CHAPTER 36
◆
A mower starts up three gardens over, and I don't move.
Cole's arm lies across my waist, heavy, the way it gets when he's properly under. The window's been open all night. The air coming in is warm already and smells of cut grass and somebody's washing on a line.
This isn't a good house. It went up in the thirties — two bedrooms, a roof line that argues with itself over the back bay, and a landing window in the wrong place that I've already drawn a fix for. The floor slopes toward the stairs.
Nothing in it asks me anything. There's no panel by the door, no voice in the ceiling, no record anywhere of what time I came down or how I slept. The quiet has a texture to it. It's the most expensive thing I own and it cost nothing.
The keys hang on a hook by the door. Four of them on a ring — front, back, the shed, the car — and they're heavy enough that I feel them against my hip when I walk. I carry them to the end of the road and back for no reason at all.
They're worn bright along the edges where they've turned in locks. A lock is a simple machine. You can hold the whole of it in your hand and understand every part, and it does one thing, and it does it for whoever is holding the metal.
Cole's at the counter by twenty past eight with the oven on, and there's flour on the floor, which is a detail I'd like the record to show.
“Lunch is at one,” I say. “It isn't even nine.”
“It needs to sit.” He doesn't look up. “Everything worth eating needs to sit. I read that somewhere once and I've decided to build my whole life around it.”
I come and look into the dish. The layers have gone sideways. The middle has slumped and taken the top with it, and something pale is running out at the corner and pooling against the glass.
“What's the white layer supposed to be doing?”
“That was a sauce for about four minutes.”
“That's a load-bearing lasagna, Cole, and it has failed in shear.”
“It's structural.” He points the spoon at me. “You told me structures fail gradually. This one's been failing since it went in, so really it's doing exactly what you said it would do.”
“Gradual failure still ends in failure. That's the part everybody skips over.”
“You're going to eat it and you're going to say something kind about it, because Rachel's coming and I have my pride.”
I put my hands flat on his spine, both palms, warm through the shirt. He goes still under them, the way he always does, like holding himself steady costs him something.
Then he turns around with flour up to his wrists and holds his hands out wide, away from me. “Don't. You'll be wearing that all day and I'll never hear the end of it.”
I take a handful of his shirt at the waist and pull him in anyway.
His mouth finds my jaw first, then the side of my throat, unhurried, like there's nothing else on the list and there never was. His hands stay out and away from my shirt, and I laugh into his shoulder about that, and then I stop laughing.
He lifts me onto the counter. I take his weight between my thighs, ankles crossed behind him, and he kisses me the way you kiss somebody when the whole day belongs to you — slow, and then slower. Oven heat down one side of me. The open window down the other.
His hands come to my hips and stay there, going nowhere in a hurry. When we stop, we stop because we decide to, and for no other reason in the world.
I keep one hand flat on his shoulder, holding nothing, holding him there. “That oven's been on half an hour with nothing in it but the wreckage.”
“Let it sit there and think about what it's done.”
“Nobody's knocking on that door until one. We've got the whole day and then all the days after it, and I keep waiting to get used to that.”
He doesn't let me down yet. He puts a hand on the counter either side of me and says, “How did the north span go? Start at the part that annoyed you.”
That's what he promised me at a gate a year ago, and he's never once asked me anything else first.
“The fabricator sent the bearing plates eight millimetres out, and then he explained to me, at length, why eight millimetres doesn't matter.”
“And what did you tell him?”
“I said it doesn't matter at the third one and it matters at the ninth, and by the eleventh it's a different bridge. Then I drew it for him on the back of the delivery note.”
“Did he take it?”
“He took it, and he sulked about it, and three days later the new plates turned up without a word.”
“That's my favourite thing about you, and it always has been.”
“The drawing, or the sulking fabricator?”
“You, explaining a bridge to a man who didn't want one explained.”
The Volvo's out on the road, slate-blue in the sun, with a new battery in it since spring. It starts on the first turn every time now, which still feels like a kindness I didn't pay for.
The right front wing is still creased. I've never had it straightened and I never will, because it's the only thing I own that went through all of it with me.
By ten Cole's out in the shed doing something loud to a gutter bracket, and the house is mine.
The drafting table is second-hand and it stands under the front window. I chose that spot before I chose which bedroom we'd sleep in, because the light comes across it flat until noon and I wasn't going to negotiate about that with anybody.
It smells of linseed and graphite. That smell has done more for me this year than any amount of talking.
There's a drawing pinned on it — a footbridge, three days a week, licensed again since March. A straight edge. And the pencil, flat and red and new, brENNAN SYSTEMS stamped along one side.
I'm working. That's the whole sentence and it doesn't need another one after it.
