“I didn’t say anything.”
“You are saying a great number of things. I can hear you saying all of them.”
“I’m just standing here in my kitchen drinking my coffee and thinking about how many days it has been since you promised me you would tell her.”
“It has been three days.”
“Four. It has been four, Jasper. I am counting them on my fingers as we speak.”
I set my coffee down on the counter. “I am going to tell her. I am going to tell her after our date. I’ll tell her this weekend.” I heard how it sounded. I pushed through it anyway. “I don’t want to walk into tonight with this sitting on top of it—I haven’t figured out how to have the conversation yet, and I don’t want to. Not tonight. Let me take her to dinner first. I just want—I want this, okay?”
Another silence. I could hear him drinking his coffee on the other end of the line, slow and deliberate. “Okay,” he said finally.
“Have dinner. I won’t be annoying about it tonight.” A pause. “But Jasper. I’m calling you on Monday. And if you haven’t told her by then, I’m going to drive to your cabin and sit in your kitchen and be annoying about it in person, directly, at close range, for as long as it takes.”
“Understood.”
“Good.” His voice warmed again. “I love you. I want you to be happy. Go be good to her tonight.”
“Love you too. I will.”
I hung up. I stood at the small table by the window with my coffee for a few minutes and watched the river. The mallards were back. The light was the soft pale gold of a Friday in early fall in Oregon, and somewhere across town, a woman I was falling for was probably already at her bookshop opening up for the day.
I made myself eat something. Then I picked up the phone again to confirm the reservation. I picked up my coffee, drank the rest of it cold, and went to get on with my day.
The morning passed in pieces I would not entirely remember later. I drove the half hour out to a small used bookshop in the next town over—a place I had discovered a few months ago on a long drive nowhere in particular and had been meaning to come back to. I had been there exactly once. I remembered exactly where the book was.
Third shelf from the bottom, left side of the poetry section. A signed edition ofDevotionsby Mary Oliver. It had made me think of Cara—we read “How I Go Into the Woods”together a few days before I graduated. I had picked it up that day and held it for a long minute, then put it back, remembering the look on Cara’s face after I’d read it aloud. Buying it back then would have meant admitting something to myself I hadn’t been ready to face.
I picked it up now. It was still there. Nobody else had bought it in the months I had been gone. That felt like a small piece of cosmic permission.
I took it to the counter, and the shopkeeper rang me up without saying much. Then she wrapped the book in brown paper and tied it with kitchen twine.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You’re welcome.” She paused, her hands still resting on the parcel. “She’s going to love it.”
“How do you?—?”
“Honey, men don’t buy hardcover Mary Oliver poetry for themselves. Especially rare, nearly impossible to find signed copies like this one.” She slid it across the counter to me. “Take it. Go home. Drive safe.”
I stopped at Pine & Pages on my way back to the cabin. I had not planned to. I just couldn’t quite drive past it.
The bell over the door made its small, soft sound when I pushed it open. Cara was behind the counter, ringing up a customer—an older man buying a stack of three books—and she looked up when the bell chimed. Her face did the small, private thing it always did when it was me coming through the door instead of a stranger. The shopkeeper’s smile slid in over the top of it a half second later, but I had seen the first version. The first version was mine.
“Hi,” she said, in the warm public voice she used for customers, except thehiwas tilted just slightly toward me in a way the older man would not have caught.
“Hi.”
I went and stood by the new releases table near the front and pretended to look at books while she finished the transaction.
After he left, she came around the counter. She was wearing a cream cardigan over a soft gray t-shirt and the same jeans she’d had on the day we had lunch, and her hair was pulled back at the nape of her neck with a small clip, and she was looking at me with an expression that meant she was trying very hard not to give everything away before tonight.
“You’re not supposed to be here until seven,” she said. But she kept walking toward me when she said it.
“I know.” I turned from the books to face her. “I just wanted to see you for a second.”
She stopped close enough that I could smell the faint trace of vanilla and old paper coming off her sweater. She closed her eyes.
