Chapter 7
Harper
I did not, when I left the bakery Wednesday afternoon, intend to spend the night at Everett Dalton's farm.
I want to put that down because it matters.
I want the record to show that I left my own back kitchen at four-fifteen p.m. with two flat boxes of biscuits cooling on the passenger seat of my Honda Civic and one box of pain au chocolat in the footwell, and that I had every intention in the world of driving the seven miles out to his farm, handing him the catering for Briar's Friday event, drinking exactly one glass of iced tea on his porch, and being back in my own kitchen by six p.m. for the supper rush of regulars Wren had started calling Harper's after-dinner crowd .
That was the plan. That was the plan I had told my brother on the phone at three when he'd asked me what I was doing that evening.
That was the plan I had told my own mother at lunch when she'd asked the same question.
That was the plan that, in retrospect, the weather had been laughing at for about six hours by the time I got in the car.
The rain started forty minutes outside town.
It had been building all afternoon. The high had been ninety-three and the air had been thick as gravy since noon, and by three the sky over Clover Ridge had been the color of an old penny and the radio had been chirping warnings about severe storms and flash flooding in the eastern counties for hours.
I had heard the warnings. I had heard them, and I had thought I can be there and back before the rain comes , the way every person who has ever been caught in a thunderstorm thinks I can be there and back before the rain comes , and the Lord, who I suspect has a sense of humor about these things, had decided otherwise.
The first fat drop hit the windshield at four-thirty-two p.m. on the county road outside Everett's farm.
I know the exact time because I looked at the clock on the dash.
By four-thirty-five it was a wall. By four-thirty-eight the wipers on the Civic could not keep up with the water and I was crawling down a road I had driven a hundred times in my life at fifteen miles an hour with my hands gripped white on the wheel, and by four-forty when I made the turn into his driveway the gravel was a small fast-moving creek and I parked the Civic up by his porch and sat in the driver's seat watching water sheet off the roofline of the farmhouse like a curtain made of nickel.
Everett came out onto the porch.
He had on his old gray t-shirt, the worn-soft one with a hole in the hem, and his work jeans, and his hair was wet because the porch eaves were not deep enough for the slant of this rain.
He had a kitchen towel slung over his shoulder.
He stood at the railing and looked at me through the windshield, and I looked at him through the windshield, and he gestured at the boxes on my passenger seat with one hand and beckoned me up onto the porch with the other, and I rolled the window down a half inch and yelled —
"It's a flood, Boone!"
"I know it!"
"I can't get back!"
"I know it!"
"Hold the door open!"
He held the door open. I grabbed the two boxes of biscuits and one box of pain au chocolat off the passenger seat and made a run for the porch through rain so heavy it hit the back of my neck like a handful of pebbles.
I came up the porch steps two at a time.
He took two of the three boxes out of my hands as I came past him.
We tumbled into the house together. The screen door slapped shut behind us and the inside door clicked shut after that and the sudden quiet of being indoors with the storm on the outside of the walls hit my ears like a held breath.
I was soaked. I was completely soaked. The fifteen feet from the Civic to the porch had drenched me through the cotton sundress I was wearing — the yellow one, because I had not learned my lesson yet — and my hair was plastered to my temples and a small steady drip was coming off the hem of the dress onto his front entry rug.
He set the boxes on the side table. He looked at me. I looked at him. We started laughing.
We laughed for maybe thirty seconds. We laughed the way two people laugh when the sky has just done something so dramatic that you have to laugh at it, and we laughed at me dripping on his rug, and we laughed at his hair sticking up in three directions from the wind on the porch, and somewhere in the middle of the laughing he stopped first, and his eyes moved from my face down to where the wet sundress was clinging to me in places I had not, half an hour ago, intended for the sundress to cling, and his face did the thing it did, the curtain thing, and the curtain did not come down.
The curtain stayed up.
He said, "Harp. You're gonna catch cold."
"It's ninety degrees out."
"You're gonna catch cold."
"Everett. It's June. It's ninety degrees and I am wet but I am not cold."
