Chapter 4 #2
She took the towel first. She dried her face.
She dried her hair. She handed it back. She took the flannel.
She turned away from me — the small precise turning of a woman who had been taught modesty as a survival skill — and she stripped off the soaked cardigan and pulled the flannel on over her dress.
The flannel was three sizes too big. It fell to mid-thigh. She rolled the cuffs up twice.
She took the beer. She did not look at the label. She twisted off the cap with the heel of her palm — and I want to note, for the record, that I had not known she could do this. She had not known either. She looked at the cap in her hand for a second, mildly surprised at herself.
She sat down on the shop floor.
Not the crate. The floor. Her back against the lift, her legs out in front of her, her bare feet — she had taken her ruined shoes off at the door — small and pale against the gray concrete. She took a long pull from the bottle. She closed her eyes.
I sat down beside her. I sat carefully, with about a foot of floor between us, and I leaned my back against the same lift, and I did not touch her.
She said, He found one of my notebooks.
I waited.
She said, Not the brown one. A newer one. I'd been writing in it on the porch this morning before church and I forgot it on the table. He read a poem about freedom. He decided it meant I was planning to leave the church.
She took another pull from the bottle.
She said, We fought.
She said, He called me ungrateful.
She said, I called him controlling.
She said the word controlling like a woman who had just discovered, in adulthood, that there had been a word for the shape of her life all along, and the word had been sitting in the dictionary waiting for her to come and get it.
She said, I didn't know where else to go.
I felt the sentence in my sternum. I felt it move along the underside of my ribs and settle somewhere I did not have a name for. I did not look at her. I looked at the bay door. The rain was coming down on it in a sustained, generous applause. The lights flickered once and held.
I said, You're in the right place.
She turned her head. She looked at me.
She said, He thinks the poems are about rebellion.
She said, They're about breathing.
She said, I just want to breathe.
I want to be careful about what I did next, because what I did next was nothing, and the nothing was the most deliberate thing I had ever done.
I did not put my arm around her. I did not turn toward her.
I did not, even, look at her for very long.
I looked at the bay door. I drew in a slow breath of my own.
I said, Then breathe.
She closed her eyes.
She breathed. I heard the inhale and the exhale. She did it twice. She did it a third time. And then, very slowly, the way a thing settles, she let her head fall sideways and come to rest on my shoulder.
I felt the weight of her against the flannel of my own shirt. I felt the damp of her hair against my neck. I felt the small in-and-out of her breath, which had slowed down, finally, to the pace of a person who has stopped fighting.
I did not move.
I will say this and then I will stop. I have wanted women. I have wanted them recklessly and badly and often, and I have wanted them in shops and bars and motel rooms and parking lots, and I have rarely, in my adult life, had to argue with the wanting for very long.
I wanted Delilah Crane more, in that hour, sitting on the cold floor of my shop with the rain on the roof and her wet hair against my collarbone, than I had wanted any woman, ever, in my life.
I did not touch her.
I held still and I let her breathe and I understood, with a clarity that terrified me, that this woman was going to ruin every comfortable lie I had ever told myself about not needing anyone, and that I was going to let her, and that the letting was going to be the first holy thing I had ever done.
The rain went on for another hour. We sat there for the whole hour.
She finished the beer. I did not offer another.
When she finally lifted her head from my shoulder, the rain had slowed to a steady soft drumming, and the lights in the shop were warm and yellow and certain, and she said, quietly, I should call my mother.
I gave her the phone.
She called. She told her mother where she was. She did not lie. I want to record that, because it mattered, and I am sure it mattered to her. She said, I'm at Halo Custom Works. I'm safe. I'll be home in an hour.
She hung up.
She looked at me. She said, She knew, didn't she.
I said, Probably.
She almost laughed. She said, She's known for a month.
She stood up. I stood up. She handed me the flannel back, which I had not asked her to, and underneath it her cardigan and the blue dress were nearly dry.
She put her ruined shoes back on. She picked up her bag.
At the door, she turned around. She did not say thank you.
She did not need to. She said, instead, with a small steady look at my face, Tuesday.
I said, Tuesday.
She walked out into the rain. She walked toward town.
I stood in the doorway and watched her go, and I watched until she had crossed the gravel and turned onto the road, and I stood there for a long time after that, even though I could no longer see her, even though the rain was getting on me and the door was open and the shop was getting cold.
I had lasted four days.
The decision I'd made driving home from my mother's was over.
The argument with myself was over. I was, by any reasonable accounting, in love with the pastor's daughter, and I was not going to be able to do the kind thing I had told myself I was going to do, and I was, finally, going to have to find out what the unkind thing was going to cost.
I shut the door.
I went back to the phoenix. I worked on the eye. I worked on it for two hours, and when I was finished, the eye on that gas tank looked, for the first time, like it was looking at me.