CHAPTER ELEVEN #3
Renz didn't say anything back. There wasn't a sentence built yet, in the whole of his considerable vocabulary of birthdays remembered and coffee orders and cray pots and cray-pot logistics, for what he needed to say, so he didn't try to build one on the spot — just stood there with the coin closed in his fist and the whole standing, silent crew in front of him, and let his eyes go, once, helplessly, to the one person still moving toward him instead of simply standing where she was.
Pip crossed the last of the grass between them and didn't say anything either.
She just took his free hand, the way she'd taken it at the fire pit, the way she'd taken it at the fence line in the storm, and stood beside him while the whole Brotherhood, slowly, one by one, began to sit back down — the applause arriving late and soft now, almost an afterthought, because the standing had already said everything that needed saying and the clapping was just the room remembering how to make ordinary noise again, the particular gentle return of a crowd finding its way back to the surface after something had briefly taken all of them somewhere deeper.
? ? ?
Later, well after dark, with the fire burned down low and most of the crew drifted off toward cars and beds and the ordinary business of an ordinary Sunday tomorrow, Renz and Pip sat together at the long table — not the front-row chairs by the fire now, but the table itself, the actual table, the one he'd carried out of the shed at six that morning with his own two hands — and Pip reached over and turned the coin slowly where it sat between them, heptagonal, plain, the season's line freshly etched along one edge, still faintly warm from being carried in a closed fist for hours.
"Two empty seats," she said, nodding at the front row, the one gap he'd left for her three weeks ago and the second gap that had opened up beside it sometime today without either of them noticing exactly when.
"Not empty anymore."
"No," Pip agreed. "Not anymore."
She thought, sitting there, of every kitchen table she'd ever half-set for a life she hadn't let herself live in, and of the one at her own flat now, with an empty frame on it waiting for a photograph neither of them had chosen yet, and of this one, the long table on the headland, carried out fresh every single year by a man who had spent a decade believing the tables were the only thing he had to offer.
The thing she'd understood three nights ago, lying awake after the storm, felt complete now in a way it hadn't then — every table Renz Kowalski had ever set, going back years before she'd arrived to sit at any of them, had been exactly that: not a party trick, not a compulsion, but the plainest, truest love language a careful, quiet man had ever known how to speak.
She didn't say any of it out loud. Some things didn't need saying twice.
"What are you going to put in the frame?" Renz asked, apropos of nothing, turning his own half of the coin's warmth over in memory rather than his hand now, since he'd already passed it to her.
"I was thinking the photo from tonight. If Cal got one. All of us standing." She looked at him sideways, something warm and slightly shy in it, an expression she didn't often let herself wear. "Or just you and me, at this table. Haven't decided."
"Might need a bigger frame for the whole crew standing."
"Might need to buy a second one, then. One for us, one for everyone else who taught us how to be the kind of people who could do this properly."
Renz's phone buzzed once against the table, and he glanced at it out of old habit before remembering, a half-second later, that it was well past ten and his mother didn't usually ring this late.
It was a text, not a call. Jodie told me about your coin thing.
Sounds like your crew up there thinks the world of you.
Proud of you, love. Should've said that more over the years.
He read it twice, something loosening in his chest that he hadn't realised was still held tight, an old ledger he hadn't known he was still keeping quietly settling itself by some small unexpected amount.
"Everything alright?" Pip asked, watching his face.
"Yeah," Renz said, and put the phone away, and found, somewhat to his own surprise, that he believed it. "Yeah, everything's alright."
Renz reached over and took her hand again, the coin now resting between them on the worn wood of the table, and neither of them said anything further for a long while, content simply to sit there while the last of the fire burned down to embers and the sea kept its old patient rhythm against the rocks below.
Somewhere out past the dark water, the next season was already turning, already bringing whatever it was going to bring — a dive-rescue outfit up in Broome about to get a great deal busier than its owner currently expected, though neither Renz nor Pip had any way of knowing that yet — and for the first time in either of their lives, neither one of them felt the slightest need to have a bag packed for it.
— END OF BOOK SEVEN —