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* * *

The workshop was a separate room behind the store, not large, just wide enough to be functional, with a workbench along one wall and a table saw in the center and shelving units holding organized quantities of lumber in various dimensions. It smelled strongly of sawdust and something resinous underneath, pine sap maybe, the living smell of cut wood. A shop light hung overhead, casting everything in a clean even brightness.

Shane was at the workbench with his back to her, measuring something with a steel tape measure that he held with the ease of a tool that had been in his hand enough times to feel like an extension of it. He had his jacket off. The flannel shirt was rolled to the elbows, and she had noticed this before, the rolled sleeves, which she was not thinking about. His forearms were thick and corded and marked with small pale nicks, the forearms of a man who had been lifting lumber and swinging hammers since he was a boy. She watched the muscle move in one of them as he marked the measurement with a pencil. There was nothing decorative about any of it. It was strength that had been earned one board at a time.

He turned around before she said anything, which suggested either very good peripheral vision or that he’d heard her come in over the sound of his own work, and looked at her with the same quality of stillness she’d come to associate with him, the attention of a person who didn’t react to things before he’d assessed them.

“Ms. Hayes,” he said.

“I need panels cut,” she said. “Doug sent me back.”

He looked at her, assessing, not unfriendly, and then he looked at the tape measure in his hand and set it on the workbench.

“How many.”

“Eight. Four feet by three.”

He nodded. He turned to the lumber shelving and began pulling boards without apparent deliberation. He knew what he needed before he looked, selecting by dimension with the ease of someone who had sorted these shelves himself and knew every piece in them.

“What are they for?” he asked. Not making conversation. Just gathering information.

“A festival project. The kids are painting them, one panel per class, something that means Merrybrook to them.” She moved to the side of the workshop where she wasn’t in the way of anything, which was a smaller area than she’d expected. “I wanted something they could actually lean into. Big enough to matter.”

He set the boards on the workbench. He began measuring.

“How old are they?”

“Mixed. Second through fifth.”

He marked a board. He moved it to the table saw with the deliberate care of someone who respected what the tool could do. The saw ran for thirty seconds and then stopped, and the cut piece came free, and he set it aside and picked up the next board.

“They’ve never painted anything this size,” she said. “Most of them. I want them to understand that big doesn’t have to mean complicated. That the scale is the point.”

He looked at her briefly over the board he was measuring. “What are they painting?”

“I haven’t told them yet. I’m going to ask them what Merrybrook looks like from where they stand.” She paused. “Literally and otherwise.”

He was quiet, marking another board.

“That’s a good question,” he said.

She looked at him. He was focused on the measurement, the pencil moving along the straight edge, and he said it without looking up, which somehow made it land differently than if he’d meant to say it directly.

“Thank you,” she said.

He ran the next cut.

* * *

They worked in the same space for a while, him cutting, her organizing the finished panels against the wall in the order she’d use them, and the workshop settled into a quiet that was not uncomfortable. She’d been in a lot of quiet spaces with a lot of different people, and quiet had different qualities depending on who was in it. Some quiet was avoidance. Some was simply the absence of anything to say. This was neither.

This was the quiet of two people doing separate things in the same place and finding it workable, which was a kind of quiet that she associated with comfort, with familiarity, with people who didn’t need to fill space to justify taking it up.

She hadn’t expected to find it here, on a Thursday afternoon in a hardware store workshop, with a man she’d known for three weeks and spoken to on four occasions.

She filed this away without examining it.

“Have you always lived here?” she asked, because the question had been sitting in her since she’d watched him walk away from his coffee and because Harold Finley had put things in her head at the farm stand and because she was constitutionally incapable of being in a room with someone interesting and not asking them things.