CHAPTER SIX
Past Twelve Months
Pip
The call came from Layla on a Wednesday morning, harried in a way Pip had rarely heard her, the café's usual unflappable calm cracked clean through by a genuine crisis rather than the ordinary manageable chaos of a busy service.
"Pipe's burst under the kitchen sink," Layla said, no preamble, the words coming fast. "Whole floor's under an inch of water and I've got a booking for forty covers at midday.
Renz isn't answering his phone, he's out at some job with the crew, and the plumber I usually use is three weeks booked solid.
Please tell me you know something about pipes. "
Pip didn't, particularly, beyond the ordinary competence of a woman who'd lived alone in enough rental flats to have fixed a blocked drain or two out of sheer necessity, but she said yes anyway, the way you say yes to a friend in genuine trouble, and drove to Rivers with a toolbox she wasn't entirely sure contained the right tools, working out the actual plan somewhere between the phone call and the front door.
She found the source of it within ten minutes — a corroded joint under the old enamel sink, spraying a thin determined jet across the floorboards every time the mains pressure built — and had just worked out that she needed the water isolated at the meter before she could do anything useful when Renz's ute pulled up outside, tyres skidding slightly on the wet gravel, Renz himself out of the cab and moving before the engine had fully died.
"Layla finally got through to me," he said, already crouching beside her under the sink, assessing the joint with the quick practical eye of a man who'd fixed considerably worse than a burst pipe under considerably worse pressure. "Isolated the mains?"
"Was about to."
"I'll do it, you hold this," he said, handing her a rag to press against the joint to slow the spray while he ducked out to the meter box, and for the next forty minutes the two of them worked the problem together with the same wordless coordination they'd perfected carrying chairs and folding tablecloths, Renz sourcing a replacement joint from the hardware store two streets over while Pip mopped the worst of the flood and kept Layla calm with a steady stream of updates, the two of them falling into a genuine working partnership that had nothing to do with romance and everything to do with simply being good, together, at solving an actual problem.
"You're better at this than you let on," Renz said, tightening the new joint with the last confident turn of the wrench, testing it against the mains pressure and finding it held.
"Nine years of dodgy rental plumbing teaches you a few things.
" Pip sat back on her heels, surveying the mopped floor, the fixed joint, the crisis successfully averted with twenty minutes to spare before the first lunch booking arrived.
"Didn't expect to spend my Wednesday morning under Layla's sink, but there are worse ways to spend a morning. "
"Best kind, honestly." Renz packed the old broken joint into a bag for the bin, the particular satisfaction of a solved problem written plain across his face.
"Nobody thanking you yet, nobody standing round watching, just two people and a problem and a decent solution.
I like this part best. Better than the parties, if I'm honest. Nobody's watching to see if you deserve the credit, you just fix the thing and move on. "
"Maybe that's the actual trick," Pip said, watching him work, something in the observation catching at her more than she expected. "This. A pipe fixed before the lunch rush. Nobody watching."
Renz looked at her a moment, something working behind his eyes that she couldn't quite name, and didn't answer straight away, and Layla came through from the dining room a minute later, effusively grateful, pressing a tray of hot scones on both of them before they'd even properly washed the pipe grime off their hands, and the moment folded itself back into the ordinary business of a Wednesday morning, though Pip carried the small unspoken exchange with her the rest of the day.
? ? ?
Twelve month lease, renewable.
She'd signed twelve months, and only ever twelve months, four times running in this town, in three different flats, and every time the agent had asked, mildly, almost as a formality, whether she wanted to talk about a longer term — better rate, less admin, the landlord liked a settled tenant, one of them had even mentioned once that a longer lease meant they wouldn't have to reinspect the smoke alarms every twelve months, a detail so mundane it had almost made her laugh out loud at the absurdity of choosing instability over a slightly less frequent smoke alarm check — and every time she'd said no, cheerfully, with a reason ready that always sounded reasonable and never once was the real one.
