the eleven days — Harper Kincaid was becoming a woman I had not, in six years of loving her at a distance, fully met.
She was getting bigger inside herself. That's the only way I know how to say it.
She had come home in a U-Haul looking like a woman who had been folded up small to fit through a door, and I had watched her unfold one inch at a time, day after day, in front of me, all month.
She laughed louder. She walked differently in her own shop.
She made eye contact with strangers in line and remembered their names by the second visit.
She corrected Cade about something at Sunday supper and held the correction when he tried to push back on it.
She wore a sundress to the bakery on Wednesday — a yellow one, like the one she'd worn at the barbecue six years ago, but cut closer to her body, and shorter at the knee, and she had not, when she'd put it on, made herself smaller in it.
She had walked into her own bakery in a yellow sundress with a confidence that was a different confidence from the one she had carried in any year of her twenties, and I had set down the box of new aprons I'd been carrying and just looked at her, and she had caught me looking, and she had not blushed and she had not looked away.
She had said, "What."
I had said, "Pretty dress."
She had said, "Thank you, Boone."
Then she had walked past me into the kitchen and I had stood in the middle of the front-of-house and tried to remember what I had been doing.
The conversation that mattered most happened on the Tuesday of week two on her back stoop.
It was a hot afternoon. The high was ninety-one.
She had brought us out two cups of iced coffee and she had a kitchen towel over her shoulder from where she'd been wiping down the prep table, and she sat down on the concrete step next to me with maybe eight inches between her hip and mine, and she looked out at the small back alley where the dumpster lived and the wild honeysuckle had come up between the concrete and the brick wall of the next building, and she said —
"Boone. I want to tell you something."
"Okay."
"I spent my twenties making myself smaller for people."
I did not say anything. I drank my coffee.
"All of my twenties," she said. "Every single year.
I made myself smaller. I made my body smaller.
I tried to. I starved myself in pastry school, can you believe that.
I starved myself in pastry school . I weighed every cup of flour I touched and refused to eat anything I made because I was twenty-two and a hundred and seventy pounds and I thought I needed to be a hundred and forty by graduation.
I did not get to a hundred and forty. I got down to a hundred and fifty-eight and I felt like a ghost and my hands shook and I burned three sheet pans of croissants in a row in March of senior year because I could not see the timer through the spots in my eyes, and the chef pulled me aside in the kitchen and told me I was going to wash out of his program if I did not start eating, and I started eating, and I gained the weight back, and I was ashamed of myself for years for gaining the weight back, even though gaining the weight back was the thing that let me finish school.
I made my voice smaller. I learned to laugh at jokes I did not think were funny.
I dated men who told me I was brave for wearing things, which is the word men use when they mean not what I would have picked .
I dated a man for two years in Nashville who told me he loved me and never once introduced me to his mother.
I built a bakery with a woman who treated me like the help in my own kitchen because I had decided, very early on, that I was lucky she wanted to be partners with me at all.
I made my dreams smaller. I made my voice smaller.
I made my body smaller. I made everything about me smaller, Boone, for ten straight years, because I had it in my head somewhere that there was a size of me that was the acceptable size, and if I could just be that size, in every direction, then I would get the things I wanted. "
She stopped.
She drank her coffee.
"I lost the bakery in February," she said.
"I lost forty-three thousand dollars and a business and a partner and the part of my life I had built in that city.
And I sat in my apartment in Nashville for three weeks afterwards and I tried to figure out what I had done wrong.
I lost ten more pounds in those three weeks because I could not eat.
I sat there and I made lists in my head of all the places I had been too much, all the places where if I had just been smaller, quieter, easier, this would not have happened to me.
I made those lists for three weeks. Boone.
Three weeks. And then on a Sunday morning, end of February, I went out for coffee at the diner around the corner from my apartment, and the waitress was a fat woman in her fifties named Diane, and she brought me my coffee and she sat down across from me — she just sat down, in the booth — and she said, honey, you look like somebody who lost something .
And I started crying. In a diner. With a stranger.
I cried at this woman for forty-five minutes.
And she let me. She held my hand across the booth and she let me cry, and when I was done, she said to me — and I have thought about this every day since — she said, baby, the world is going to tell you, your whole life, to make yourself smaller.
The world made me try to make myself smaller for forty years.
Don't you do it. Don't you do it. You are already exactly the right size of yourself. "
She stopped. She looked at her coffee.
"I packed up the apartment three days later," she said.
"I rented the U-Haul. I came home. And I made myself a promise on the way down.
I made myself the same promise Diane the waitress in Nashville had made me.
The promise was: I am done making myself smaller.
I am done. In any direction. I am going to take up the room I take up.
I am going to bake the food I want to bake.
I am going to wear the clothes I want to wear.
I am going to laugh as loud as I laugh. I am going to want the things I want.
