6. Walker
six
Walker
I wake up alone.
It’s much later than I usually let myself sleep, and my arm is stretched across the other side of the bed onto sheets that have already gone cold. No note. No shower running, no coffee smell. Just her clothes gone from the chair, and the front door closed carefully and quietly behind her.
She left before I woke up.
I get dressed and open the store on time, because the festival doesn't care whose life changed last night.
Old Man Pete is waiting outside when I get there, same as every year, needing a latch for his shed door.
"Bear again," he says, before I've even got the key in the lock.
"Same bear?"
"Can't prove it's not." He follows me in, watches me pull the right latch off the pegboard without looking. "You look like hell, Danes."
"Thanks."
"You sleep at all?"
"Some."
He pays for the latch and doesn't push it, which is its own kind of mercy. At the door he stops. "Whatever it is. Fix it before the bonfire. Man shouldn't sit alone at that thing."
"Working on it."
He leaves. I stand behind the counter and let myself ask the only question that matters: why'd she leave before I woke up?
I don't get far with it before the bell rings again — the kid running the festival grounds setup this year, same one who's been in twice a day all week not knowing what he's doing. He's got a printout in his hand, creased from being folded and unfolded too many times.
"I need the timber weights for the chop competition," he says. "For real this time. My boss says if I come back without them he's doing it himself."
"You've got the chart I gave you Tuesday."
"I lost the chart."
I dig a spare out from under the register, the one I keep for exactly this reason, and walk him through it slow — softwood versus hardwood, how the weight class breaks for juniors versus open division, why the numbers on his printout don't match anything real.
He writes it down this time instead of trying to remember it.
"You're gonna be fine," I tell him, because he looks like a man who needs to hear it from somebody.
"Everybody keeps saying that."
"Everybody's usually right about that kind of thing."
He leaves looking marginally less like he's about to be fired.
Behind him, a run of customers I barely register — sunscreen, a phone charger, somebody's kid wanting a water gun we don't carry — the kind of morning that keeps my hands busy and my head circling anyway, because busy hands never once in my life have stopped a man from thinking.
Darlene, off-shift from the diner, in for a box of matches. She takes one look at me and sets the matches down without paying for them yet.
"You're doing the thing," she says.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you look like a man building a boat in his head." She leans on the counter. "Porter Lane leave your place before sunup?"
I go still. "How do you—"
"Small town, Walker. Ruthie saw her walking down Birch at seven with her hair doing something it doesn't usually do." She says it without malice, just fact, the way she'd tell me the weather. "You gonna tell me what happened, or you gonna make me guess?"
"Nothing happened."
"Uh-huh." She finally pays for the matches.
"For what it's worth — that girl's been in love with you since before she knew the word.
Whole town's known it longer than you two have.
If she ran this morning, it's not because she doesn't want to be there.
It's because she does, and that's new for her. "
"That supposed to make me feel better?"
"It's supposed to make you stop looking like you're picking out your own funeral flowers." She heads for the door. "Talk to her, dummy."
The bell rings behind her.
The rest of the morning moves the way festival mornings move — busy in bursts, quiet in between. Around midday I flip the sign to Back in 15 and walk down to the diner, mostly because standing still behind an empty counter is worse than being around people.
The diner's slammed, every booth full, the smell of the fryer thick in the doorway. I end up at the counter next to one of the loggers from the mill, sawdust on his forearms from the log-rolling pool practice, a plate of fries he's not eating fast enough to keep me from stealing one.
"You look terrible," he says, not looking up from his phone.
"Thanks."
"That a woman kind of terrible, or a regular kind of terrible?"
I don't answer, which is an answer, and he has the decency not to push it, just slides his fries a half-inch closer to me like that settles something.
We don't talk about it. We talk about the chop competition brackets, about whether the bonfire's still on for Saturday given the fire ban talk, about nothing that matters, and it's exactly what I need — twenty minutes of not being alone with my own head.
I walk back to the store with a coffee I don't really want, just to have something to hold.
I keep catching myself building the conversation I'm afraid of having tonight, the one where Porter tells me last night was good but she needs things to go back to how they were, and every time I catch myself doing it I make myself stop and unpack another box of stock instead.
By the time the light outside goes long and gold, I still don't have an answer for why she left. I'm flipping the sign when the bell rings before I get the lock turned.
Porter. Sawdust on her forearm from somewhere at the grounds, notebook tucked under her arm, and an expression I can't immediately place — not her easy look, not a bad one either. Something I need a second to read.
"Hi," she says.
"Hi." I don't move to let her all the way in. "You left."
She stops just inside the door. "I know."
"Before I woke up. No note."
"I know, Walker."
"I stood in my kitchen this morning wondering if I'd made a mistake I couldn't fix." It comes out flatter than I mean it, but I don't take it back. Fifteen years of not saying things, and I'm not doing that again today. "That's not — I'm not asking for an explanation. I'm telling you what it did."
She's quiet a second. Then she comes the rest of the way in, lets the door swing shut behind her, and crosses to the customer side of the counter — not around it, not yet.
"I got scared," she says. "Good-scared. Not regret-scared.
But scared enough that I needed to be alone with it before I trusted anything I said to you.
So I left. And I should've woken you up and told you that instead of just — going.
That was wrong. I knew it was wrong the second I was outside your door. "
"Okay."
"It's not okay yet. Let me finish." She sets both hands on the counter.
"I've spent the whole day walking around this festival with my gut doing something it's never done before, and every version of the conversation I built in my head started with me apologizing for this morning.
So. I'm sorry. I left because I needed to think, and I should have told you that to your face instead of leaving you to wonder if I regretted it. "
"I built a speech too," I say. "Where I tell you we can pretend last night didn't happen."
"Don't you dare."
"Wasn't going to give it. Just telling you where my head went, since we're being honest about where our heads went today."
That gets something out of her — not quite a laugh, but close. She comes around the counter now, the way she always has, the way she didn't a second ago, and puts her hand flat against my chest, over the apron.
"I have more to say than sorry I left," she says. "But I want to say it right, not standing here with the closing sign still crooked in the window. Can I have tonight to get it right? Not to disappear again. To sit with you while I say it."
"You don't need to get it right, Porter. You just need to say it."
"I know. I'm going to say it anyway, in a way that isn't me standing in a doorway with sawdust on my arm." She looks up at me. "I'm not leaving again without telling you first. That's the only promise I've got right now, but I'm making it."
I put my hand over hers where it rests against my chest. "Then I'll take it."
She nods, steps back, picks her notebook back up. At the door she turns.
"I'm not going far. Give me a little while to get my head straight, and I'll come find you."
"I believe you."
The bell rings on her way out. I stand there a minute after the sound of it dies, feeling how different the store is from yesterday — same shelves, same light, same smell of metal and cedar, and none of it sitting the same on me.
Then I lock the door for real this time, because the festival doesn't pause for a man's nerves, and because whatever she's coming back to say, I'd rather wait for it standing than sitting still.