She regarded him thoughtfully. “Did you always want to be a carpenter?”
Her boyfriend was a doctor who treated kids with cancer. Anne had left the island right after high school. How could she understand his choice to stay?
“It’s not a competition,” she’d said. But it kind of felt like one.
“Pretty much, yeah.”
“But do you like it? Would you call it your passion?”
He heard the echo of his own question turned against him and hitched a corner of his mouth in acknowledgment. “It’s a living.”
Another pause, different but no less dangerous. Waiting.
“That’s it?” she demanded.
He bit the inside of his cheek, containing his smile. “I’m good at it.”
Her brows twitched together in frustration. “And…?”
She was like Honey with a tennis ball. “I like working with my hands. Fixing things.”
She squinted, like she was trying to see inside his head. “Mm.” Part question, part judgment.
Like his answers weren’t good enough. What did she expect him to say?
He figured she’d drop the subject then. But he hadn’t reckoned on Anne being Anne. She wandered toward the back of the shop, where his current project was waiting for another coat of oil.
“What’s this?” she asked.
He resisted the urge to fold his arms again. “Sofa table.”
She rolled her eyes. “I can see that. This isn’t a repair.”
“It’s from a repairjob—the wood is. Paul Knutson needed to replace some horse stalls. I gave him a hand; he gave me the old lumber.”
Her smile flashed. “Found wood.”
“Yeah.” He cleared his throat. “Beats letting it rot behind the barn. Or shipping it to some landfill on the mainland.”
She traced the zebra-like pattern crossing the natural grain. His skin prickled with goose bumps, as if she’d trailed her finger along the line of his forearm or the back of his neck. “It’s beautiful.”
“Band-saw cuts,” Joe said. “A hundred years ago, nobody was paying for smooth planed boards for a barn. The tool marks, the nail pops—they’re all part of the wood.”
Anne beamed. “It’s like the wood is telling a story. If you listen hard enough, it will tell you where it came from. What it wants to be.”
His breath jammed a second because, yeah, that’s what he’d always thought, though he never would have said it. “You’re the one with the words.”
Too many words, sometimes. And sometimes they were exactly what he needed to hear.
She flushed a little. “Not always.” He figured there was a story there, too, but she was already moving on, moving away from him, out of reach. “What else can you make?”
He followed her, drawn like a fish on a line by her enthusiasm. “Whatever the customer wants. Beams, doors, fireplace mantels, shelves. Accent walls are big right now. But it’s not like making furniture.”
She looked back at him, her forehead crinkling. “If you want to build furniture, why are you doing construction?”
She didn’t know, Joe realized.
And it wasn’t his place to tell her. Rob had adored his daughter, and she’d worshipped him right back. He couldn’t say anything that would diminish Rob in her eyes.
