14. Izzy
— ? —
Izzy
Delia arrives ahead of schedule.
Wilson hasn’t stopped since I stepped back and held the door for him.
By the time my coffee finishes brewing, he’s up the ladder at the east gable, rain shell plastered to his back, fighting a shutter that hasn’t closed since before I could drive. The wind keeps grabbing the panel out of his hands. He keeps grabbing it back.
I watch from the kitchen window with my mug going cold against my palms.
He doesn’t know what he’s doing. He just refuses to stop.
He checks his phone, propped inside a sandwich bag on the porch rail, where a video plays the same repair on a loop. He copies it, fails, rewinds, and copies it again.
When the bolt finally seats, he doesn’t celebrate. He just wipes his face with a muddy forearm and drags the ladder to the next window.
He has people for this. He has people for his people. And he’s out there losing a fistfight with my grandmother’s house.
The generator is worse.
It lives behind the cottage in a shed with a lean, and it hasn’t turned over since spring. I hear him out there through the weather. Sputter, silence, sputter. And then a string of curses so filthy and so heartfelt that I laugh out loud, alone, in my kitchen.
The laugh surprises me. It comes up rusty.
I make a fresh mug and carry it out under the porch overhang.
He’s on his knees in the mud, sleeves shoved up, forearms striped with grease, a wrench in one bleeding-knuckled hand and his phone in the other, mid-argument with a tutorial.
“He says to check the fuel line.” Wilson looks up at me through the rain, soaked completely through. “I don’t know which one is the fuel line. I own three companies, Izzy. I don’t know which one is the fuel line.”
“The black hose.” I point with the mug. “Left side. Gran kicked it when it acted up.”
He kicks it. The generator coughs, catches, and settles into a rattling hum, and the shed light stutters on over his head.
He stares at the machine. Then at me. Rain drips off his nose, and he starts laughing, really laughing, mud to the elbows, and I’m laughing too, and for a second the storm is just weather.
“Coffee.” I hold out the mug. “You’ve earned the good mug. It has a lighthouse on it.”
He takes it with both filthy hands, careful, and looks at it, then at me, and his thank you comes out with a weight the mug can’t hold.
“It’s coffee, Wilson.”
“Right.” He clears his throat. “It’s coffee.”
By late afternoon the wind stops playing.
It leans on the cottage in long shoves. The beach roses lie flat. The rain goes sideways, and the radio says Delia made her turn and the island is in for the whole night of her.
Wilson loads the last armful of firewood into the rack by the stove, and then he stands there dripping on the mat, and I watch him gear up to leave.
“I should get back before the road floods.” He reaches for his soaked shell. “The inn’s expecting…”
“You can’t drive in this.” It comes out sharper than I planned, and I’m annoyed at how fast it came. “The dirt road washes out at the low spot. You’d end up in a ditch and then I’d have to worry about you.”
His mouth twitches. “Can’t have that.”
“The couch pulls out. It’s not great but it works.” I cross my arms. “That’s all this is. You’re stuck here because of the weather. That’s it.”
“Got it.” He hangs the wet shell on the crooked hook by the door, the one my grandfather screwed in, next to the old slicker that’s outlived him.
The sight of them hanging together does a thing to me I’m not going to think about right now.
The power quits at dusk, all at once, the whole cottage dropping into storm-dark.
The generator carries the fridge and one lamp. For the rest, I light Gran’s hurricane candles, stubs of them in mason jars, and the kitchen goes gold and small.
We make dinner out of the cabinet. Canned tomato soup, crackers, the cheese I bought before the warnings. Wilson insists on stirring and hovers over the pot like he’s performing surgery.
“You’re hovering.”
“I’m helping.”
“You’re standing too close to the stove and getting in my way.” I bump him aside with my hip before I think about it, and we both feel the contact, and neither of us says anything.
We eat at the kitchen table with the candles between us and the storm doing its worst against the shutters he closed. The soup is just soup. Nothing special. But it might be the best meal I’ve had all year.
“Tell me about her.” Wilson’s voice goes soft as he nods at the room, the house, all of it. “Your grandmother. What was she like?”
I look up from my soup and he’s watching me with this look on his face, open and patient, like he’s got all the time in the world.
“You never really talked about her much,” he says. “And I never asked. I should have. I want to know now, if you’ll tell me.”
He reaches across the table and his fingers brush against mine, just barely, without grabbing or pushing. Just there.
“I want to know all the things I missed, Izzy. All the stuff I should have asked about years ago. I want to know you again.”
I turn my spoon over in the bowl.
“She was small and loud, and she cheated at cards.” The candle flame bends and rights itself.
“She’d deal me in at that exact table and rob me blind and say it was a lesson in paying attention.
She swam in the ocean every morning until the year she couldn’t anymore.
She thought butter was its own food group. ”
I smile a little at the memory.
“She was a force.”
My throat closes without warning. Wilson doesn’t fill the silence. He just waits with his hands wrapped around his bowl, eyes on me. And the waiting is new. The waiting is everything.
“When I was in college, a boy I liked told me my painting was a cute hobby.” I hold my spoon still.
“I came up here that summer and told Gran I was thinking about switching to a practical major. And she took my face in both hands, flour all over hers because she was in the middle of making a pie, so I ended up with flour on my cheeks too.”
