CHAPTER ELEVEN
Mae's was almost empty.
The dinner crowd had cleared. Three regulars at a far booth.
A young couple at the counter sharing a plate of fries.
The small TV above the pass-through was on with the sound off, baseball, a game neither team in the diner was watching.
Claire slid onto a counter stool, and Mae, wiping down the far end, looked up and registered her and walked the length of the counter and set a glass of water in front of her without saying hello.
"Soup tonight," Mae said. "Beef and barley. You look like you could use it."
"Yes, please."
Mae brought soup. And bread, which Claire hadn't asked for, and a small plate of butter.
Claire ate. Mae went back to wiping the far end, then came back, refilled the water, and then, with the unhurried slowness of a woman who'd decided to sit, pulled up the stool beside Claire and put her elbows on the counter.
"Where'd you grow up?" Mae said.
"Portland."
"That all your life?"
"Mostly. We moved there from John Day when I was small."
"John Day."
"My mother wanted out. She wanted me to grow up where the schools were."
Mae nodded.
"Your people are from John Day, then."
"My mother's mother was. She had a shop there. Up in Mitchell, technically. A rockhound shop. She moved to John Day later."
Mae set her coffee cup down.
"What was her name."
"Helen."
Mae was quiet a beat.
Then Mae said, with the careful authority Claire had clocked the first night, when Mae had looked at her hands too long and chosen not to comment: "I knew a woman in Mitchell who had a rockhound shop.
Forty years ago. Eyes a little like yours.
She had a way of picking up a stone and holding it and knowing, just by the way she held it, that she'd already heard what it had to say. "
Claire didn't answer right away.
She sat with the soup in front of her and the spoon in her hand and Mae's words still landing.
She hadn't known her grandmother had been. Not the way Mae had just described. She'd known Helen was respected in a small region for a particular competence. She hadn't known there were people forty miles east who'd registered, in 1985 or whenever Mae had been there, that Helen could hear stones.
"That was my grandmother," Claire said.
"I figured."
Mae didn't press. Mae refilled the coffee Claire hadn't asked for. Watched the counter a long quiet beat.
Then Mae said: "Whatever you're feeling out there, you're not making it up. You should know that. People like your grandmother, they had a name for it they used among themselves. Good ears for the ground."
Claire's eyes filled.
She didn't let them spill. She hadn't cried at the funeral. She wasn't going to cry in a diner.
She drank the coffee. The coffee was hot. The hot was a thing to attend to.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what."
"For knowing her."
Mae didn't answer right away. She looked at the silent TV, then back at her cup, and Claire watched a woman in her late sixties process some private thing across her face and put it away again.
"She was kind to me once," Mae said. "I was passing through.
Had a bad night. I stopped in a shop in Mitchell because I needed to put my hands on something that wasn't moving.
She let me sit on a stool in the back for two hours and didn't ask me anything.
When I was ready to go she gave me a piece of obsidian for my pocket.
Said this one's for putting your foot down.
I had that piece of obsidian for thirty years. I still have it."
Claire was looking down at the soup.
"That sounds like her," Claire said.
"Mhm."
They sat another minute. Mae, in her own time, stood and went back to the dishes. Claire ate the rest of the soup and the bread and finished the coffee. Mae brought a piece of pie Claire hadn't ordered, with a small fork. Mae didn't charge her for the pie.
When Claire stood to go, Mae said: "Don't let her teach you to stop listening, baby."
Claire walked back to the cabin in the dark.
She sat on the front porch a long time without going inside.
There was a cat on the railing.
She hadn't heard it arrive. It was large and orange and entirely unbothered, sitting at the far end of the rail with its tail wrapped over its feet, looking at her the way Mae looked at her hands. It did not belong to the cabin. The cabin did not, as far as she knew, come with a cat.
"Hello," she said.
The cat did not answer. The cat held her in its yellow regard a moment longer, decided something, and crossed the railing to sit beside her. Not on her lap. Beside her. Close enough that she could feel the small furnace of it through the cold.
She put her hand out. The cat allowed it.
Her hands, in her lap and now on a cat that had appeared out of nothing, did whatever they wanted to do.
She didn't ask them to stop.
When she finally went in, the cat was gone. She had not seen it go.
She slept, when she slept, hard.
She dreamed of her grandmother for the first time in seven years.
Helen at the creek bed. Helen at the rock shop. Helen at the basalt shelf, in late August, on a day Claire had not yet lived. Helen saying what do your hands say, baby, and Claire, in the dream, answering for the first time.
She said: they say I'm home.
She woke at 4:47 with her hands warm.
She got up and made coffee and sat at the kitchen table and did what she'd been refusing to do for nineteen years. She started a separate field log. She didn't call it that. At the top of the page she wrote observations of body response.
She wrote down everything that had happened on the contract so far.
By the time the sun came up she'd filled six pages.
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