Work's a bit uncertain right now. Might want to travel.
Just prefer the flexibility, you understand.
And signed the twelve months, and felt something in her chest unclench the second the shorter number was locked in, a small private relief nobody else in the transaction ever had reason to notice.
There'd been a bloke, a few years back, before Ridgeline Bay properly, before any of this — Dean, a diesel mechanic from two towns over, decent enough, kind in an uncomplicated way, who'd lasted the better part of a year before he'd finally sat her down at a kitchen table not unlike this one and asked her, plainly, why she still had three unopened boxes in the spare room eleven months into living together.
She hadn't had a good answer then either.
She remembered the specific shape of his hurt, quiet and confused rather than angry, a man who'd done nothing wrong and simply wanted to understand why the woman he loved kept one hand permanently on the door.
It's like living with someone who's already decided to leave, he'd said, not cruelly, just tired, and I can't work out what I did to make you think you'll need to.
She hadn't been able to tell him it wasn't about him at all, because at the time she hadn't fully understood that herself; she'd just packed the three boxes properly, this time, and gone, and told herself, the way she told herself most things, that it had simply run its course, the way these things did, rather than admitting she'd ended it the way she ended everything, pre-emptively, before it could end her first.
She thought about Dean sometimes, not with longing exactly, but with a kind of clinical curiosity about her own younger self, the way you might look back at an old photograph and barely recognise the certainty on your own face.
She wondered, sitting at this newer table with this newer envelope in front of her, whether Dean had ever worked out that it hadn't been him, that no version of him could have fixed it, that she'd have done the same thing to anyone patient enough to get eleven months deep before asking the obvious question.
She looked at the line a long time this year.
Twelve months, renewable. Her pen was already in her hand, uncapped, the way it always was by this point in the ritual, because some part of her had already decided, before she'd consciously decided anything, that today would go the way every other year had gone.
The kettle clicked off behind her, and she got up to make the tea, and while she stood at the counter waiting for it to steep she found herself doing the arithmetic she'd been half-consciously avoiding all week — that in twelve months' time, if this thing with Renz went where every unhurried, careful sign of it seemed to be pointing, twelve months would be an arbitrary line drawn straight through the middle of something she didn't want interrupted for the sake of an old habit that had stopped, if she was honest, protecting her from anything real in a very long time.
What exactly was the twelve-month lease still guarding against?
She tried, standing there with the tea steeping, to actually answer that question rather than simply feeling the familiar anxious tug of it.
Guarding against a truck coming back for her, the one that had never actually come back, not once, not in twenty years, because there had been no truck since she'd left home at eighteen, only her own hands packing her own boxes, over and over, an exile she'd been imposing on herself long after anyone else had stopped requiring it of her.
She thought about Josie at the boat shed. I didn't believe, in the part of me that actually runs things, that anywhere was going to want me to stay long enough to make unpacking worth it.
She thought about her own duffel, still on the back seat of her car three weeks after the gathering, half-zipped, the sundress and the boots and the paperback she still hadn't read, sitting there not because she needed it for anything — she had a wardrobe full of clothes at the flat, a proper toothbrush in the proper bathroom, every practical need already met at home — but because taking it out of the car would have been its own kind of admission, a small surrender she hadn't been ready to make even three weeks ago, standing on a headland with a man's coin-shaped hope sitting quiet and unclaimed in a gap in a row of chairs.
She set her tea down, unfinished, and went to the spare room without quite deciding to, the way her feet sometimes carried her toward a thing before her mind had finished arguing with itself about whether to go.
There, at the back of the wardrobe, behind a stack of towels she never used, sat the same box she'd carried through three moves without once opening it — books, mostly, from a childhood she'd otherwise packed away entirely, the removalist's tape still holding one flap shut where she'd sealed it eleven years ago and never once found a reason good enough to break the seal.
She sat on the floor and opened it.