Chapter 46
Chapter
Forty-Six
The first thing I had to learn about loving Hollis was that there was nothing to do about it, and for a woman like me, nothing-to-do-about-it is not a relief. It is a vacuum, and I abhor a vacuum the way nature is supposed to, and my entire life, I have rushed to fill one with a plan.
So I caught myself, about two weeks into whatever it was we were not calling anything, drafting it.
In my head, where I do most of my worst work.
I had begun to build, without quite admitting it, a sort of operating agreement for the two of us — nights I’d stay at his place by the marina and nights I’d keep my own, a rhythm for the back-and-forth across the causeway, a tactful framework for the holidays, a contingency for what we’d tell Sophie and what we’d tell Cam and how we’d handle the inevitable conversation about whether this was Serious — and I got about as far as the holidays before I heard it, heard the pen scratching where no pen was, and understood that I was doing it again.
I was trying to turn the one thing in my life that had finally come without a schedule into a thing with terms, because the terms are where I feel safe, and the man does not come with terms, and I could not seem to stop reaching for the place where the terms should be, like a tongue going to a missing tooth.
I told him. That was new, the telling. “I’m doing the thing,” I said.
We were on the Margaret Ann at six in the morning, running his pots, the same gray pewter water as the day in July when he’d offered to let me steer.
“I’m building us a — I caught myself drafting a schedule.
For us. In my head. There were holidays in it, Hollis. I’d gotten to Thanksgiving.”
He hauled a pot, checked it, dropped it back. “Yeah,” he said. “Figured you would.”
“That’s it? Figured you would?”
“You’re a person who paves things. It’s not a sin.
” He coiled the line. “You spent fifty years learning that if you don’t pave the road, you fall in the river.
Takes more than a couple weeks to learn the river’s all right.
Some of it you don’t have to walk on. Some of it you can just float.
” He looked at me, the four-second read gone soft around the edges these days.
“You don’t have to stop being who you are, Brooke.
I never asked you to. I just want you to notice you’re paving a thing that doesn’t need a road, and then put the shovel down.
You did it just now. You noticed. That’s the whole skill. That’s the only skill.”
I had to learn what the days were, because nobody had ever shown me a life that wasn’t a campaign.
They were so quiet. That was the thing that frightened me at first, the way a held breath frightens you before you learn it’s just rest. Hollis would cook — he is a flatly competent cook, a man who can put fish and rice and a thing from the garden on a table without once consulting anything — and we would eat on the deck of the Margaret Ann or on his porch, and he would not fill the silence, and for the first several weeks I filled it for both of us, narrating, planning, organizing the conversation as I’d organized every dinner table of my married life, because a silence, in the house I grew up in, was a verdict being prepared.
And he would let me run down, like a clock, and then he would say one true thing, or nothing, and I began to understand that the quiet was not a verdict.
It was the absence of one. It was a man who had already decided about me and did not require me to keep re-auditioning over the green beans.
I learned to garden a little, badly, which is becoming the theme of my second life.
I learned that he reads, at night, paperbacks gone soft as cloth, and that he will read me a sentence he likes and not explain why he likes it.
I learned that when I had a hard day — a contractor, a client in Atlanta, my mother — he did not try to fix it, did not offer a plan, did not do the single thing I had done to every person I’d ever loved; he just made the dinner and let me be a person who’d had a hard day, in a kitchen, with someone who wasn’t keeping a ledger of my moods.
It was, by every metric of my old life, an astonishingly low-yield way to spend an evening.
There was no project in it. Nothing got optimized.
And I would lie awake afterward in the dark of his small clean room over the sound of the water against the hull and feel a thing I had no column for, which I eventually, with great suspicion, identified as contentment — a flat, unspectacular, deeply suspect contentment, the kind that doesn’t photograph and won’t scale and can’t be reported to a board, and is, I am now fairly sure, the only thing I ever actually wanted under all the things I built to keep from having to want it.
He let me steer on the way in.
He did it the way he’d said he would, back in July, before any of it — I’d let her steer sometime, she wouldn’t even have to be good at it — and I was not good at it, which is a sentence I have had very few occasions to write in my life and have come to treasure.
I oversteered. I corrected too hard. I ran us at a piling I was certain was somewhere else, and he reached over without urgency, put two fingers on the wheel, and we missed it by the exact margin a man who has read this water for forty years knows is plenty and a woman doing it for the first time finds insufficient.
And he did not take the wheel back. That was the thing.
He just left his two fingers near it and let me keep being bad at it all the way to the slip, because being allowed to be bad at something, in front of a person who is not keeping score, turns out to be the rarest luxury there is, and I had gone thirty-nine years without it, and I cried a little at the wheel of a crab boat over how cheap it had been all along and how long I’d believed I couldn’t afford it.
“You’re crying,” Hollis observed, not alarmed, a man reporting weather.
“I’m steering,” I said. “It’s a lot. Leave me alone.”
“Mm.” He let the quiet come back, the one that asks nothing, and we came into the marina at a speed that would have appalled the harbormaster, and I did not hit a single thing, and it was, for the record, the best I have ever done at being bad at something.
We did not define it. We never did, the whole rest of that fall and the winter after and as far out as I am willing to project, which is not far, on purpose.
Cam would call it nothing, and I would let her, because Cam needs a word and I have stopped needing one.
It is not a plan. It does not have a destination, a timeline, a clause for the holidays.
It is a man and a boat and a stretch of pewter water at six in the morning, and a woman who is learning, slowly, badly, with great and unaccustomed happiness, to put the shovel down and float — and to let herself be steered around the pilings she can’t see yet by someone who has no intention of taking the wheel, only of leaving two fingers near it, in case, with no receipt, asking nothing, the way the whole maddening island had been trying to love me since the day I crossed the causeway with my old life in a tote bag and my hands too full of plans to feel it.