On the sill there's a jam jar, and in the jam jar are two halves of an older pencil.
I don't keep them to remember him. I keep them because they're mine, and because he doesn't get to have broken them.
Ardenwood sold in March. A family bought it — three children and a dog — and the word in town is that they're taking the glass out and putting in walls, actual walls, rooms a person can be alone in. I hope they take every pane.
The money went into a fund at Calder Ridge Regional Medical Center, and the fund carries Delphine's name, because she paid for the whole of it first and nobody ever wrote that down anywhere.
Julian is in a facility three counties over and the criminal matter is still grinding through, slowly, the way those things do.
There's a civil case behind it that my attorney says will outlast us both.
I used to rehearse what I'd say to him — whole speeches, in the bath, with my hands moving — and one afternoon this spring I noticed I'd stopped.
At one o'clock a car door goes, then a second one, and when I get to the window Rachel and Nora are coming up the path together.
That's its own piece of news. Nobody arranged it and nobody's going to make a speech about it, and Rachel has a covered dish in each hand.
She's through the door first. “Right — who let him near an oven, and how long has this been going on?”
“It started in the spring and nobody's been able to stop him since.”
“I've brought a chicken and a thing with potatoes in it, and I brought them because I've eaten his cooking, Evelyn. I've eaten it twice and I've thought about it since.”
Nora comes in behind her with a cake tin and sets it down without asking where. She works three mornings at The Wren now, and she has a flat with her own front door, and she says both of those things in the same flat voice, like she's still deciding whether she's allowed them.
She's at the sink inside four minutes. Hands in the water, plates stacked on the drainer, out of a habit eleven years put in her and one year hasn't taken out.
I take the tea towel out of her hands. “Sit down and let somebody else do that. You've done enough sinks for one lifetime.”
She holds on to the edge of the counter. “You don't have to keep asking me, you know. I'd understand it if you didn't.”
“I know. That's the whole reason it counts.”
That's all either of us says about it, then or later. She sits down in the chair with the arms, and Rachel puts a glass in front of her, and nobody in this kitchen makes it into a moment.
“They've put me on the early shift now,” she says.
“She's fast,” Rachel says. “The whole square has noticed.”
Nora looks into her glass and lets that sit on her, and after a second she takes it.
Rachel and I do the salad together at the counter. She tells me about a horse that bit her, and about a man she's seeing who she describes as fine, structurally, which she thinks is the funniest thing anyone has ever said.
Then she says, “It was four years, though, and I'm going to keep saying that out loud every time I come.”
“I want you to. I'd rather have it in the room than in the walls where it can rot.”
“That's the most engineer thing you've ever said to me, and I've known you since you were six years old.”
She mentions the hearing once, the way you'd mention a bad winter — a year ago now, that corridor, the coats — and then she's back on the horse and I let her go.
We eat outside at the table Cole built badly. Four people in the sun and Bramwell flat out underneath it with his chin on Nora's foot, being no use to anybody at all.
The lasagna comes out looking like a hillside after rain and tastes fine, and I say something kind about it, and Cole receives it as his due.
The house makes a noise around two. A joist over the kitchen, one dry knock and then another one further along the run.
Rachel keeps talking. Nora reaches past me for the salt. Bramwell doesn't lift his head.
Nothing answers it. AURA would have answered it — warmly, with the time and a maintenance suggestion and a small joke at the end. I sit there with a fork in my hand and let a whole minute go by noticing that this room has no opinion about anything, and I don't say a word about it to any of them.
Later Bramwell gets up on the good chair, all four feet, and settles like he's been invited. Nobody moves him. Nobody writes it down anywhere.
They leave at four. Rachel hugs me too hard, twice, and Nora pats my arm on the way past the door, which from her means the same thing and costs her more.
Then Cole comes through with the coats over his arm. He stops at the sill on the way past and straightens the two halves of the old pencil so they lie parallel, the way he does.
He's done that every single time he's passed that jar for a year. I've never mentioned it and I never will.
We're going out to the reservoir road, which I drive now, at the speed limit, with the windows down. My left forearm rides on the sill in the sun, scar and all. I stopped putting sleeves over it a long time ago.
It's Sunday, so the road will be empty the whole way up, and my left ankle knows before the radio does when rain's coming, and there's no rain in it today.
“Take a coat, it turns cold up on that ridge.”
“I've got mine, and I've got yours over my arm as well.”
Bramwell's already out at the gate, turning circles, certain we're going to leave without him. He's four years old and he has never once believed us about anything.
Cole picks the ring off the hook and the metal knocks against itself, four keys, that small ordinary racket.
“Ready?” he says, and holds out the keys.
I take them, because they're mine, and because they're heavy, and because for the first time in seven years the door I'm walking through is one I can open from either side.