CHAPTER 26
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Her boots are up on my dash. Crossed at the ankle, laces gone gray, a fleck of orchard mud drying on the windshield gasket where it'll sit until spring.
I've quit saying anything about it. Saying something about it is how I lost the dash in the first place.
“All I want is to take you to a restaurant,” I tell her. “One time. Somewhere a person folds the napkin into a shape before you sit down.”
“The Wren is a restaurant.” She doesn't look over. “There's a menu, there are chairs, and a woman carries you food that you did not personally cook. That's the whole definition and you know it is.”
“It's a diner. There's a pie under a plastic dome that I've watched grow old since the spring.”
“You're describing atmosphere, and atmosphere isn't in the definition.” Now she looks over, and something is happening at one corner of her mouth. “Name the missing element. Give me one and I'll concede the whole thing.”
Fernhollow Road runs out its frost heaves and I spend most of a mile hunting for the element. She lets me have the entire mile, which is the worst part of it.
“You win the diner,” I say. “I want that on the record as a hostile ruling.”
She's got the pencil out, turning it over. The red half, brENNAN SYSTEMS stamped along the side and stopping short where it broke.
“Feet on my dash, my pencil in your pocket,” I say. “When exactly do I get to say you've moved in?”
She taps the broken end on her knee twice before she answers, and I watch her decide to answer it straight instead of light. She does that about once a week and I have never once got used to it.
“It's half a pencil,” she says. “Half of anything is only a loan. Ask me again when I can hand you the whole of it.”
Ten past one on the dash clock. The Halcyon board lunch runs to six, and she said so in the yard this morning the way you'd read a tide table, and I checked my watch when she said it. I'm not proud of that.
Bramwell's back at the shop on his bed under the bench, because she asked. Leave him home today, if you don't mind it — that's how she put it, not looking at me, hands in her coat. In a month she has asked me for exactly nothing that was for her. She asked me for that.
The stair up the side of The Wren is iron and it rings under us, and the door at the top opens before we knock.
The room is one bed, one window, one chair with a coat over the back of it. Nora's case is open on the bed and it is still packed. There's nothing on the walls, and picture hooks in the plaster where somebody else's life hung.
Her hands don't know where to go. They go to the plait, then the hem of her cardigan, then behind her, then back to the plait.
“I'd offer you something,” she says, “but there's a hot plate and one cup and that's the sum of it. They'll send it up from downstairs if I ask, and then the whole square knows who's sitting in my room, so I've stopped asking.”
Evelyn takes the chair without moving the coat. “I didn't come to make you say it all again.”
“I've told you what I'm going to tell you about that night, and I'm not going over the road again for you or anybody.” Nora's chin comes up. “That's not unkindness. It's the only thing left that's mine to decide.”
“I know it is.”
“He thanked me.” Nora says it to the window.
“Stood in the kitchen with his coat folded over his arm and thanked me for eleven years, and told me the car would run me down to town.
He was kind about it. He was kind the whole way through, and I'd like somebody to write that down somewhere, because nobody believes the part where he's kind.”
Evelyn doesn't fill the gap. She's good at that, and it costs her something every time.
“I've nothing to do with my hands,” Nora says, “and it turns out that's the whole of it. Eleven years of six in the morning, and now there's a hot plate and a chair. I've been up since four. I did the case twice.”
I stay by the door with my back against the jamb, because three people is a lot for a room this size and because whatever this is, it isn't mine.
“There's a folder in that case,” Nora says. “I signed for every delivery that came to that house for eleven years. Repeat slips, delivery notes, the pharmacy's own paperwork with the dates printed on it. I kept the copies, and that's not courage, it's only the way I was brought up.”
Evelyn's hands go still on her knees. “Will you give them to me?”
“I'll bring them myself, when there's somebody in the room with the authority to take them off me.” Nora finally sits down on the edge of the bed, next to the case, and puts one hand flat on the lid.
“If I hand them over today they're only paper in your coat, and he'll have a name for what you are before you get to the door.”
On the stairs going down, Evelyn stops two steps from the bottom with her hand on the rail.
“She didn't ask me to forgive her,” she says. “That's the only reason I might.”
My stairwell smells of diesel off the yard and hot solder out of the shop, and I'm three steps up and already talking.
“So it's the one room. There's a bed, there's a table, and there's a radio in about forty pieces on the table because I took the back off it in the summer and then I got busy, and the chair by the window has got a leg I keep meaning to—”
Her hand closes on my wrist. My coat is still on. Hers is too.
“Eleven days,” she says. “No dose since the first of October, and I stepped it down over four days before that.
Nothing in me but water and whatever they call coffee at The Wren.
I'm giving you the number because you'd have asked, and because I want it on the record that I knew exactly what I was asking for.”
There's a whole speech somewhere in me and none of it will come up the pipe. Her thumb is on the bone of my wrist. She isn't looking away, and her hands are steady, and I've watched those hands hold a level against a wall for a full minute without a tremor.
“Then ask me. Out loud.” My voice comes out lower than I meant it. “I've spent four years letting myself out of that house quietly. I'd like, once, to be invited.”
“Stop waiting for the moment I change my mind.” She doesn't let go of my wrist. “I'm a woman who counts. I did the arithmetic on your stairs, all fourteen of them, and I came up the same at the top as I did at the bottom. Stay in this room with me.”
