Chapter 4
Ezra
The problem with wanting the preacher's daughter wasn't the preacher.
The problem was the town.
Ember Falls is the kind of small that gossip moves through the way blood moves through a body — constantly, mostly unnoticed, with the occasional dramatic show of color when something has hit a vein.
I had been a feature of that bloodstream since I was nineteen, when I'd taken Maddie Beaumont to a state fair in Wheeler County and brought her back at three in the morning with grass in her hair and an unfortunate hickey she had not bothered to hide.
I had been a feature ever since. I had slept with enough women in the county that, if I were honest with myself, my romantic history could fill a small civic census.
I had left them, every one, the way I'd left Maddie — cheerfully, on good terms, with the small clean exchange of someone who has been bought a drink and bought one back.
Delilah was not a woman I could leave cheerfully.
That was the sentence I had been refusing to say to myself for two weeks.
I said it now, standing in the kitchen of my apartment on a Saturday night with a beer I hadn't opened, because the sentence had finally walked up to me and tapped me on the shoulder and refused to walk away.
She was not a woman I could leave cheerfully.
She was not a woman I should touch at all.
She was a woman who had been kept small by a man who loved her badly, and the last thing she needed was another man who would consume her and move on.
And yet.
She came to the shop and the air changed.
I had been working in that shop for seven years.
I knew its weather. I knew the way the temperature shifted in late afternoon when the sun moved off the western wall, and the way the air at the back of the bay got close in August, and the way the smell of fresh enamel hung differently when the bay door was open versus when it was closed.
I knew the shop the way I knew my own breath.
When she walked in, the shop became another room.
I cannot describe it any other way. The air arranged itself around her.
The light, I swear to God, found her. I would set my brush down and walk over to her crate and find that I had walked over before I had decided to, and she would lift her face to me with that small expectant look she got when she was about to read me something, and the look did things to my chest I did not have the vocabulary to name and was not, frankly, in the market to acquire.
She read me her poetry. She had a voice when she read that was different from her speaking voice — lower, slower, with the kind of careful pacing that came from a person who had grown up in pews listening to language treated like a sacrament.
She read me a poem about her piano with the broken F sharp.
She read me a poem about the smell of communion wafers, which I had not previously thought a smell anyone would write about.
She read me a poem, one Thursday, about a woman who watched her own life through a window and could not decide if she was inside the house or outside it, and at the end of the poem she had closed the notebook and looked at the floor, and I had not known, for a long minute, what to say.
I'd said, finally, Read it again.
She had read it again. Her voice had cracked on the last line. Not much. Just the small fissure of a woman who had not, before that afternoon, read her own work aloud to a man who could hear it.
That was the Thursday I started losing the argument I was having with myself.
I had tracked it. I had tracked all of it.
The way she tilted her head when she was thinking, the right ear dropping a fraction toward her shoulder, like a child listening for a far-off train.
The way she bit her lower lip when she was writing, not the way women bite their lips in movies — there was nothing performed about it — but the way a person bites a lip when they don't know they are doing it, when the body is engaged in the work of getting a thought across and the lip is just collateral.
I had tracked the way she set her notebook down.
The way she rolled the cap of her pen between her thumb and forefinger when she was thinking.
The way she sometimes, in the long silences when I was painting, hummed without realizing she was humming, and the hum was always the same six notes, and the six notes were, I'd figured out by the fifth Thursday, the opening of Brahms' Lullaby, slowed down to the speed of a heartbeat.
I tracked her with the obsessive attention I usually reserved for paint gradients.
Liam noticed.
Of course Liam noticed. My brother is a man whose mind is built for patterns, and a pattern is what I had been building, openly, in his line of sight, for half of August. We had Sunday dinners at our mother's house every other week — our mother lived in a small bungalow on Clarkson Street with two cats and a peace lily that Liam watered for her, and the dinners were the kind of obligation that was also a kindness, and we both showed up, every time, on time.
On the last Sunday in August, Liam waited until our mother went to the kitchen for the pie.
He said, Heard the pastor's daughter's been visiting your shop.
He said it the way he said everything — flat, factual, without the rhetorical curl that a less careful man might have given it.
He had a fork in his hand. He was looking at the fork.
He was not looking at me. This was, in Liam's grammar, a kindness.
He was letting me decide what kind of conversation we were having.
I said, She's interested in engines.
I said it lightly. I said it the way I had said a hundred other lines like it at a hundred other Sunday dinners.
Liam said, She's interested in you.
He said it without looking up. He turned the fork over and set it on his plate.
I said, She's off-limits.
Liam looked at me then. He looked at me for a long second.
He had the same eyes our father had had, the same gray-green you could not lie to comfortably, and I had been on the receiving end of those eyes since I was four years old and had learned, somewhere around eight, that the only thing to do when those eyes landed on you was to hold still and let the looking happen.
He said, Since when do you recognize limits, Ezra.
He said it gently. That was the worst part. He said it gently, the way an older brother says a true thing he does not want to enjoy saying.
I did not answer. There was no good answer. The question was rhetorical the way scripture is rhetorical — the answer was supposed to be lived, not spoken.
My mother came back with the pie. The conversation moved.
Liam did not bring her up again that night.
He didn't have to. He had said the sentence I had been refusing to say to myself for two weeks, and he had said it with the small irrefutable authority of a man who had loved me since the day I was born, and the sentence sat between us through the pie and the coffee and the slow walk to our bikes in our mother's driveway.
Driving home, I made a decision.
I made the decision the way I made most decisions — quickly, completely, and with the small, private certainty of a man who had no idea he was wrong.
I was going to pull back. I was going to be professional.
I was going to stop writing notes in her journal margins.
I was going to stop starting the Shovelhead just to watch her face light up.
The next Tuesday she came in, I was going to find a polite, deliberate way to put eighteen inches of space between us, and I was going to keep it there until either the bird was finished or she decided, on her own, that the shop was not where she belonged.
The decision lasted until Friday.
Friday afternoon, around three, the sky started doing something I did not like.
Late August in Ember Falls is volatile. The heat builds and builds for days and then the sky cracks and the rain comes down in sheets and the gravel road floods and the bay doors get shut.
By four, I had the doors closed. By four-fifteen, the rain was coming down.
By four-forty, the wind was coming down with it, and the lights in the shop flickered once, and the rain on the steel roof became loud enough that I gave up on the radio and just let the rain be the noise.
Then the bay door rattled.
Not the wind. The wind was a sustained pressure on the door; this was a knock, low, three sharp raps. I went to the side door. I opened it.
She was standing in the gravel.
She had not driven. I want to record that, because the walking mattered.
She had walked, in the rain, from town. The blue cardigan was a darker blue.
Her hair was loose and stuck to her face.
Her shoes were ruined. She was holding her bag against her chest as if it were a child she was protecting.
Her eyes were red, not from the rain. Her mouth was set in a small hard line I had not seen on her before.
I did not ask what had happened.
I stepped back and held the door. She came inside.
The rain came in with her and pooled on the concrete at her feet.
I shut the door behind her and turned the lock.
I went to the back room. I came back with a towel — a real one, a heavy white one I'd stolen, in fairness, from a motel in Bowling Green four years earlier — and the cleanest flannel shirt I owned and a beer.
I held them out. I said, In whatever order you like.