Chapter 6
Thaddeus
The thing about working with wood for forty years is that your hands learn to know things before you do.
I have a piece of cedar across the sawhorses tonight.
Mae's coffin. The lid, specifically—I have built the box already, and tomorrow morning I will join the lid to the body of it, but tonight the lid is the work.
The goldfinch needs to be carved. The wood needs to be sanded smooth enough that Hollis can run his palm across the surface and feel his mother's wedding dress against it, the way she wanted, the way I have promised him she will get.
I am sanding now.
It is past nine. The lamp is lit. The skylight is dark with November sky—no stars tonight, low cloud, the kind of evening that smells like snow before snow comes.
The workshop is warm with the small stove banked for the long sanding work, and I am in shirtsleeves, my flannel rolled to the elbow, the fine cedar dust accumulating on my forearms and across the bridge of my nose, which itches in a way I have stopped noticing because the rhythm of the work has me.
I am working with the grain.
This is the only way to finish cedar. You go with the grain or the wood will tell you.
I have done four passes already—coarse, medium, fine, finer—and now I am on the finest, and the surface under my hand is almost like skin, the way the wood gets when it has been worked correctly.
My arms ache pleasantly. My back is loose. I have not eaten since lunch.
I have been with Rue, in some form, for sixteen days.
The cherry medallion is at her breastbone.
The carved wolf is on her shelf. The piece of HAZZ-ERD oak is on her bedside table beside an old paperback of Mountain Ghosts and Hollow Folk she has, in the absence of Edwin to read it to, been reading to herself.
She has slept in my cabin twice. I have slept in her cottage four times.
We have done nothing more than kiss—long quiet kisses against the doorframe of the workshop, slow tired kisses in the half-light of her cottage at three in the morning, one careful kiss at the foot of the cemetery hill that I will remember for the rest of my life because she had snowflakes in her hair and her mouth was very cold against mine.
We have not gone further.
It has not, I think, been deliberate restraint on either of our parts.
It has been an unconsidered patience. We are both tired.
The work has been heavy. Mae is in her last days.
Beau is stable but the tumor is growing again.
The pack is still grieving Wyatt. There has not been a good night to do anything but hold each other and sleep, and I have been content with that, more than content, because the holding itself has been a thing I had not known I was missing.
But the wolf has been awake.
The wolf is awake now. He is sitting up.
He has been sitting up for two weeks. He is patient, the way I am patient, and he has not pressed, the way I have not pressed.
But there is a low thrum in the back of my mind that has been steady and unignorable, and tonight, in the cedar dust and the lamp light, the thrum is louder than usual.
The door opens.
I know who it is before I turn. I always know. The footsteps. The breathing. The faint scent of soap and hospice antiseptic and the violet-water Della has somehow convinced Rue to wear in the evenings.
"You forgot dinner," she says.
I turn.
She is in the doorway with a covered plate in her hands.
She is wearing my old gray sweater—she has, in the past week, started borrowing it without asking, and I have, in the past week, stopped putting it back on the hook because I prefer it on her—and her hair is loose, and her face is flushed from the climb, and she is looking at me the way she has been looking at me for two days now, which is the way of a woman who has decided something and has not yet found the moment to say it.
"I did," I say.
"It's a sandwich. And soup. Della says to tell you that if you forget dinner one more time she is putting you on rations like a child."
"Tell Della I am grateful for the rations."
She smiles.
She comes into the workshop and sets the plate down on the small table by the stove.
She does not, the way she usually does, immediately go to the chair.
She stands there for a moment with her hand on the plate, and I watch her, and the lamp light catches her in profile—the line of her jaw, the soft curve of her neck where the gray sweater has slipped at the shoulder, the cherry medallion at her breastbone catching the lamp and gleaming dark.
"You have cedar dust on your nose," she says.
"I have cedar dust everywhere."
She crosses to me. She comes around the sawhorses. She lifts her hand and very carefully brushes the dust from the bridge of my nose with her thumb.
Her thumb is warm.
Her hand stays.
It moves a fraction. To my cheekbone. To my jaw. The pad of her thumb traces the line of my mouth—the unscarred side, the side that almost-smiles, the side she has been kissing for two weeks—and her eyes are on mine, and the wolf in the back of my mind goes very still.
