3. Porter
three
Porter
We're on our second round of beers at the diner. It’s late enough that the dinner rush has cleared and Ruthanne, who runs the evening shift, has stopped pretending she isn't watching us when I tell Walker about Thomas.
I don't plan to. It just sort of comes out: "I broke up with Thomas. In February."
Walker wraps both hands around his beer glass.
He doesn't say anything right away, which with most people would feel like absence, but with Walker is a different thing.
He's always been a beat-behind speaker. He processes before he responds, and it used to frustrate me when we were teenagers.
But now I find it the most calming quality in a human being.
"Okay," he says.
"I should have told you sooner."
"Probably."
"I didn't know how."
He looks up from his pint glass. "How come?"
I don't have an answer for that. I have the real answer, but it's not the one I'm going to say out loud, so I look at my beer and say, "I don't know. It felt weird to say on the phone."
He nods slowly. "You doing all right?"
"Yeah. It was right. He was a good person, but it wasn't working. I'm the one who ended it, so." I turn the glass on the table.
Walker is quiet again. It's a different quality of quiet now, a weight to it, and I'm very aware of him across the table in a way I'm usually able to keep at arm's length. It’s heavy.
"Good," he says.
Not sorry to hear it. Not that sounds hard. Good.
I look at him. He holds my look without flinching, and I'm reading something I'm not used to seeing in that position.
I'm about to say something when Ruthanne comes to refill the waters, and instead she says, to nobody in particular but very loudly: "You two ever just going to get on with it? Be a mercy to the rest of us."
I laugh. It comes out too quick and a little loud, which is what happens when I'm covering for something.
"Ruthanne," I say, feeling my face turn red.
"What? I've been watching you two for ten years. You want more beer or no?"
"No," Walker says, and his voice is completely even, and he doesn't look at me when he says it.
I notice that.
Ruthanne goes back to the counter. I pick up my beer and take a drink and set it down as I watch him.
He's looking at his glass. His thumb traces the rim once. His hands are always doing something when his mind is working. I've been watching those hands for fifteen years, and I've never once asked myself why they're the specific detail I always come back to.
I ask myself now.
He looks up and catches me watching. Doesn't look away. Neither do I.
We've held each other's look across a table, across a room, across the festival grounds. It's always been easy. It's been easy because I've always had a name for what it was: friendship, closeness, the particular comfort of someone who knows you completely.
"You really doing okay?" he asks..
"I think so." I turn my glass on the table. "It's strange, mostly. Four years and the dominant feeling is — relief? Which probably tells you everything about why it was right."
"Yeah," he says. "It does."
"Thomas was good to me."
"I know."
"You've never liked him."
He's quiet for a beat. "I didn't dislike him."
"Walker."
"He was fine." He picks up his beer. "He wasn't —" He stops.
"Wasn't what?"
He looks at me over the rim of his glass and says nothing. With Walker, nothing is always something.
I don't push it. I know better than to push Walker Danes when he's decided not to finish a sentence.
He wasn't what? He wasn't who? He wasn't enough? He wasn't right for me? He wasn't Walker?
I'm not ready to say any of that out loud. Not tonight, not with Ruthanne at the counter pretending to wipe down the same spot she's wiped three times already. Not with Walker sitting across from me being his particular brand of steady, the kind that's always felt like shelter.
When we finally pay and put on our jackets, I'm careful not to look at him the way I've been looking at him for the last hour. We walk out together and the night air is warm, the festival grounds are lit up down the block, and the mountains are dark shapes against a darker sky.
On the sidewalk he bumps his shoulder into mine once, brief, and I feel it from my collar to my shoes.