Chapter 15 #2
"The upper left crossing branch," I say.
"Right," she says, with the slight over-focus of someone who is also thinking about something other than the tree.
We go back to work.
Lunch happens because I brought sandwiches — Beck's, where Carol orders the good bread and the deli is actually decent — and because by noon the tree is in a shape that represents a real morning's work and we've both earned it.
We end up at the kitchen table with sandwiches and Gerald's output, and the cottage has the warmth of a house that someone is living in properly, which it didn't have in October.
She made it warm. That's what's different.
"I want to show you something," she says, and goes to the bookshelf.
She comes back with the Nikon.
It's Elise's — I've seen it before, around the cottage when Elise was alive and having it out was just a fact of her kitchen. Delaney sets it on the table between us with the care of someone handling something significant.
"I've been looking at it for six weeks," she says. "I haven't really touched it. Loaded it and cleaned it, but haven’t really used it.”
"What's stopping you?"
"I don't know." She looks at the camera. "Maybe I'm afraid it'll be like the workshop, and I won't want to stop. And I'm still getting my footing." She glances up. "Does that make sense?"
"You don't want to want something you're not ready to pursue."
"Yes." She looks at me. "Exactly that."
I think about wanting things you're not ready to pursue. I think about how I've been sitting in that house for about ten weeks.
"It'll be there when you're ready," I say.
"That's what I keep telling myself." She touches the strap of the camera, just with her fingertips. "I looked up how to load the film. Just in case."
I smile at my sandwich.
"I saw that," she says.
"Noting the preparation."
"I'm a preparer."
"I know." I look at her. "It's good quality."
She looks at me with something in her expression I don't know what to do with — something warm and slightly uncertain and entirely directed at me. The kitchen light is the noon kind, coming through the window at the angle that hits the table just right, and she has a small smear of something on her jaw from the sandwich, and her hair is still doing the cold-weather thing, and she’s looking at me in a way I’ve noticed.
I look at my sandwich.
"You've got—" I gesture at my own jaw.
She makes a face and picks up a napkin. "Of course I do."
"It's on the right."
"This right or your right?"
"Your right."
She gets it and makes another face. I am smiling at my sandwich with a focus that is doing significant structural work right now.
"Did I get it?" she asks.
"Yeah," I say. "You got it."
She walks me to the gate when I leave.
Which is the reverse of how it usually goes, and she seems aware of it too — something slightly aware in her expression, like she made the decision and is now noticing she made it.
The afternoon has gone the soft early-dark of November, the light low and gold, the garden behind us finished for the season except for the new shape of the pear tree.
We stop at the gate.
"Thank you," she says. "For the tree. For the rules." A pause. "For the sandwich."
"Beck's deli earns its own thanks."
"Beck's deli earns its own thanks," she agrees. "But you brought them."
I look at her. She looks at me. The November light is doing its honest thing — making everything look exactly like what it is.
I am in serious trouble.
Not new information. But it lands differently at a garden gate at four in the afternoon than it does at a kitchen window on a Saturday morning. It lands in the embodied way of something confirmed rather than theorized.
"Saturday was good," I say.
"Saturday was really good." She says it simply. "We should do the espalier planning before spring. If you meant it."
"I meant it."
"Then I'll get the book from Helen. We can figure out the timing."
"Yeah," I say. "We can do that."
She smiles. Not the polite one, not the social one — the real one, the whole-face one that she gives away less often than she should, and I have apparently memorized the difference.
I lift a hand and walk back down the lane.
I sit on my porch with what's left of the afternoon, and I am honest with myself.
Ten weeks ago, I told myself I was giving her space. That was true.
Eight weeks ago, I told myself I was being patient. That was also true.
Right now, I'm sitting on my porch thinking about a garden gate at four in the afternoon and a hand on my arm that moved before she'd decided to move it and a woman who looks at an old film camera with the longing of someone who's not yet ready to want what she wants.
I know what this is.
I've been knowing what this is for longer than is comfortable to admit.
The part I keep coming back to is the moment on the steps when she said the end of a thing that was already over. The way she sounded when she said it. Not grief, not relief. Settled. Like someone turning a key in a lock that was always hers to turn, that she'd just been carrying for a while.
She's going through the doorway.
I know the difference between someone who is mid-process and someone who is arriving at something.
I've been watching her for ten weeks. I've been noting the Asheville project and the painted porch railing and the spring bulbs and the second bedroom and the pear tree espalier plan that just extended her horizon another two or three seasons.
She's arriving at something.
And the honest version of where I am is that I want to be there when she lands.
Not now. Not yet. But she's going through the door and I'm watching her go through it and I want to be on the other side.
That's the truth of it.
I sit with it in the November cold.
I let it be true.