“Ten years fixing things in other people's houses,” I say, “and nobody's ever once asked me to stay in a room.”
She kisses me with her coat on. Standing, in the doorway, one hand still around my wrist like she's holding a place in a book.
My hand comes up to her jaw and stays there because it has nowhere better in the world to be.
Her mouth is warm and it isn't hurrying and it isn't asking anybody's permission, and every tool I own goes straight out of my head.
The coats go. Hers first, off her shoulders and onto the floor, and she leaves it there, which from her is practically a shout.
Her hands flat on my shirt, then sliding to my waist and staying.
My mouth at her throat, and she tips her head back for it.
Then lower, the ridge of her collarbone, and her fingers close in the cloth at my waist.
She gets three buttons of my shirt and stalls on the fourth, and then she laughs at herself, one short honest laugh against my throat.
“These are ridiculous buttons.”
“They are. I bought that shirt in a hurry and I've regretted it in a slow, steady way ever since.”
“Don't help me.”
“I'm not going to help you,” I say, and I don't. I stand there with my hands at her hips and I let her take as long as she takes, and I would put money on that being the best ninety seconds of my life to date.
When her hands come away I catch the left one and turn it over. The white scar across her index knuckle, the site accident, the one she mentions like it's weather. I put my mouth on it.
She stops breathing, and there's no sound in the room but rain arriving on my flat roof, the drops coming out of time with themselves, one corner running ahead of the rest.
“That one's ugly,” she says, when she's got air again.
“You keep saying that. Nobody agrees with you.”
Four steps to the bed under the window. I go onto my back because I want to watch her decide, and she does decide, and she ends up above me with her hands flat on my shoulders and her weight settled on her thighs and her spine gone long and easy in the gray light off the glass.
Her hair is loose. There's rain on the window behind her and the whole street below going about its Sunday, and none of it is happening in here.
My hands find her waist and she covers one of them with her own, and she is not managed, not steered, not being kept safe from anything, and her skin is warm and she is entirely and completely herself, and I have wanted this so long that the wanting had turned into furniture.
“Say the eleven days again,” I tell her. “I want it in the room with us, and not just in your head.”
“Eleven days.” She says it down into my mouth. “Every hour of them mine.”
“I'm not going to be careful with you.” My fingers spread at her hips. “I'm going to be exact. There's a difference, and you already know it.”
“I know it.”
And then she stops. All of her, at once, forehead down to mine, breath and heat and her hands still flat on my shoulders and nothing moving in the room at all.
“Don't move, not yet.” Her lips are almost on mine and she isn't kissing me. “I want to know which minute this is, so I can have it later.”
“Evelyn.”
That's all of it. Her name, once, and it comes out of me like something being set down after a long carry.
After, her skin cools and the rain goes on being out of time with itself, and she lies along my side with her left arm laid across me where I can reach it.
The surgical scar runs the length of her forearm, pale and slightly proud of the skin around it.
I put two fingers at the top of it and go down slowly, the whole way, and she goes still in a different way than before.
“Nobody's touched that since the hospital,” she says. “Nobody at all, in all that time, and I haven't touched it either, if I'm being honest with you.”
“Do you want me to stop?”
“No. Keep going. It's only strange because it's the first time.”
Somebody downstairs has burned sugar again, and it comes up through the floorboards the way it does every weekend.
“That's the bakery,” I say. “Every Sunday, same hour, like a bell.”
“It smells like a school fair.” Her fingers are moving slowly in my hair. “I've been given permission for nothing in six years. I'm not going to make you wait for it either.”
I check the watch on the nail by the window and hate myself a small amount for it. Quarter to five.
“What happens at the hearing?” I ask.
She doesn't deflect. She pushes herself up onto one arm and itemizes it, which is how I know she's already been through it fifty times alone.
“The evaluation is booked, and it's with the man Julian is paying, so I know the shape of the report before it's written.
The petition freezes everything in my name from the day it's filed, so I can't retain anybody, which is the point of filing it that way.
And if it goes his way, my signature stops meaning anything, and it isn't for a year, it's permanent unless somebody petitions it back, and the only person standing close enough to do that is him.”
“What do you need from me?”
“Nothing yet.” Her mouth goes flat. “That's the hard part, and I want you to hear that I know it is.”
So I get up and pull my coat off the floor and take the folded court order out of the inside pocket, where it's been living under the seat and then in my coat for two weeks, and I sit back down on the edge of the bed and turn it to the last page for her.
“I should have shown you this two weeks ago. I read it in the truck and I decided you had enough on you, and that was me deciding something that was yours.”
She reads it. It takes her a while, and her free hand goes flat on the bedsheet and presses down.
“That's my name on the service contract,” she says. “It isn't his name at all, and the order runs against me, not against the house.”
“Yeah.”
“You could have kept that from me for another month.” She's quiet a moment. “Thank you for the timing. I'm not thanking you for the two weeks, only for the timing.”
At half past five she's sitting on the edge of my bed with one boot on, and I'm at the door with her coat over my arm like a man in a hallway who has run out of reasons.
There's a word standing in the room with us.
She looks at me and I look at her and neither of us picks it up, and it doesn't go anywhere either. It just waits.
“And if it goes his way?” I ask her.
She's got one boot on and one in her hand, and she doesn't dress it up for me.
“Then I'll have been a person for eleven days,” she says. “Which is eleven more than he budgeted for.”