Not asleep-still.
Hunting-still.
The thrum I have been carrying for fourteen days resolves into something with edges.
"Thaddeus."
"Yes."
"I have been thinking."
"I gather."
"For two weeks."
"I gather that too."
She does not laugh. She looks at me, and her hand is still on my jaw, and her thumb is still at the corner of my mouth.
The cedar dust on my forearms catches the lamp.
The fine grain of the lid behind me catches the lamp.
Everything in the workshop catches the lamp, and what the lamp is catching most clearly is her—the gray sweater, the cherry at her breastbone, the slow precise color rising in her cheeks.
"I want you to take me to bed," she says.
I do not move.
I have heard the words. I have understood them. The man at the front of my mind has them. The wolf has them. Both of us are holding very, very still.
"Rue."
"Yes."
"Are you sure?"
"I have been sure for two weeks. I have been waiting for a night when neither of us is exhausted and no one is dying."
"Tonight."
"Tonight."
I set the sanding block down.
I set it down very carefully, because I am, in this moment, holding myself together with a discipline I have not had to use in fourteen years, and the smallest unprecise motion will not, I think, be small.
I set it down. I turn to her. I take her face in both my hands.
My palms are warm with the work. Her skin is cool from the climb up the hill.
I look at her.
I do not, in this moment, want to take her to bed.
I want to take her now. Here. In the workshop. With the lamp light on her face and the cedar dust on my hands and the lid behind us that I have been sanding for hours, smooth as skin.
The wolf agrees.
I lower my mouth to hers.
I kiss her the way I have been kissing her for two weeks—slow, deliberate, patient. The kiss is the same kiss for perhaps four seconds. Then her hand slides into my hair. Then her mouth opens under mine. Then the patience snaps.
I do not, exactly, lift her. I move her.
I take a step toward her and she takes a step back and we are in motion together, her hands moving up the front of my shirt, my hand at the small of her back, and the small space between the sawhorses and the workbench is the space we cross.
The bench is at her back. I lift her—light, easy, the kind of lifting that surprises both of us because I do not remember being that strong this morning—and she is on the workbench, and I am between her knees, and her mouth is on mine and her fingers are in my hair and the cherry medallion is between us, swinging on its cord, warm against my own chest where it has fallen against me.
I pull back.
"The lid," I say.
She laughs. The laugh is breathless. "Move it."
I move it. With one arm, while the other holds her at the waist, I lift the cedar lid—it weighs less than her—and set it aside on the floor. I clear the bench in two more motions: the sanding blocks, the small jar of beeswax, the pencils. They go to the table by the stove. The workbench is empty.
Her hands are at the front of my shirt.
She undoes the buttons slowly. One. Two.
Three. Her knuckles brush the hollow of my throat as she works, and her eyes do not leave mine, and the lamp light makes a small bright point in the gray of her irises.
The fourth button. The fifth. She pushes the shirt back from my shoulders and lets it fall to my elbows.
She lays her palms flat against my chest.
I have not been touched like this in fourteen years.
I have not been touched by anyone in fourteen years. The pack does not touch me; they keep their distance, for reasons I have made my peace with. The dead I prepare are not, in any meaningful sense, touch. The handshake at a funeral is not touch.
Her hands are warm against my skin. They move slowly.
They feel the shape of me—the chest, the ribs, the place where the long scar from a young man's stupid fight thirty years ago runs from my collarbone to my breastbone, the line of the small healed brand the club gave me when I was patched in, the soft plane of my stomach above my belt.
"Thaddeus," she says.
"Yes."
"You are shaking."
"I am."
"Why?"
"Because I have not done this in fourteen years and I am very, very afraid of doing it badly."
Her mouth softens.
"You will not," she says, "do it badly."
She lifts her arms over her head.
The gray sweater—my sweater—comes off in one motion.
Beneath it she is wearing a thin white camisole, and her skin above it is paler than her face, and the cherry medallion lies against her sternum the way I have wanted to lie against her sternum since the day I gave it to her.
I bend my head. I press my mouth to the place where the cord of the medallion meets her skin.
She makes a small sound.