Chapter 4 #2
I drove back to the shop that night, and I walked up the stairs to the apartment, and I let myself in, and Alma was on the couch with her laptop open and her hair down, reading something on the screen with her glasses sliding down her nose.
She looked up. She said, "Hi." I said, "Hi.
" She said, "There's leftover chili." I said, "Thank you.
" I heated up the chili. I ate it standing at the kitchen counter while she went back to her work.
I watched her in profile, the soft lamplight catching the side of her face, and I thought about what Gunner had said, and I thought about it for the rest of the night, and I went to bed with it still ringing in my head like a struck tuning fork.
The Tuesday after that — week six — I came home from the forge late.
I had been working on a commission, a custom gate for a vineyard up near Charlottesville, and the design had been giving me trouble.
I'd stayed past sundown, working with the lights of the forge for two extra hours, and when I finally drove home it was past ten.
My clothes smelled like coal and hot iron.
My hands had the gray tinge of metal dust that no amount of scrubbing took off entirely, only faded.
I came up the stairs quietly because I assumed she was asleep.
She was not asleep. She was on the couch.
She was almost asleep. The laptop was open beside her.
Her glasses had slid all the way down her nose.
Her left hand was curled under her cheek.
The screen showed the quarterly projections she'd been working on — columns of numbers, three years of forecast, the cursor blinking in a cell where she had been mid-entry when sleep had taken her.
I stood in the doorway and looked at her.
I want to be careful, here, about what I tell you.
I had grown up around women. I had a mother, and I had loved women, and I had had a relationship in my early twenties that lasted almost two years, and I had thought, before I met Alma, that I knew the shape of what it meant to look at a person and feel something organize itself in your chest. I did not.
I had not known. The previous relationship had been pleasant.
It had ended pleasantly. What I felt standing in the doorway of an apartment that smelled like dryer sheets and old coffee, looking at a woman who had fallen asleep doing math, was not pleasant.
It was the opposite of pleasant. It was the feeling of a piece of high-carbon steel cooling for the first time in its life into the shape it had always been meant to take, and the cooling was not gentle.
It was the slow, irrevocable hardening of something that had until then been molten and free.
I walked across the room very softly.
I closed her laptop. I set it on the coffee table.
I took the throw blanket off the back of the couch — the one she had brought from Denver, gray, soft, slightly oversized — and I unfolded it and laid it over her.
I did it carefully. I did not want to wake her.
She made a small sound, the sound a person makes in the deepest part of sleep when something good has touched them, and she turned her face into the cushion.
I stood there for another minute.
I memorized her. I am not going to pretend I did not.
I memorized the line of her jaw, the way her braid had come loose at the temple, the small fan of dark lashes against the dust of freckles on her cheekbones.
I memorized her hand under her face — the chipped polish on her thumbnail, the way the ring sat slightly crooked on her finger, the small white scar across the second knuckle that she had told me, once, in passing, came from a beer bottle she had broken trying to open it on the edge of a table when she was twenty.
I memorized the rise and fall of her breath.
Then I went to my room.
I sat down on the edge of my bed. I did not turn on the light.
I sat in the dark for a long time, with my hands on my knees, with the smell of coal still on my shirt, and I said it out loud to the room — to the four walls of the second bedroom in the apartment above Navarro Custom Cycles, to the floorboards and the wallpaper and the framed picture of my mother on the dresser, to the version of myself I had been six weeks ago when I'd thought this was going to be a business arrangement and a clean exit.
I said, "I'm in love with my wife."
It came out quiet. Quieter than I expected. The room absorbed it.
I lay down on the bed. I did not undress. I stared at the ceiling.
Gunner had said, Paper has a way of becoming real. Gunner had been right. He was almost always right, which was why he was a good brother and a difficult one.
The contract specified that either of us could request renegotiation.
The contract specified that we would not let things become problems. The contract specified honesty.
The contract had not specified what to do when you fell in love with the person you had contracted with — when the variable you had not accounted for showed up in the middle of the spreadsheet and refused to be filed.
I thought about telling her. I thought about waking her up and walking into the living room and saying it out loud the way I had said it to the ceiling. I thought about it for ten full minutes.
I did not tell her.
I did not tell her because I was a smith, and I had been making things with my hands for eight years, and I knew the difference between metal that was ready to be moved and metal that was not.
You can feel it. You can put the hammer to the bar and you can know, in the first strike, whether the heat is right or whether you need to put it back in the fire and wait.
Alma was not ready. The metal of us was not ready.
She had built her life on lists and columns, and she had told me, in the office on the day we signed the contract, that she was not in a position to enter a real relationship, and I believed her. I believed her then. I still did.
But I also believed Gunner.
I believed Gunner, and I believed myself, and I believed the slow ringing in my chest, and I made a decision that night, lying in the dark in a bedroom that was supposed to be mine for six months and a wife who was supposed to be temporary.
I decided I was going to be patient.
I was going to keep washing the dishes. I was going to keep cooking on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays.
I was going to keep making her coffee on the mornings when I beat her to the kitchen, which was rare but increasing in frequency.
I was going to keep being, in the apartment, exactly the husband I had contracted to be — present, kind, respectful, useful — and I was going to let her come to me, if she came to me, in her own time and on her own terms.
If she did not come to me, I would, at the end of six months, sign the dissolution papers and go back to my barn loft and live the rest of my life having been quietly in love, once, with a woman who had taught me what competence was.
I closed my eyes.
I slept poorly.
In the morning, I made coffee. I made it strong, the way she liked it. She came into the kitchen at six-fifteen with the throw blanket around her shoulders and her hair a complete catastrophe and her eyes still half-asleep, and she said, "Did you cover me last night?"
I said, "Yeah."
She said, "Thank you."
She did not look at me. She poured her coffee. She stood at the counter drinking it. Her shoulder was three inches from my shoulder. I could feel the heat coming off her body the way I could feel the heat coming off a piece of steel that was still too hot to touch but cool enough to look at.
I drank my coffee.
I did not say anything else.
Patience, I told myself. Patience.
The hammer would come down when the metal was ready.