Afterward, walking back up Ridgeline Road toward the site, Flint falls into step beside me. The evening is cool and the sky above the ridge has gone that shade of pale green-gold that only happens in June in the interior, that particular quality of post-sunset light that lasts longer than you expect and then is gone all at once.
"Thank you," I say. "In the meeting."
"I said what was true."
"I know. It still landed."
He's quiet for a stretch. We're on the slope now, heading up toward the site, and the meadow grass is damp from the afternoon's cloud and the wildflowers that have come up since my first visit are more open now, a whole vocabulary of small white and yellow things I'll need to catalogue for the planting plan.
“He was my friend,” Flint says slowly after another few moments of silence. "He was my friend for fifteen years. We went to school together. He knew I hated small talk and hetalked anyway because he thought it was good for me." A pause. "He was probably right."
"What was he like?"
Flint is quiet long enough that I start to think he won't answer. Then: "He laughed. All the time. Not at things, usually — just the laughing kind of person. His wife and he used to argue at the hardware store about paint colours and you could hear them from the street but they weren't fighting. They just thought arguing about paint was funny." He stops walking for a moment. "He died pulling two people out of a back bedroom. He went back in when the roof was already compromised. The other firefighters said he knew what he was doing. He knew the risk."
He says the last sentence without anything added to it. Not anger, not peace. Just fact. The way you hold something when you've been holding it long enough that you've stopped fighting the weight of it.
"He went in anyway," I say.
"He always went in anyway. That was who he was."
We've reached the site. The orange flag in its new position is just visible in the fading light, and the slope below it is in shadow now, the meadow grass silver in the last of the day. I stand at the edge of the area, and I can feel the design becoming reality.
I feel Flint behind me before he's close. He's stopped about two feet away, and I can feel his warmth at my back the way you feel the heat coming off a stone wall in the evening.
I turn.
He's looking at the site, not at me. Then he looks at me.
Neither of us says anything.
He kisses me first, slow and careful, his hand coming up to the side of my jaw. I answer it. He's very still for a moment and then he isn't, and we stay like that in the last of the evening light on the hill above Silver Ridge with the whole valley going dark around us.
four
Flint
Thechiselknowswhereto go now.
That's the thing about starting — once you start, the stone tells you. The Jamie stone has been giving itself to me in the mornings, an hour at a time, before the crew arrives. It's gray-green granite with a quartz vein that runs diagonally across the upper face and I've been working around it, incorporating it, because Jamie had that streak of silver in his dark hair by the time he was thirty-five and found it funny rather than alarming. The stone is giving me that. I hadn't planned it. You don't always plan. Sometimes you just follow what the stone offers.
We fall into a rhythm on the site.
She's up there most mornings taking soil readings, mapping drainage, photographing the meadow plants already there so she can reference the native seed mix she's sourcing. I'm on-site three afternoons a week for the hardscape planning: path placement, the low stone edging, the central installation platform that has to be set before anything else goes in.
At noon we eat lunch on the hill. This isn't planned. It's just what happens.
Wren brings something from the bakery on Main Street and I bring coffee in the thermos and we sit on the slope above the work zone and look at the valley. She doesn't use conversation as background noise.
She asks me once, between bites of a pastry she's trying to identify by ingredients, what stone I'd use for something that wasn't meant to last.
I think about it. "Sandstone," I say. "Soapstone. Anything soft. It weathers back to the ground eventually."
"Is that harder to work with? Knowing it won't stay?"
"No. Sometimes it's easier. Nothing has to be perfect if it's going to go anyway."
She's quiet. Then: "I've always worked with things that change. Trees, perennials, ground covers. Everything I plant is going to look different in five years than it does the day I install it. That used to bother me. Now it's the part I like."
