I eat the whole sandwich.
I sit with the plate on my knee and the afternoon lightturninggold and try not to think about how warm her hands would have been when she made it. Ifail.
On day seven, she calledme Mercer likeit’sa nickname.
On day eight, she does it again.
On day nine, my head turns when she says it. Some part of me has started to think of it as my name.
On day ten, she says,“Sullivan, can I ask you something?”
The system collapses on day ten.
We’reon the porch. Late afternoon. The sun is doing the thing it does at altitude, where it gets golden and serious about it. Tess is sitting on the new step in asweaterthe color of daffodils.I’m leaning against the porch rail, holding a coffee mug she pressed into my hand thirty seconds ago, mid-job andunprotestingbecause somewhere along the way I stopped pretending I had somewhere better to be.
“Yeah.”
“Why are you up here?”
I look at her.
She’snot looking at me.She’slooking out at the valley, the line of the ridge, the cold blue of distance. Her cheek is inprofileand the light is doingvery nicethings toitand I have answered a version of this question for nine days through silence and labor and the studious avoidance of the part where a person tells the truth.
“Personal preference,” I say.
“Mm.” She tips her chin. “Okay.”
She lets it go. Just like that.
A muscle in my chest unknots, and three seconds later, ties itself in a different shape.
“You?”I ask before I can stop the word.
She turns her headandlooks at me from behind those glasses with the sawdust on them. Her eyes area shade of blueI’mnot going to name.
“Personal preference,” she says.
A quarter laugh. Mine. I don’t know where it came from.
She grins at me. “Easy,” she says. “We’re easy.”
“Yeah.”
For a long minute, we sit with it. The wind comes east, the casement holds, and a hawkshrillssomewhere out over the slope, and?—
The hawk shrills again.
The cry is sharp. Right above us. A second one calls back from across the ridge. A higher pitch, urgent, angled wrong.
A branch cracks behind the cabin. Loud and sharp. Wet wood, snapping.
The crack comes through me sideways.
I’m on the porch.
Then I’m not.
The porch is an empty dwelling, and thedwellingis concrete, and the concrete is hot, and there are men on either side of me whose names I haven’t saidfortwo years and whose voices I can hear like a radio I can’t turn off, and the bird isn’t a bird; the bird is the whistle of something incoming, and I know with the part of my brain that can still narrate that I’ve lost time, but I don’t know how much, or how to get it back?—