"Let me get you a t-shirt anyway."
I let him. He went up the stairs two at a time and I stood in the entryway and looked at the inside of his house.
I had been in his house exactly three times in my life — once at his mama's funeral when half the town had come back to the farm afterwards for sandwiches, once two years ago when Cade had brought me out to help Boone bring in a couch he'd bought off a neighbor, and once last Friday when I had walked into his kitchen and told him he didn't get to rescue me.
I had never been further in than the kitchen.
I had never seen the staircase, or the hallway, or what was up the stairs.
I stood in his entryway with rain on my eyelashes and I looked, and I saw a house.
I saw a real house. I saw a man's house that had been a woman's house once — there were curtains his mama had picked out, a framed cross-stitch his grandmother had made of the Twenty-Third Psalm hanging on the wall by the kitchen door, a small enamel-handled rosemary planter on the kitchen windowsill where I had seen it from the doorway on Friday — and underneath the woman's bones of the house I saw a man living.
I saw his boots lined up under a wooden bench.
I saw a blue flannel shirt on a hook by the door.
I saw a coffee cup that had been left on the side table that morning with a third of an inch of cold coffee in the bottom, and that small unfinished cup of coffee made the back of my throat ache for some reason I could not name.
He came back down the stairs with a t-shirt in his hand.
It was an old one. It said DALTON FARMS — CLOVER RIDGE TN in faded letters across the front.
"Bathroom's through there," he said. "Towels in the closet."
"Boone."
"Mm."
"I'm here for a while."
"I know."
The road home was going to be impassable till morning.
We both knew it. Briar had texted me at four-fifteen to tell me Cade was staying at the clubhouse because the bridge over the creek was already a foot under.
My mother had texted me at four-twenty-five to ask if I was somewhere safe and I had texted her back at Everett's, picking up a delivery, will call when I'm home , and the storm had eaten the road behind me and the road in front of me and the only road left to me was the long one through Everett Dalton's front door.
I went into the bathroom. I peeled off the wet sundress.
I rubbed myself down with a clean towel from his closet.
I pulled the t-shirt on. It came nearly to my knees.
It smelled, faintly, of the cedar of the closet it had been folded in and underneath that of him, the cedar-and-clean-sweat smell I had been carrying around with me since the day in my bakery he had run his hand through his hair and made a cloud of sawdust come down around his shoulders.
I looked at myself in his bathroom mirror.
My hair was a situation. My mascara was a situation.
I was standing in Everett Dalton's bathroom in nothing but his t-shirt and damp underwear, and I was about to come back out and stand in his kitchen, and I was thirty years old, and I had made a promise to myself eleven days ago about being whole-sized, and I looked at the woman in the bathroom mirror and I said, out loud, quietly —
"Hi, sugar."
I came out.
He was in the kitchen with his back to me.
He had put a kettle on. He was reaching down a tin of loose tea from a high shelf, and I noticed — the way you notice things when every nerve in your body is on a high frequency — that he had changed his shirt while I had been in the bathroom.
He had on a clean white t-shirt. His hair was drying in a soft sandy mess on top of his head.
The kitchen smelled like rain through an open window and rosemary and the faint warmth of the cast iron stove. He turned when I came in.
He stopped.
He set the tin of tea on the counter very carefully. He looked at me from the kitchen doorway to the crown of my head to the hem of his own t-shirt where it ended halfway down my thighs, and back up to my face. The look took about a second and a half. The kitchen was suddenly very small.
I crossed it.
I had not crossed it in any of the eleven days.
I had been in this kitchen four times now and I had stood across rooms from this man for six years and I had let him be the one to keep the distance, and I crossed the kitchen because the line was gone, and I came up to the prep counter where the mixing bowl I had pulled out earlier in the afternoon for the biscuits was still sitting, and I picked the mixing bowl up because my hands needed something to do, and I said —
"I think I'm going to stress-bake."
"Okay."
"Do you have butter."
"I have butter."
"Flour."
"Flour."
"Salt."
"Salt."
"Then I'm going to make us biscuits."