The storm shoulders the house. The candles flicker.
“She looked right at me and said, Isadora, never let anyone make you small.”
Wilson goes very still across the table.
“I forgot that.” The tears come and I let them fall. “That’s what I keep coming back to out here, in her house, with her flour tin still sitting on the damn shelf. I forgot the one thing she made me promise.”
I stir my soup without really seeing it.
“I made myself small for you, Wilson. Year after year. I got quieter. I took up less space. I shrank myself down so there was more room for your job and your stress and all the things you needed from me.”
I look at him across the table.
“I told myself that’s what good wives do. They support. They compromise. They wait. But somewhere along the way the waiting just became my whole life and I forgot who I was before it.”
I wipe my face with the back of my hand.
“She would have dragged me out of that penthouse by the ear if she’d seen what I turned into.”
He sets down his spoon. He doesn’t cry. I’ve watched him cry in three different cities this year, and this is the first time he just sits there and lets it hurt.
“I’m so sorry.” It scrapes out of him, rough and broken. “I’m sorry that’s how you felt the whole time you were married to me. I should have seen it. I should have done a damn thing about it.”
He reaches across the table and his fingers hover near mine, not quite touching.
“You’re my whole world, Izzy. You always have been. And I failed to show you that every single day. I don’t know how to make that okay. I don’t know if I can. But I need you to know that I see it now.”
***
The wind screams around the gable he fixed.
The shutter holds.
I look at this man with mud still under his nails and my grandmother’s candlelight moving on his face, and I have to look at my soup instead. Because the wanting is back and it has stopped walking beside me. It’s sitting right here at my table and I don’t know what the hell to do with it.
“There are sheets in the cedar chest.” I stand and carry my bowl to the sink so my hands have a job. “The couch is shorter than you but that’s not my fault. You’re the one who decided to get tall.”
“I’ll take it up with the couch.”
He gathers his own bowl and follows me to the sink, and we wash up side by side in the storm-dark, elbow to elbow, not saying anything. It’s the most married I’ve felt in years.
The house wakes me deep in the night and I tell myself I’m going down to check the candles.
That’s bullshit, obviously. The candles are fine and I blew them out myself. But my feet take the stairs anyway, wool socks on cold wood, the storm still working outside.
He’s asleep on the pull-out with the lamp off and the storm light gray on his face, and the couch is losing badly. He’s too long for it in every direction, one arm hanging off the edge with his knuckles brushing the floor, feet stacked on the armrest, the thin blanket kicked to the floor.
I move closer without meaning to, drawn to him the way I’ve always been drawn to him even when I didn’t want to be.
His face has let go of everything it holds all day. The tension around his jaw is gone and the furrow between his brows that’s been there for years has smoothed out. He looks younger. He looks like the man who knelt in a puddle on Bleecker Street and asked me to marry him.
It hurts just looking at him.
He spent today fixing shutters he didn’t know how to fix and fighting with a generator that beat him three times before he beat it back.
He got soaked and muddy and cursed at YouTube tutorials for hours, all because I needed help and he wanted to be the one to give it. He didn’t have to. He wanted to.
He’s trying. He’s actually trying this time, and not with money or gifts or grand gestures that cost him nothing but a phone call. He’s trying with his hands and his time and by showing up even when I told him to leave.
I sink down onto my knees beside the couch, close enough to feel the warmth coming off his skin and close enough to see the slow rise and fall of his chest.
My hand reaches out before I can stop it because I want to touch his face so badly.
I want to trace the line of his jaw and push the hair back from his forehead and press my lips to his and tell him it’s okay.
I want to tell him I forgive him and that we can go back to the way it was, back when we were broke and happy and couldn’t keep our hands off each other.
My fingers hover an inch from his cheek and I can feel the heat of his skin and the wanting is so strong it actually hurts.
But we can’t go back. I know that now, kneeling here in the dark beside him. Back wasn’t working. Back is what broke us in the first place.
If we do this again, it has to be forward. It has to be different and it has to be built on more than just love, because love wasn’t enough the first time around.
My eyes are burning and I blink and feel the tears slip down my cheeks, and I pull my hand back before I can do a thing I’m not ready for.
He stirs but doesn’t wake, and his hand, the one hanging into empty air, closes slowly around nothing.
I know exactly how that feels.
The cedar chest is still open by the wall, so I get up and take out the heavier quilt, the one Gran kept for the coldest nights.
I cross back to the couch and tuck it around him carefully, from his shoulders to his stacked feet, and he shifts a little and makes a soft sound in his sleep. I freeze, but he doesn’t wake.
I stay there for a moment, kneeling beside him in the dark, watching him breathe.
He’s here. He’s actually here, in my grandmother’s house, on her terrible couch, and he’s not leaving.
I wipe my face with the back of my hand and stand up slowly. I leave the chest open and the thin blanket where it fell and I go back up the stairs before I can do anything else stupid.
I almost touched him tonight. I almost kissed him. I almost crawled onto that couch and let him hold me until the storm passed and the morning came and none of the last year mattered anymore.
Almost is new.
I lie in my grandmother’s guest bed listening to the storm and the small sounds of a sleeping man in a house that has been too quiet for years, and I let myself feel a thing I’d forgotten how to feel.
Hope, fragile and terrifying and there anyway.