two
Nash
Icomebackatseven.
She's already in the kitchen when I pull up, light on over the sink, and by the time I've got my bag out of the truck she's opened the front door. Dark green dress, pearl earrings, red lipstick at seven in the morning. She looks like she's about to host a dinner party. She's about to hand me a pipe wrench.
There's a bag on the kitchen table with a handwritten note:For Nash, for coming out at midnight. — M.Cardamom shortbread, still slightly warm. I eat one standing in her front parlour. Then a second. I put the bag in my truck where it is safer from me.
We work through the morning. She holds the flashlight, hands me tools without being asked, asks questions that are specific and useful. She doesn't fill silence with noise, which most people do. By ten o'clock I've said fewer words than I usually say in a full work day and none of them have been wasted.
Around eleven she asks if the dogs can come in.
Rivet comes through the front door and goes straight to Maple like she's been looking for her specifically. Sits on her foot. Looks up at her with the expression she reserves for people she has decided belong to her.
I look at Rivet.
Rivet does not look at me.
"She doesn't do that," I say.
Maple crouches down. Rivet puts her paws on Maple's knees and licks her chin, which she has never done to anyone in three years, including me. Maple laughs — low and surprised and completely real — and I turn back to the pipe section I'm cutting and I do not think about the laugh.
Wrench installs himself against Maple's leg by noon. Penny claims the kitchen radiator, opens one eye to assess Maple, and closes it again.
I load the truck. I call the dogs.
Rivet doesn't come.
"Rivet."
She's sitting in the kitchen doorway looking between me and Maple with the focused patience of a dog who has decided she is personally responsible for an outcome.
"Rivet. Truck."
She gets up slowly. Walks to the door. Stops and looks back at Maple one more time.
"Tomorrow," Maple tells her, like this is a reasonable thing to say to a terrier.
Rivet gets in the truck.
I drive home. I eat the rest of the shortbread standing over the kitchen sink and I do not think about any of it.
I'm back the next morning for the second pipe section. She's waiting with brown butter toffee, still warm, and I eat three pieces in her parlour while she asks about the library radiator and I answer and somewhere in the middle of it I stop hearing the question because she's tucking a loose piece of hair behind her ear and looking at me with those blue-green eyes like I'm someone worth listening to.
I answer the question. I go back to the pipe.
We work close the rest of the morning — old house, narrow walls, not much room to exist in a professional distance. She hands me tools and I take them and our fingers don't quite not touch and neither of us mentions it.
At lunch she makes soup and sets a bowl in front of me without asking. I sit at her kitchen table in the winter light and eat it and it's the best thing I've eaten in months and I don't say so.
That's when I know I'm in trouble.
I'm replacing a fitting in the back hallway mid-afternoon when she comes around the corner carrying a work light and catches the raised threshold wrong — I should have mentioned it, I'd seen it and catalogued it and not said anything — and she goes forward fast. I drop the fitting and catch her. One second she's falling, the next she's against my chest, both hands gripping the front of my coveralls, the work light swinging wildly between us.
She looks up.
We're close enough that I can see the lamp reflected in her eyes. Her hands are still in my coveralls. She doesn't let go and I don't either, and the hallway is very quiet.
