“Um…”
“I’ve been on the road three weeks, Soph. I haven’t sat a horse with my sister since August. Brisket is going to bite me on sight if I don’t put eyes on him soon. Six a.m.”
“Six is criminal.”
“Six.”
“Fine. Six.”
“Good. Drive safe.”
He hung up.
I drove for a mile in the gold afternoon with my brother’s voice still in the car and my best friend’s lasagna waiting at the end of the road and my horse standing in a paddock not knowing I was on my way; and somewhere in the middle of the gold and the dust and the warm engine and the wholesome arithmetic of family arriving at me on a Wednesday, the part of my afternoon that had taken place at a mailbox came back online with full and unwelcome clarity.
I let the full diagnostic run.
The findings were grim. I was thirty years old. I could restart hearts, I could hold a room together at four in the morning whilea family learned their loved one had passed on. Put a good-looking man within speaking distance, however, and speech was the first faculty to flee the building, closely followed by walking, blinking, and the operation of my own face.
It was, I felt, deeply unfair. Nobody warned you that competence didn't transfer. The woman who could talk a hysterical father down off the ledge of the worst night of his life did not turn up for this. She sent, in her place, a fifteen-year-old with a crush and a blush problem, and then she went somewhere with good cell reception and declined to answer her phone.
Clinically, I was a senior trauma nurse. Romantically, I was, frankly, a public health concern.
Doris took the turn with her usual reluctance.
There was really only one diagnosis left, and it was not in any of my textbooks.
I could not wait to see him again.
4
Caleb
I was in my own driveway at dusk with a wrench in my hand and a carburetor that didn’t need rebuilding, which is to say I was outside for no reason a grown man could put his name to, when her engine caught across the road and I straightened up to watch.
Second turn of the key. That little hesitation first — the half-second where the old sedan seemed to weigh up whether running was worth the bother — and then it took, and the pale car rolled back down her drive with the last of the light going copper along the windshield. I had my weight on one hip and the wrench still in my hand, my shirt was pulled tight across the shoulder of the arm I’d left up on the open tailgate, and I stood there in the blue end of the day and watched her point the car down the cul-de-sac.
She didn’t look over. She’d no cause to. We’d stood at our two curbside bins a few hours back and had the most ordinary exchange two neighbors can have — hers a polite little wave-off,don’t go to any trouble, mine something I’d worked a good deal harder on than I’d let her see — and that interaction was the whole sum of what I had any claim to. A woman backing out ofher own drive at dusk owed the man over the road nothing. Least of all a glance.
She braked at the four-way. Signaled, which near made me smile — nobody for a quarter mile but me, and I knew she hadn’t signaled for me. Then she turned left, toward where the streetlights were coming on, and the car got small and the engine note thinned to nothing.
I didn’t lift a hand. There’d been nothing to lift it at; she was already gone. I wanted to know where she was going — why she had tossed a bag into the backseat on her way out — but I had no right to. She was off somewhere, overnight at least, with no thoughts of a man who’d caught himself learning the sound of her starter motor like it meant something.
I stood in the quiet a while after the road gave her up.
A week I’d lived across this road from her. Long enough to know her shifts by her porch light and the particular way she carried herself up her own path when she thought nobody was watching. I’d told myself each piece of it was nothing, just a street noticing itself. I’m a practiced liar to a great many men. I have never once fooled the one keeping the count.
Then I went back to the carburetor that didn’t need me and rebuilt it anyway, because a man’s hands have to be somewhere, and lately mine had been forming opinions about where they’d rather be.
Her house stayed dark through the next morning too, and that was when her absence started to get under my skin.
A man with a free day and a house still half in boxes keeps busy or he loses the whole of it, so I kept busy. There was a lift going into the garage the next month and a wall to clear for it. Three boxes I still hadn’t opened, because opening them meant calling this home — which it was, which had been the entire point of buying it, but the thought still made me apprehensive. Like I didn’t deserve to have this home. I cleared the wall. Ibroke the boxes down flat. I swept out a bay that was already clean.
And every time I came back through the kitchen the window pulled my eyes over the road — to a drive with nothing in it, and they came back carrying the same nothing they’d brought a half-hour before.
By noon the empty drive had started to itch at me like a job I’d left half-done.
That was the trouble with the way I’m built. I’d spent thirteen years learning to walk into a room full of unknowns and drive the count to zero — who’s armed, who’s scared, who moves when the lights go out, which door’s a lie. You get good at it, or you don’t come home, and I came home a great many times. Trading the rifle for a welder doesn’t switch the wiring off. It only leaves it casting about for a problem.
