She wasn't looking at me anymore. Her gaze had moved to the table. She walked around it, not touching, just looking. She bent down to see the joinery on the underside. Then she straightened and ran her hand along the top, barely grazing the wood, then leaned in close enough to see the grain.
“This is careful,” she said.
Her comment set off warning bells.Carefulwasn’t a word I'd heard anyone say about my work.Carefulwas the word I used in my own head, when I was alone, in the moments before I did something I knew I shouldn't do.Carefulwas a word my foster mother used to use when I was twelve years old and she'd caught me trying to lift something too heavy.Careful, Treyton. I’d never thought a stranger would walk into my shop and use the same word about a piece of furniture I was building for a buyer in Aspen who wanted reclaimed mountain timber for his second house.
She looked up. “I'm sorry. I shouldn't —”
“It's fine.”
“It's not. I keep walking into your space.”
“It's fine, Soleil.”
She didn't believe me, but she didn't push it. She took one more look at the table, at the underside, where I'd done the worst possible thing I could have done given the situation, and then she turned to go.
I opened my mouth. Then closed it.
She walked out of the shop with Biscuit at her heel. He didn't even look at me.
I'd worked through lunch by the time I could move.
I'd been carving on the underside of the side table for a week. It wasn’t the kind of carving anyone would see. It was the kind that lived where the buyer's hand would find it once a year, maybe, when they tipped the table on its side to clean. A column of paintbrush blooms, three of them, the way they grew on the south face of the ridge in late June. I'd been working on the smallest one when she'd come in, and the small one was visible from where she'd been bent down looking at the joinery.
She'd seen it. I knew she'd seen it because she hadn't said a word about it. If she'd missed it, she would have said something about the joinery, but she hadn't.
I sanded the surface of the leg I'd been working on with the spokeshave. I cleaned the bench. I put the spokeshave back on the pegboard. The leg was salvageable. The leg had always been salvageable. The work would survive me being an idiot for an hour.
I picked up Biscuit's water bowl from the corner of the shop and refilled it from the spigot outside. He wasn't there to drink from it, but I refilled it anyway because that was my routine and my routine was the only thing keeping me upright.
By two I was facing the west fence with a roll of barbed wire and a tamping bar. The fence didn't need work. I'd checked it last week. I was checking it again because the meadow was on the way to the west pasture and the meadow was where Soleil had been every other afternoon this week. If I happened to be in the meadow with a tamping bar and a roll of wire, it wouldn’t be because I was looking for her. It would be because the fence was the fence, and the fence needed to be checked.
She was there. Sitting on a flat rock about twenty feet off the trail with her sketchbook open on her thigh and her hair pulled up off her neck, talking to a columbine. Biscuit curled up at her feet.
I walked past her like I hadn't seen her. Even made it eight steps before she said my name.
“Treyton.”
I stopped but didn't turn.
“I wasn't going to say anything,” she said. “About what I walked in on. I know you didn't want me in there. I'm sorry.”
I'd been waiting for her to apologize. I'd been waiting for an opening to be cold to her and have her wince and have her leave me alone the rest of the summer.
But instead of ignoring her like I’d planned, I turned around. “It's a side table. Black walnut. For a guy in Aspen.”
The sun was behind her lighting up her hair and creating a glow around her head like an angel. The flower she'd been talking to was leaning slightly toward her, which I knew was because of the wind but made it look like, in that moment, that the flower was listening.
I'd never seen the line of her throat in this light before. I could feel the pull of what I wanted to do next. I didn't move.
“He'll never know about the carving,” I said. “On the underside. He bought it because his designer told him reclaimed wood was in this year.”
She didn't say anything, just sat there looking at me.
“You saw it.”
She nodded. “I wasn't going to bring it up. It wasn't mine to bring up.”
As much as I wanted to, I didn't sit down next to her. That was a line I wouldn’t let myself cross. Instead, I worked the section of fence twenty feet from her rock. I went slow, taking longer than the section needed, and she went back to her sketchbook. My traitorous dog went back to sleeping at her feet, and for about forty minutes the only sounds on the meadow were the tamping bar going into the dirt and the wind in thepines and Soleil murmuring to a columbine about how tired she was of drawing it in profile.
