"That what I wanted wasn't the same as what I'd say."
Reid puts down his cup. He looks at me with the expression he gets when he's about to say something he's thought out carefully. He does this rarely. When he does it, I listen.
"You let her think it wasn't decided between you," he says.
"It's her decision. Her business, her life."
"That's not the same thing as saying nothing." He picks the cup back up. "She's not a stone. She doesn't know which direction she wants to go just because you know. You have to tell her."
I look at the Jamie stone.
"You've been working on that piece for three months," Reid says. "And now it's almost done. What changed?"
He knows what changed. He's asking me to say it.
"She showed me what it was supposed to be," I say.
He nods. Drinks his coffee. Doesn't say anything else, because he knows that's enough.
I finish the edge work at noon. The Jamie stone is done.
It's exactly what it needed to be. The shape is somewhere between a standing figure and a geological formation — something that started as stone and decided partway through to be a person, or the other way around. The quartz vein runs through it diagonally, silver-white against the gray-green, and the lettering along the base is deep-cut and clean:Jamie Bird. He went in anyway.Ivy's phrase. She doesn't know I used it. I'll tell her.
I call Reid and he brings the equipment truck.
We move the stone to the site.
Setting stone by hand is the old way, before machinery made it faster and less careful. You dig the setting bed precisely — the depth has to account for the stone's weight and the soil's drainage and the frost heave this hillside will see everywinter. You set the stone in, you true it, you read it from every angle. You back-fill and tamp and read it again. You take your time. Machinery is faster. Machinery also doesn't tell you when something's wrong. Your hands tell you when something's wrong.
I'm tamping the setting bed when I hear the car on the road below.
I don't look up. I hear her door, her footsteps on the slope. I know her footsteps now — she places her feet deliberately, always reading the grade, always making a decision about where she puts her weight. She stops about ten feet from me and I can feel her looking at the stone.
I tamp the final section. I straighten up. I step back and look at the stone in its place.
It's right. It's exactly right. The slope behind it, the soil around it, the direction it faces — south-southwest, so it catches the afternoon light and throws it back into the face of anyone standing in the approach path. I knew that was right on paper. It's different to know it in the actual stone, in the actual ground.
I look at her.
She's looking at the stone. Then at me. Her eyes are steady.
"I want you to stay," I say. "I'm not going to pretend I don't."
She doesn't say anything.
"But if you go, I'll still carve this right. Because you showed me what it should be." I look back at the stone. "That doesn't go away. Whatever you decide."
She walks toward me.
She doesn't say anything else and neither do I, because the hill is saying it, and the stone is saying it, and the valley below us with the river through it and the town at its edge is saying it. She comes to me and puts both hands on my chest and looks up at me and the look on her face is the look of someone who has made the clearest decision of her life.
Here's the complete scene, all the way through to the stone:
The light is failing when I lower her down into the grass.
The slope is still warm. Southwest-facing — I've been reading this hill long enough to know how it holds heat. The grass is dry under my jacket. First stars coming up in the east.
She looks at me. I look back. Neither of us says anything because there's nothing that needs saying.
