24. Jett
JETT
I sat at the kitchen island after the front door closed and I did not get up for forty-three minutes.
I knew because the clock on the oven said seven oh nine when the door clicked shut behind her, and the next time I came up for air it said seven fifty-two.
Forty-three minutes, gone, and I couldn't have told you where to.
The kitchen hadn't gotten warmer or colder.
Her laptop sat closed where she'd closed it.
Half a sandwich sat on the plate going stale. I just sat there with all of it.
I didn't move because I hadn't yet decided which thing I was going to do first, and I'd figured out somewhere in the last forty minutes that doing the wrong thing first was going to set me up to do the wrong thing second.
The list of things I was not going to do was longer than the list of things I was.
I was not going to text her. I'd told her I'd text her once tomorrow morning, once tomorrow night, neither one asking her to come back. I was going to keep that promise.
I was not going to call Brynn. Brynn was about to be the woman across a glass of wine from Dani for the next eight hours, and calling Brynn to ask her to lobby for me would have been the move of a man who didn't trust the woman he'd just told he loved to come back to him on her own timing, and that man was not the man I was going to be tonight.
I was not going to call Coach. Coach didn't need to know about this, for the same reason Coach didn't need to know about most of the things in my life, which was that I'd built my life specifically so I wouldn't have to bring most of it to Coach.
I was not going to drive past her best friend's building.
I was not going to circle her best friend's block.
I was not going to do any of the small physical-presence things a less-controlled man would have done in the first three hours after the woman he loved left his house with her laptop bag packed.
What I was going to do was sit in the kitchen.
I sat in the kitchen.
The phone vibrated on the counter at eight oh one.
Brynn.
She made it here. She is on my couch with a glass of wine.
She is okay. She is going to be okay. She told me what happened.
I will not be calling you tonight. I will not be reporting to you.
I am telling you she got here safe because the only thing I think you have a right to know tonight is that she got here safe. Go to bed, Sturgill.
I read it twice.
I wrote back. Thank you.
She wrote back. Go to bed.
I did not write back to that. I put the phone face-down.
I got up off the stool for the first time in nearly an hour and walked through my own kitchen and looked at the things in it that had become hers in the last seventy-two hours.
The mug she'd been drinking out of in the morning.
The notepad she'd been writing on. The stool she'd been sitting on.
The exact place at the corner of the island where the sandwich plate was, which was the place she'd sat down at on a Wednesday afternoon to do research that had broken open the actual shape of my life.
I picked up the plate. I threw the rest of the sandwich in the trash. I washed the plate. I dried the plate. I put the plate in the cupboard.
These were not the actions of a calm man.
These were the actions of a man performing the activity of being calm in the hope that the activity would produce, in the man, the actual quality of calm.
I'd read about the trick of it somewhere once.
A therapist in San Diego had tried to walk me through it years back, and I had not, at the time, believed it would work.
I'd believed, at twenty-five, that the only way through a feeling was to argue your way through it.
I'd been wrong about that.
I washed her wine glass too, the one from dinner, the one she'd left on the counter. I put it in the cupboard. I turned the kitchen lights off.
I went upstairs.
I sat on the edge of the bed and I called Rhett.
He picked up on the second ring.
"You all right."
"No."
"What."
"She found the LLCs."
A pause.
"Okay."
"She found all forty-seven of them, Stone. She found J.S. Holdings. She did the math. She told me she would have been okay with it. She told me she was angry that I hadn't told her, not that I had the money. She told me she loved me. She's at Brynn's for the night."
He took a long breath on his end.
"Jett."
"Yeah."
"She's coming back."
"How do you know."
"Because she told you she loved you on her way out the door, and a woman who's not coming back does not say that on her way out the door. You know that. Take the night."
"Yeah."
"And Jett."
"Yeah."
"You're a slow learner about some things."
"I know."
"But you're learning."
"I'm learning."
"Good. Go to bed."
I hung up.
I did not go to bed.
I lay on the bed in my clothes with the lamp off and the dark coming in through the windows and the valley going about its lit-up nighttime business below me, and I thought about a woman on a couch on the other side of the city in a sweatshirt of her best friend's, drinking wine.
I thought about the four seconds of stillness her face had done in my kitchen between the words I love you and the next words she'd said.
I thought about how I'd told her I loved her back in a voice I hadn't used since the last time I'd said the words out loud, which had been to my sister Mary Beth on a Greyhound platform in Nashville at eighteen years old, and how no woman in my entire adult life had been a woman I'd wanted to say the words to until the woman in my kitchen had said them first.
I'd loved her since the first day.
I'd told her so.
She'd known.
She'd known and she'd also packed her bag.
The two facts coexisted, and I lay in the dark and let them coexist, and I did not try to argue my way to a version of either one that was easier than the other.
I slept eventually.
I did not sleep well.
At six fourteen in the morning I sat at the kitchen island with a fresh coffee and wrote her the text I'd promised.
I did not sleep. The kitchen is yours when you come back. The coffee will be hot.
I read it twice. I sent it. I put the phone face-down.
I went out on the deck.
The sun was coming up gold on the valley the way it had on Saturday and Sunday and Monday and Tuesday and every other morning I'd stood on this deck since I bought the house, except this morning was the first morning the deck didn't feel like the deck I'd been standing on alone.
The deck had become a deck a woman had stood next to me on at one in the afternoon yesterday, looking at the same valley, telling me she had nine thousand words and would be deleting most of them.
The valley was the same valley. The deck was the same deck.
The man at the rail was a man who'd been told by a woman he loved that he'd been slow, and told by his only real friend that he was learning, and the morning was a morning he was going to get through one hour at a time until the woman came back.
The phone vibrated face-down on the deck rail.
I looked at it.
Coffee should be hot when you come back. Also I did not sleep.
It was from her. It had taken her seventeen seconds to write back.
I picked up the phone. I read it again. I did not write back.
I'd told her I would text her twice. I'd used one. I had one left, for tonight. The math was the math.
I put the phone face-down. I drank my coffee.
The morning came up. I had a day to get through. She had a day to get through. We were both going to get through it.
That was, I decided, going to be enough for the day.
Getting through was going to be enough. The big things would happen tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever she walked back through my front door, and the man who'd receive her at the door was going to be a man who, for the rest of his life, was going to tell her the size of the things he was carrying without waiting for her to find them in a Delaware secretary-of-state database at four-eighteen on a Wednesday afternoon.
I was going to be that man. I'd decided. I was going to be that man starting today.
I drank my coffee. The sun cleared the rim of the valley. The kitchen was hers when she came back. The coffee would be hot. She would, eventually, walk back through the door.
I had a day to get through.
There was a game in it. Seattle, at home, a team we should have handled the last two times and hadn't.
I'd be at the rink by four. I'd put the gear on the way I'd put it on nine hundred times.
I'd stand for the anthem next to Stone with a chest that had a brand-new thing living in it, and I'd play sixty minutes for a slumping team with my whole life sitting in a guest room across town waiting to come back, and that was new, and it did not make me worse.
It was the first thing in three weeks that hadn't.
I went to get through it.