I am going to be exactly the right size of myself, and if there is room for me in this world, I will find it, and if there is not, I will make some. "
She was quiet a minute.
She looked at me.
"That includes you, Boone."
"Harp."
"I am not making myself smaller to be loved by you.
I am not making myself quieter. I am not pretending I don't want what I want.
I am telling you what I want, and I am giving you a chance to do what you want with that information, and I am not going to take up less room in your life to make the math of loving me easier on you.
That is the deal. That is the only deal I have.
I have wanted you for six years and I have wanted you in the size I am — the size that walks into a kitchen and laughs too loud and bakes bread in her own bakery on Main Street.
I want you to want me at that size. That is all I am asking.
I do not need you to fix anything for me.
I do not need you to be smaller for me either, by the way.
I love every part of you. The chaplain. The farmer.
The brother. The big quiet man who calls Knox at six forty-five on a Thursday morning when one of his people is in trouble.
I love all of it, Boone. I want all of it. I want it whole-sized."
I sat there.
I sat there with my iced coffee in my hand and my heart in my throat and I looked at Harper Kincaid on her own back stoop, sweat on her temples in the June heat, no makeup, her hair coming out of the knot at the back of her head, telling me she had spent ten years trying to be smaller and had decided to stop, and I want to put down something I felt right then because I think it is the truest thing I will ever have to write down in my life.
There is nothing small about Harper Kincaid.
There never has been. There never will be.
She is a big-hearted, big-laughing, big-talented, big-bodied, big-spirited woman who has spent ten years apologizing for the size of every dimension of herself, and I have loved her in every one of those dimensions for six years without telling her so, and she was sitting on a back stoop telling me she was not, anymore, going to apologize for any of it.
She was sitting on a back stoop telling me she was going to come at me whole-sized, and that the deal was take her whole or do not take her at all.
I set my coffee down on the concrete.
I turned to her. I did not touch her. I sat on the step with my forearms on my knees and I looked at her, and I said —
"Harper Kincaid."
"Yes."
"There is nothing small about you. There never has been.
I have loved every inch of every dimension of you for six years and I have not been brave enough to tell you in any of them.
I am telling you now. I love your laugh.
I love the room you take up. I love your hands.
I love the way you cried in front of Diane in a diner in February and the way you packed a U-Haul ten days later.
I love your cinnamon rolls and the bee joke and the way you call me Boone in front of other people and the way you called me Everett in a text message three weeks ago.
I love that you have not made yourself smaller for me in any of the eleven days, even though I would have, in those days, made it easy for you to.
I am telling you, Harp — I am not asking you to be smaller.
I am asking you to be exactly what you are. "
She did not say anything.
She looked at me a long time.
She said, "Then let me handle Cade."
"Tomorrow."
"Tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow."
She stood up. She brushed off the back of the sundress.
She picked up my empty coffee cup and her own, and she paused in the doorway of her kitchen and looked back at me on the stoop, and she said, "Boone.
You should know. Cade is not going to be okay with this for a while.
I have known him my whole life. He is going to be hurt and he is going to be loud and he is probably going to throw something. "
"I know."
"And I am still going to handle it."
"I know."
"And after he calms down, he is going to look at me, and he is going to see that I am happy. And that is going to do most of the work for us."
"Okay."
"Okay."
She went inside.
I sat on the back stoop a long time. Maybe twenty minutes.
The honeysuckle in the alley smelled sweet and the cicadas were just starting up and the sky was the deep blue it got around six p.m. on a hot June afternoon when a storm was thinking about coming.
There was rain in the forecast. The radio in my truck had said severe thunderstorms possible Wednesday afternoon, flash flood watch in effect for the eastern counties.
I had eggs and honey to drop at her shop Wednesday morning at six.
I was going to be at her shop in the morning.
She was going to come out to the farm in the afternoon to pick up the second batch — the catering order Briar had placed for the flower shop's anniversary on Friday, six dozen biscuits, more than I could fit in one delivery.
She was going to come out to the farm. Tomorrow. Alone.
I sat on the stoop and looked at the sky.
I went home around seven. I sat on my own porch.
I watched the clouds gather over the west pasture.
I went to bed at ten. I lay there in the dark with my hands flat on my chest and I made myself a small honest promise — the kind of promise I had made in the gray morning at the kitchen table six years ago, and the kind of promise I had not, until that night, made to myself again.
The promise was: Tomorrow I am done looking away. Whatever comes next is whatever comes next. The line is gone. I love her. I am not going to lie about it for one more day.
I slept. I slept better than I had slept in six years. I slept like a man who had finally set something down he had been carrying too long.
When I woke up Wednesday morning at five-thirty, the rain was coming.
I could feel it in the air through the open window.
The line was gone.
The bee was coming home.