Chapter Eight
Rhys
I buckled the box into the passenger seat before I backed out of the drive, and then I sat there with the engine running and looked at it, trying to figure out when I’d become a man who put a seat belt on cardboard.
Inside were her notebooks. Black Moleskines, a number on each spine in white paint pen. They lived on two shelves in her study. I walked past that study twenty times a day. I couldn’t have told you what color the shelves were.
Can you bring the rest of my notebooks up Saturday? Black ones, study shelves. Thanks.
The rest. I’d stood in her study that night with the phone in my hand and seen the gaps. A few were already gone. I didn’t know when she’d taken them. I hadn’t noticed. I’d been sleeping forty feet from those gaps for a month.
So I counted them into the box. Twice.
Brockway Summit was clear and hot, the lake dropping away in the mirror. My phone buzzed twice on the grade—Margot, probably, or Dev—and I let it buzz. That was new. I didn’t know yet whether it was growth or just fear.
Owen’s shop had its roll-up door open and a band saw screaming somewhere inside. I’d been up to her studio once, the Sunday after the party, and I tried very hard not to think about how that had gone.
I parked and unbuckled the box, and Juniper came around the side of the building at her rocking-horse lope, tail going, ears flat, making the low happy grumble she saves for me and for cheese.
“Hey, Juni. Hey, girl.” I crouched with the box on my knee and let her lean her whole old weight into my shin. She smelled like sawdust and creek water. “You been working?”
The band saw stopped.
Owen stood in the doorway in a canvas apron, safety glasses pushed up into his hair. Lucy’s brother had her jaw and none of her patience with me. He looked at the box, then at me.
“Delivery,” I said.
“I see that.”
“She up there?”
“Where else would she be?” He went back inside, and the saw started up again, louder than any saw needed to be.
She heard me on the stairs. By the time I got to the top she’d set her pencil down and turned her stool around, and she was sitting with her hands flat on her knees, waiting. I noticed that. I noticed she didn’t want me to see her hands moving.
She was wearing a paint-stiff denim shirt I hadn’t seen since before we were married, a pencil stuck through the knot of her hair, and she looked tired and tan and about fifteen percent more like herself than she had in years. I didn’t know what to do with that, so I held up the box.
“You can put them on the table,” she said.
The table was an old door on two sawhorses. I set the box down on it. She came over and lifted the lid and ran one finger along the spines, the way you’d check on sleeping kids. Her lips moved a little. She was counting.
“They’re all there,” I said. “I counted.”
“You counted.”
“Twice.”
Something happened at the corner of her mouth and went away again. “Thank you.”
“Sure.”
We stood there. Downstairs, the saw bit into something hard and whined.
I looked around, because looking at her was like looking at the sun.
A box fan in the window. A tin of watercolors open on the sill, the little cakes of paint worn into bowls.
The dust sheets I remembered from June were folded in a corner now, and a sheet of heavy paper was taped to her old drafting table.
“It’s hot up here,” I said.
“It’s July.”
“There’s no air-conditioning.”
“There’s a window.”
“Luce.” I heard it coming out of me, the thing I’d rehearsed on the drive, the thing I’d had in my pocket for three days.
“There’s a brick building on Commercial Row.
Two floors. Fourteen-foot ceilings, windows on three sides.
It used to be a bank. It’s on the market. I called the broker Wednesday.”
She was already shaking her head.
“I could have keys in your hand by Friday. It’d be yours. Not mine, not the company’s. Your name on the deed. You could put the drafting table right in the—”
“No.”
“You haven’t even seen it.”
“I’ve seen it. I’ve walked past it my whole life. It’s a beautiful building.” She put the lid back on the box. “No.”
“You’re working in an attic over a table saw.”
“It’s a band saw.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I know exactly what you mean.” She folded her arms. “You mean you want this fixed by Friday.”
I opened my mouth to tell her that wasn’t it, and heard, a half second before I said it, that it was exactly it. I’d had that broker’s number in my phone since Wednesday. It was the only idea I’d had in four weeks.
“It’s a building,” I said. “It’s not a trick.”
“I know it’s not a trick. That’s what makes it hard.” She looked past me, at the window. “Every room I’ve drawn in ten years is in a building you bought, Rhys. I’d like one thing that isn’t.”
For once in my life I didn’t say anything. I went to the drafting table, because I didn’t know where else to put myself.
It was a building. Long and low, a gabled roof broken by a square tower at one end, three tall doors across the front. Along the bottom, in her capitals: TRUCKEE FIRE—STATION REBUILD—SCHEME B.
