2. Walker
two
Walker
I've been in love with Porter Lane since I was twenty years old.
I've never told her. I'm not going to tell her this week either, because it would blow up the most important friendship in my life and I'm not willing to do that.
So, I do inventory fasteners and wait for the bell above the door to announce her arrival.
She comes in wearing a blue shirt I haven't seen before, and her hair's shorter than last August — not by much, enough that I notice. I always notice everything about her. I can’t help it.
The thing about loving someone for fifteen years is that it stops being dramatic.
It becomes part of who you are. It's load-bearing, something I've built the rest of my life around the way you build around a post that can't be moved.
I date sometimes. I've dated a few women who were good, women I liked.
It's never gotten far, and I've never pretended I didn't know why.
Porter's been with someone for four years.
A guy in Calgary. She mentioned him early on — I'm seeing someone, actually, said with a particular brightness that told me she was trying it on, checking how it sounded — and I said good and meant it and also wanted to put my fist through the wall behind me, but that's not Porter's problem, that's mine.
She hasn't mentioned him this trip.
I close up at five. She's already in the booth when I get to the diner.
She's got both coffees waiting, which tells me she got there early, which tells me she needed to sit still sooner than usual. I slide in across from her, and she passes me the mug. I take a sip without checking what's in it because she knows how I take it.
We order. She gets the brisket. I get the same, out of long habit.
"How was the drive?" I ask.
"Long. Construction past Cochrane. I sat behind a horse trailer for twenty minutes." She unrolls her napkin, sets it on her lap like it's a formality she doesn't believe in. "I left the Canmore project half-finished to be here, so."
"They'll survive without you for a week."
"The client won't. He wants to rip out his river-stone fireplace and put in a gas insert."
I wait.
"A gas insert, Walker. In a house with a river-stone fireplace his grandfather built."
"Might be a comfort thing," I say. "Flip a switch, get heat. No hauling wood."
"Comfort isn't an excuse for bad taste."
"Didn't say it was good taste. Said I understood it."
"You always do this."
"Do what?"
"Give the other side more credit than it's earned."
We both laugh. We've had some version of this fight a dozen times. I love it every time.
She doesn't mention Calgary-guy. I don't ask.
After dinner we walk.
We go up the ridge trail for an hour, the one that starts at the north edge of the festival grounds and climbs through the lodgepole pines before it levels out at the first lookout.
The evening light comes through the trees in long gold strips and catches her hair when she moves through it.
I lose my place in whatever I'm about to say.
It's not a hard trail, but it's dark under the trees, and she tucks a little closer when it dims. Her shoulder finds mine. I've put my arm around her on this trail so many times it doesn't mean anything.
It means everything.
She's wearing a blue t-shirt, and there's a small bruise on her forearm, faded to yellow at the edges.
I want to run my thumb over it. I don't. She talks with her hands when she's excited about something, cutting shapes out of the air, and I watch her do it instead of watching the trail, which is how I nearly walk us both into a root.
"You're not even looking where you're going," she says, laughing, catching my arm.
"I know where I'm going." I don't. Not on this trail. Not with her hand on my arm.
I know exactly when it started. The love, I mean. We were kids together. Rode the same school bus, fished the same stretch of river, and somewhere in all that ordinary time the love just built itself without asking me. But the knowing of it, I can date exactly.
She'd left for university that fall, which was the first time Silver Ridge hadn't had her in it.
I was twenty, still here, still would always be here, learning what the town looked like with her gone from it.
She called me from her residence at eleven at night, the week before her final exams. Tired.
Funny. Said she needed to hear a familiar voice.
I sat on the floor of my bedroom and talked to her for two hours.
About nothing. About everything. Somewhere in there she laughed at something stupid I said.
I sat there after we hung up, in the quiet, and thought: I'm in love with Porter.
Fifteen years later. I've never once stopped thinking it.
But, like a coward, I didn't do anything about it. She was in Vancouver. I was in Silver Ridge. She had a life she was building, and I was building mine.
Halfway up the trail she bumps her shoulder into mine.
It's a small thing. She does it when she's happy to be somewhere.
I feel it in my whole body.
The worst part is that I'd rather have her shoulder against mine in the dark on a trail in August, her voice talking about light and space, the particular laugh she saves for conversations with me more than anything I've ever been offered as an alternative.
I've never told her, and I'm not going to tell her tonight.