Frustration rattled through him.He was completely out of his depth, here, and heneededto understand her feelings before he up and announced to her that the barn should have had sprinklers and they would’ve saved her husband’s life.
He reached into his truck and pulled out the thermos again.He turned around, and she was just emerging from her own car, holding out a thermos to him.
She looked at his thermos.
He looked at hers.
They broke into laughter.
“Don't make it weird,” she said.
“Too late,” he replied drolly.
They leaned against the side of her car and drank their coffee in the weak morning sunlight.A red-tailed hawk circled overhead, soaring in ever higher circles as thermals carried him up upward.
Neither of them spoke about the blueprints or what was in them.
Instead, she asked, “Were you in 4-H growing up?”
He blinked at the subject change.“No.My mom worked two jobs and we didn't have cash to spare for such things.I was more of a library kid.”
“What did you read?”
“Books on everything.I went through phases.Geology, marine biology, astronomy.Genetics is the phase that stuck.”
“Why genetics?”
Because I was terrified I would turn out like my old man and wanted to know if inability to love or to stick around for one’s family was inherited.
He set aside that answer and said instead, “It explains things.Why living creatures look the way they look.Why traits pass down the way they do.It’s the logic under the apparent randomness of Nature.”
“You like finding the logic, don’t you?”
“I do.”He paused.“I find logical things reassuring.Even when the answer is complicated.”
She was quiet for a moment.“Not everything has a clean answer.”
“No,” he agreed.“But most things have an explanation if you look hard enough.It might not be the one you want or it might be terrible.But it exists.”
She looked up at the hawk.He could see she was thinking.Whether it was about what he’d said or something else entirely, he couldn’t tell.The wind moved a strand of hair across her cheek and she tucked it away absently with one hand.
“Tell me something useless,” she said.
“Pardon?”
“Like the sugar cube thing last week.Tell me another useless fact.”She glanced at him sidelong.“Not a disgusting one this time.I'm still getting over having a mouth full of bacteria.”
“Not all microbes are bad or make us sick.Many of the ones in our mouths help us digest and absorb our food.”
She threw him a dire look.
“Right.No more mouth bacteria talk.”He considered.“How about this?Honey never spoils.Archaeologists have found edible honey in three-thousand-year-old Egyptian tombs In 2003 fifty-five-hundred-year-old honey was found in Georgia.The country, not the state.”
“Wow.”She thought about that.“That's actually kind of amazing.”
“I think it’s cool that bees have been making honey for all those thousands of years.”
“I'm keeping that one,” she said.“That's a good fact.”