“What’s this?”
She hesitated. I watched her decide whether I got to know.
“The fire station,” she said. “The one that burned last year. The committee asked if I’d help. Schematics, to start. The town can’t hire a firm until the grant money comes through, and they’re tired of waiting.”
“You’re designing a firehouse.”
“I’m designing a firehouse.”
“Show me.”
She came and stood beside the table, not too close. For a second she just looked at it. Then she picked up a pencil—I don’t think she knew she’d done it—and touched the tip to the left side of the plan.
“Okay. So the old one had the bunk room right behind the apparatus bay, which is insane, because every time they started an engine in the winter the guys sleeping got a lungful of diesel. So the bays go here, and there’s a corridor here, see this jog, where they strip their gear before they come inside.
The stuff that comes off turnouts after a fire is poison.
You don’t want it near the couch.” Her pencil moved.
“And the kitchen goes in the middle of everything.”
“Why the middle?”
“Because that’s what a firehouse actually is.
It’s a kitchen table.” She was talking faster now.
“The tones go off halfway through dinner and they run, and they come back at two in the morning and finish it cold. So the table goes where you can see the bay doors from every chair. And the watch office goes here, so the captain can see the street and the table at the same time. And the hose tower gets a window at the top, facing the pass, because somebody’s going to be up there anyway and they should get to see something. ”
She stopped.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing.”
“You’re looking at me weird.”
I was. I couldn’t help it. Her cheeks had gone pink.
She’d been talking with both hands, and there was a smudge of graphite on her cheekbone where she’d pushed her hair back, and her whole face had opened up like a room with the curtains pulled.
The last time I’d seen it do that, she was twenty-six, drawing on a cocktail napkin at the end of a dock, and I was too busy talking to notice.
“Where do the bunks go?” I said.
She looked at me a beat longer. Then back at the page. “East side. Upstairs. So when they get to wake up on their own, they wake up to light instead of tones.”
I looked for the word. The sales words came first, the way they always do—stunning, world-class, a real differentiator—and I left them in my mouth where they belonged.
“That’s kind,” I said.
She was quiet for a second. “Yeah. It’s supposed to be.”
“What are they paying you?”
“Nothing.”
“Luce—”
“They asked, Rhys.” She said it quietly, to the drawing, not to me. “Four of them drove out here and climbed those stairs and sat on that bench and asked me. By name.”
I wanted to tell her I’d asked, too. I went looking for a time I’d asked, and all I could find was telling. We need a lobby by March. We need forty keys on that footprint. Can you make the bar work by Thursday, the investors are coming Friday.
I didn’t say anything.
Juniper had folded herself down on my feet with a groan. Lucy looked at her, then at me, and I saw her decide something.
“You should go,” she said. Not unkind. “I’ve got a meeting with the chief at three.”
“Right. Sure.” I stepped out from under the dog. “Is she eating okay?”
“She’s eating better than you are.”
“Thanks for bringing them,” she said, and put her hand on the box, and I understood that was the part of me she wanted, and I went down the stairs.
Owen was leaning against my tailgate, working a rag over his knuckles. The saw was off. The whole lot had gone quiet except for the creek.
“She show you the station?” he said.
“Some of it.”
“She’s been up there since five every morning. I hear her pacing. Hear her on the phone with the chief, laughing.” He folded the rag. “Hadn’t heard her laugh in a while.”
I leaned on the side of the truck. The metal was hot through my shirt. “I offered to buy her a building.”
Owen snorted. “Course you did.”
“What was I supposed to do? Let her work in an attic?”
“She likes the attic.”
“It’s a hundred degrees.”
“It’s hers.” He looked at me, flat and even, a look I’d seen on his sister a thousand times across a dinner table and never once understood until right now. “You been in the library at Glenbrook lately? The shelves? The ladder rail?”
“I’ve been in that library a thousand times.”
“I built every inch of it. The stair rail in the great room, the window seats, the bar back, the beds. Four lodges, man. I’ve got a drawer full of shop drawings in there, every one of them stamped PER L.
HART SKETCH.” He jerked his head at the shop behind him.
“Not per the team. Not per the brand. Her. I never built one board for you that didn’t start in one of those notebooks you just carried up the stairs. ”
I stood there with my keys in my hand.
Owen pushed off the tailgate. He slapped the side of my truck twice, flat-handed, the way you’d send off a horse, and stepped back to let me go.
“She drew your whole company, man.”