5. Levi
LEVI
Idon’t sleep.
After the gallery, after her, after driving home in the dark with charcoal dust still on my skin, I sit at my kitchen table and look at the carvings.
They’re everywhere. The bookshelf, the windowsill, the mantel above the fireplace nobody uses.
A relief panel of the station bay doors.
A bull elk with antlers so intricate I broke two chisels getting them right.
The ridge at sunrise. Lea’s coffee shop sign.
The creek that runs behind the Trading Post, every rock and ripple rendered in sugar pine.
The courtyard carving is still in her window on Prospect Street.
The rest are here, unseen, filling a house that nobody visits.
Thirty pieces, she said. Maybe more. I walk through the house and count them. Thirty-seven. Thirty-seven pieces I made with the door closed, blinds down, nobody watching.
Last night I let a woman see me. Not just the body. The whole thing. The carving, the quiet, the softness I’ve been hiding inside a frame that doesn’t match.
She saw all of it. She didn’t flinch. She drew me with hands that shook because what she felt was too big for the charcoal to hold.
I start loading pieces into my truck at 4:30 in the morning.
Not all of them. Twelve. The best ones, the ones where my hands did exactly what I asked them to—where the wood grain, the blade, and my intention all lined up.
I wrap each one in a dish towel because I don’t have anything better, set them on the passenger seat, and drive to Prospect Street before the sun clears the ridge.
The gallery key is under the third stone pot in the courtyard.
She mentioned it last night. I let myself in.
The bell chimes in the dark. I turn on the track lighting, stand in the middle of the space, and see the walls the way she sees them.
Intentional. Every piece chosen, placed by a woman who trusts her eye for everyone’s work except her own.
I start hanging.
I leave the courtyard carving in the window.
She put it there, and she was right. It stays where she placed it.
I unwrap the others one at a time and hang them on the east wall, spacing them evenly along its length.
The elk. The ridge. The creek. The station bay doors.
I give them room to breathe, each one needs enough wall to exist on its own.
When the twelve carvings are up, I walk to the back of the gallery.
The sketchbook is on the floor near the pedestal, where she left it last night. I pick it up, my own face looks up at me. Half-finished in charcoal. The portrait she was drawing when her hand slowed, her breathing changed, she set the charcoal down, touched me instead.
I set the sketchbook aside and look around.
Beneath the workbench there’s a flat portfolio case, the kind artists use to store loose sheets.
I open it and find them. Finished portraits on heavy paper, each one more polished than the sketches in the book.
Lea. Laurelle. Neve. Millie. Kendall. She reworked them from the sketchbook studies into something refined, something gallery-ready, then slid them into a case under a workbench where nobody would find them.
I find frames in the stack against the wall.
Simple black frames, the kind she uses for matting.
Clean, unobtrusive. I frame five of her portraits.
Lea. Laurelle. Neve. Millie. Kendall. Then I carry them out and hang them on the opposite wall across from my carvings, so the gallery holds both of us now.
Then I go to the back room one more time for the portrait of me.
I frame it in the same simple black and hang it centered on the main wall, between her portraits on the west and my carvings on the east. Her hand’s work.
The thing she saw when she looked at me—the thing nobody else has ever seen—where the whole town can find it.
I sit on the bench by the window and wait.
She arrives at 7:15. I hear her key in the lock, the bell chime, her footsteps stopping three paces inside the door.
The silence lasts a long time.
I watch her take it in. Her eyes move from the carvings to the portraits to the charcoal drawing of me in the center. Her hand comes up to her mouth, pressing there. Her shoulders pull in.
“You can’t,” she whispers. “Levi, you can’t just…”
“You told me my work speaks for itself.” I stand up from the bench. “So does yours.”
“That’s different.”
“It’s the same thing. You put my carving in the window thirty seconds after holding it because you trusted what you saw.
You fought me when I tried to take it back because you were certain.
” I take a step toward her. “You were right. You were right about my work, and you’re right about yours.
Nobody draws the way you draw by accident, Iris. ”
She’s looking at the portrait of me—the half-finished charcoal, the body she drew with a hand that started steady and didn’t stay that way.
She’s seeing her own work on a gallery wall for the first time in her life.
Framed, lit, given space. I watch something shift in her face that goes deeper than anything I saw last night.
“I framed your carving without asking,” she says. “Now you framed me without asking.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not fair.”
“I know.” I’m in front of her now. Close enough that I can feel her breathing. “But I looked at those portraits and saw what you see when you see people. The tenderness. The honesty. The way you catch the moment nobody knows they’re showing. That belongs on the walls.”
She lets out a breath that shakes on the way out. Her hand reaches up to my jaw, small fingers against the hard angle of it, and warmth spreads from the point of contact down through my chest. I turn my face into her palm.
“The carving stays,” I tell her.
“The portrait stays,” she says.
“There’s more in the sketchbook.”
She almost smiles. Closer than she’s ever let it get.
I lean down and kiss her, slow and certain, the way I carve. Her hands slide up to the back of my neck and hold on, and I pull her into me. Around us, the gallery is full of art, and for the first time, we’re part of it.