Chapter 3
Sullivan
She’s back at her cabin within an hour.
I know because I’m at the stupid window again, and the stupid window has the stupid angle.
A hammer. She has a hammer.
She’s using it wrong.
Forty minutes she’s been at that porch step, with a tool too small for the job, a piece of board she pried off the siding instead of measuring for, and a determination I would respect more if it weren’t converting her into an active hazard.
The hammer drops. Bounces off her boot. Gets retrieved. Gets a small, sincere apology.
I close my eyes. The cold pane of the window is the only thing keeping me upright.
“Henry,” I say to nobody, “I’m going to need you to acknowledge how hard I’m trying.”
I have a system that I’ve maintained for forty-one days.
The system is simple: I do not interact with civilians.
I am not equipped to handle civilian interactions.
Civilians ask follow-up questions, have last names, family histories, and birthdays.
Civilians get hurt. They do not understand that I am not someone you can stand next to on a hill if you want to keep enjoying life.
The system is good. The system has been working.
I watch her drop the hammer a second time. She bends over to pick it up, and my eyes go to her rounded ass before my brain catches up.
“Goddamn it,” I say.
I get my coat.
The trail down to her cabin takes seven minutes if you take it slow. I make it in five and a half because I’ve decided the hammer will not drop a third time.
She sees me coming and straightens up. The hammer is in one hand, a bent nail in the other, and her glasses are a quarter inch off her nose.
“Oh.” Her smile starts, then she catches herself, as if she’s trying to be cool. “Hi.”
“Move.”
She blinks. “Pardon?”
“Move.” I jerk my chin at the porch step. “Off it. Down. Whichever’s faster.”
She steps down with the careful dignity of a man in a Forces sketch miming his way around a rubber prop minefield. She has committed. She will not rush.
She holds the hammer out to me on flat palms, like a sword. “Your hammer.”
“That’s not mine.”
“It’s the hammer that’s here.”
“That’s a tack hammer.”
“Oh.” She looks at it. “That explains the size.”
“It is small,” I agree gravely as I take it.
Her glove brushes my glove. Brief. Wool against wool. Nothing.
And yet I’m standing still when I should be moving, the hammer in my hand, facing the porch so she can’t read my face.
I turn to the porch and crouch down, reading the damaged wood the way I read a room, top to bottom, corner to corner, fail point to fail point.
The whole front section is rotten. The middle stringer is shot.
Somebody put a piece of lumber-yard pine across the failed step at some point and never went back.
A nail is bent at an impossible angle near the top, and that nail is hers.
Her effort is… endearing, but I’ll die before I tell her that.
“You have any wood?” I ask, eyes on the step.
“Define wood.”
“Dimensional. Two-by-something. Pressure-treated would be nice. Cedar, ideal.”
“Oh.” She thinks. “I have a kitchen chair?”
“I can hear you smiling.”
“I am smiling.”
“Stop.”
“Made you look.”
I don’t look. I’m specifically not looking.
“There’s no wood inside?” I ask the porch step. “None left over from your aunt?”
“There’s a stack of something behind the woodshed. I haven’t gone back there yet because there’s a frozen thing back there that might be a deer. Or a wheelbarrow.”
A laugh punches out of me.
Tess goes very still beside me.
I straighten up, still not looking at her. I round the cabin to the shed. A small woodpile waits under a tarp. The frozen object is a wheelbarrow, not a deer. I get my hands under the tarp and pull out four cedar planks the previous owner cut to size and never used.
Seems Aunt Rosa was a planner.
I carry the cedar around to the front. Tess hasn’t moved. She’s standing exactly where I left her, with her hands tucked under her arms and her glasses slightly fogged from her own breath.
“You had wood,” I say.
She beams. “I had wood.”
I crouch by the step and pull the bent nail. “Sit.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere that’s not the porch. Tailgate of your truck. Steps are out of service.”
She climbs into the bed of her box truck and sits on the lip of the open back, swinging her boots. I’m aware of her. I’m aware of her like a man is aware of a held grenade.
The work goes fast because I’ve done it a hundred times in worse places with worse tools.
I pry the failed step and check the stringer.
The stringer is okay—one bad fastener and a cracked face I can sister.
I pull the bad nail, sister the face, and cut the cedar to length on the deck of her truck because she has, of all things, a small handsaw rolled up in a yoga mat.
“You travel with a saw?” I ask.
“I travel,” she says solemnly, “with everything.”
The new step goes in. I drive the nails square and check the next two steps to find the second one wants reinforcement, so I do that too. I check the porch deck and decide it’s a problem for another day, but it’ll hold until then.
My back tells me about it as I straighten up.
Tess is watching me from the truck, cheeks pink from the cold, glasses balanced precariously on the tip of her nose. She’s looking at me like I just parted the seas rather than fixed two porch steps.
“Thank you,” she says.
“Don’t.”
“Don’t thank you?”
“Don’t make a thing of it.”
“Okay.” She pauses. “Thank you anyway.”
I make a sound men make when they’re losing a battle.
I gather my hammer and her bad nail, dropping the nail into my pocket like I’m preserving a small piece of evidence.
“Don’t use the third step until tomorrow,” I say. “Let the nails settle.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t go up on the roof.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t try to run a propane line.”
“Okay… wait. Was I going to?”
“You strike me as a person who reads instructions out loud, then improvises.”
“That is an attack.”
“That is an observation.”
Her laugh is bright and easy and goes through me sideways. I lock my jaw against a reciprocal smile.
“What’s your name?” she asks.
I almost don’t answer.
“Sullivan.”
“Sullivan.” She tries it like she’s tasting it. “Sullivan what?”
“Mercer.”
“Sullivan Mercer.” She nods slowly, as if the name has weight. “Nice to meet you, Sullivan Mercer.”
“Yeah.”
I turn to leave.
She slides off the back of the truck, landing lightly, and calls after me in the same hopeful, undeterred, sunshine pitch of voice I’m learning is an inherent part of her.
“I made cinnamon rolls last night! At a friend’s place in Denver. They’re in a Tupperware on top of the stand mixer, and you are absolutely getting one. You don’t have a choice.”
I keep walking.
Behind me, I hear her say, “He’s going to take one. Watch.”
I’m halfway up the trail when something white comes flying past my left shoulder—a Tupperware, hand-thrown, with admirable form—and lands in a snowbank ten feet ahead of me.
“Catch!” she calls, two seconds late.
I stop. Look down at it. Look back at her. She’s grinning on the porch with both hands at her mouth like she can’t believe she just did that.
I pick up the Tupperware. It’s warm in my glove. She must have stuck it in the truck heater.
I turn around slowly because a man has his pride. “You threw a Tupperware at me.”
“I overcommitted.”
I arch an eyebrow. “You overcommitted.”
“Eat the cinnamon roll, Sullivan Mercer.”
I look down at the Tupperware, then back at her. Her glasses are crooked. Again. Her hair is escaping from its braid. And her smile is not even a little bit afraid of me.
The system has a hairline crack in it.
I tuck the Tupperware under my arm. “Don’t go up on the roof.”
“Roger that.”
And I climb back up the ridge with a warm cinnamon roll under my arm and a feeling in my chest that’s so foreign that, at first, I don’t recognize it as the precise opposite of safe.