Chapter 7
Nora
I have planned the evening down to the last small detail.
I want to admit this, because it would be more flattering to pretend it had been spontaneous.
It would be more flattering to pretend that I had been swept up by something.
The truth is the opposite. I had — and this is one of the things I have started to learn about myself, with a small private wonder — I had decided.
I had decided three days ago. I had decided on a Wednesday night, sitting on the edge of my bed in the small narrow Victorian on Larkspur Street with the window cracked and the early-summer night air coming in and a copy of the Neruda open on my lap to the second poem, that the next time he walked me home it was not going to be to my front gate.
It was going to be to the garden behind the library.
And it was not going to end with a goodnight at the gate.
I had decided. The way I decide which book to recommend to a regular.
The way I decide where the new-arrivals display should be reset on a Monday morning.
With care. With deliberation. With the small careful pleasure of being a woman who has, for the first time in twenty-six years, learned that her own deciding is allowed to be the deciding.
It is a Saturday in early June. The library closes at six. I have closed at five forty-five because I have prepared the garden in advance and I do not want to be rushed.
I have hung fairy lights through the trellis.
I have done this in the afternoon while Rhett was at the lumberyard with Boone, with the door propped open so the bell would ring if anyone came in, and with Briar on FaceTime in the small white earbuds I almost never wear, sitting on her workbench at the flower shop with a coffee in her hand and giving me a running commentary while I stood on the small wooden stepladder I keep in the supply closet and threaded the strand through the wisteria vines that climb the south side of the trellis.
Higher on the left, sweetheart. Cluster three around the back corner so they catch the eye on the way in.
Drape, don't pull — the wisteria will hold them, you don't need a nail.
She had grinned at me through the phone.
She had said, Nora. Sugar. Is there a reason you are doing this on a Saturday afternoon when the library garden has not had fairy lights in its entire history.
I had not answered. She had said, Oh. Oh, sweetheart.
Oh, look at your face. I had ended the call.
She had texted me an hour later. I am going to brunch on Sunday like I never texted you and you can tell me everything you want and nothing you don't and I am going to be the best friend who has ever existed in any small town in human history, do you hear me, Lenora Margaret Ashby? — XO B.
I have laid a small thick wool blanket on the garden bench.
The bench is the long wooden one Rhett built me last week, the one he made out of cedar in the clubhouse yard on his Tuesday off without telling me he was making it, and which he simply rolled up the alley behind the library on Thursday morning and set in the garden where my old one had been, and which he then refused to take any thanks for.
The bench is wide enough for two people to sit and long enough to lie on.
I had noticed both things when he installed it. I do not think it had been an accident.
The wisteria is at its peak.
I want to pause on that because the wisteria is — and I am only learning to say this honestly — the wisteria is part of the plan.
The wisteria has been climbing the trellis at the back of the library garden for three years.
I have pruned it twice. I planted the second runner along the east trellis my first summer here.
It blooms in late May and into June, and it blooms at night more than it blooms in the day — by which I mean it smells more at night, that thick sweet honey-and-grape smell that gets into a person's skin and stays.
The blossoms are heavy. They hang in long lavender clusters.
Some of them are dropping now, in early June, their small individual petals falling at random from the racemes, the way a tree drops the last of its blossoms in a wind that nobody can feel.
I have walked through the garden three times this afternoon making sure nothing is out of place.
The roses are full and heavy along the back trellis, the white ones that smell like vanilla and the pink ones that do not smell like anything but look like the inside of a watercolor.
The cosmos I planted with him watching me have gotten their first buds.
The grass is freshly cut. The stone path is swept.
The garden gate is ajar — left open, the way I always leave it on a summer evening, to let the air through.
The fairy lights are on.
I plugged them in at five forty.
They are the small white ones, the warm-white kind, the kind that look from a distance like a fistful of tiny stars caught in a net.
I have woven them through the wisteria so that they sit against the lavender clusters, and the effect — when I came back through the gate just now, my hands shaking with the small fine nerves of a woman who has decided a thing — the effect is that the entire trellis looks like a piece of a different season.
Like a piece of October dressed up as June.
Like a chapel made out of vines and electricity.
I look at it for a long second and I think, with a small private inward laugh: I have made the library garden into a place I could be married in.
That is not — I want to be honest — that is not, exactly, what I was making it into.
But I am not going to argue with the parallel.
I close the back door of the library behind me.
I do not lock it from the inside. I leave it on the latch.
He will come through the alley gate the way he always does on the warm evenings, and he will find me in the garden, the way he always does.
He does not have to knock. I have not told him, in so many words, why I have asked him to come tonight.
I have only said, this morning when he came in to return the Berry and pick up the Marilynne Robinson I had set aside for him: Will you come to the garden tonight?
After close. Late. And he had looked at me, his pale eyes going careful and slow, and he had said: Yes.
What time. I had said: Nine. He had said: I'll be there.
It is one minute after nine.
I am sitting on the cedar bench he made me.
I am in a dress I have never worn in this library.
It is white cotton, eyelet at the shoulders, a small open V at the throat.
It is sleeveless. The skirt is long enough to brush my calves and short enough to lift in any wind.
I have my hair down. My hair is not often down.
My hair is, as a general rule, in a braid by sunup and out of the braid only at night by the time I have gotten to bed.
It is loose tonight. It is brushed. It is hanging over my left shoulder.
I have not put on any makeup. I am — and this matters — I am barefoot.
I left my shoes inside the back door. The grass is cool.
The stones are warm. I want to feel both of them under me when he comes.
The gate creaks.
He comes through.
He stops two steps in.
He stops because he sees the lights. He sees the wisteria.
He sees the bench. He sees the empty bottle of nothing on a small stool beside the bench — I have not put out wine.
I have not put out anything. The point of tonight is not to mask the deciding.
The point is to be in the deciding awake.
He sees all of it. His head turns, very slowly, taking it in.
Then he sees me.
He stops moving entirely.
He stands in the middle of the path with his hands at his sides and his eyes on me and he does not, for a long moment, say anything.
I see his throat move. I see his shoulders drop, the smallest fraction, the way a man's shoulders drop when he has gotten home after a long day and has shut the door behind him.
He says, "Nora."
I say, "Hi."
He says, very quiet, "What is this?"
I say, "It is for us. If you would like."
He looks at me for a long second.
He says, "Are you sure?"
I say, "Yes. Come here. Please."
He crosses the path to me.
He does not rush. He never rushes. He walks the way he walks across the library carpet — careful, deliberate, his boots quiet on the stones.
He stops in front of the bench. He looks down at me, and the fairy lights from the trellis catch in his hair where it is damp at the temples — he has showered, I notice; his hair is still wet at the back of the neck — and the light catches in his eyes too, and the river-ice blue has gone something warmer in this light, gone the color of a winter sky just before sunrise.
He kneels down on the stones in front of the bench.
Not on one knee. On both. He kneels at my feet because I am sitting on the bench and the bench is low enough that if he stood over me he would have to look down and he does not want to look down at me. He kneels so we are at the same height.
He puts his hands on the bench on either side of my hips. He does not touch me yet.
He says, "Nora. Talk to me."
I look at him.
I take a long breath in.
I say, "Rhett. I have never done this. I have never been with anyone. I want to tell you that before we — before anything. I do not want there to be a moment later where you find out and feel like I withheld it from you."
He does not move.
His face does not move.