The creek behind the Taproom is nothing like hers. It’s narrower, shallower, running between the back of the building and the treeline, the kind of creek that exists because water has to go somewhere and this is where it went. There’s a fallen sycamore along the bank, the bark gone smooth from weather and years. We sit. Heat, insects, light drifting through sycamore leaves. Her shoulder is against my arm.
Neither of us says anything for a moment.
“I heard it from the parking lot,” she says.
“I figured.”
“How long have you—”
“Months,” I say. “Since the dulcimer. Since before I knew what it was.”
She nods, looking at the water. “My mother,” she says. “You got that from one sentence at Delia’s.”
“And whatever Delia said about the booth.”
She pauses, thinking. “She worked doubles so I could train. I don’t think I ever said that to anyone in exactly those words before.”
“Mm,” I say.
The creek moves over whatever is under it. A woodpecker works at something in the treeline with patient, rhythmic focus.
“I kept seeing you,” I say. “After you left. The workshop, the lamp on late. The creek on a Sunday morning.” I look at my hands on my knees. “I could see myself there. Every time I tried to stop, I was just, still there. In your kitchen. In that workshop. At the bench next to you.” I look at her. “I know I don’t fit the chairs in your house. My feet hang off the end of your bed by a significant margin. I’ve been aware of this.” A pause. “But I could see myself spending the rest of my life not fitting into those chairs.”
She looks at the water for a moment. Then, “I’d like that,” she says.
A pause. I don’t breathe.
“Except for one thing.”
My breath pauses until she adds, “I think we could get a bigger bed.”
It comes out of me before I’ve decided—the real laugh, low and a little undone, the one that changes my face—and she is watching it land with that expression she gets when she’s said somethingdry and means every word of it. I’ve been looking at her eyes for months. Right now, they are entirely new.
I put my hand over hers on the sycamore bark.
She turns her palm up and holds it.
We sit for a while. The creek runs. The sycamore leaves move in whatever passes for a breeze in Missouri July. Behind us the Taproom holds its afternoon quiet, and Ed and Pete are at the bar, and Walt is in the office, and none of it requires anything from either of us right now.
After a while, she says, “We should go.”
“Yeah,” I say.
Neither of us moves for another minute.
Then we do.
I stop at the office door on the way through. Walt looks up. “I’m going to be out for the rest of the afternoon,” I say. He glances up at me. Then, at the parking lot through the window. Then back at me. “Okay,” he says. And goes back to whatever he was doing.
Honey’s ahead of me in the parking lot, walking with the ease of someone who has put something down and doesn’t intend to pick it back up. I don’t say anything because there’s nothing to say that the last hour hasn’t already said. I think about a hillside covered invelarathat I haven’t stood on in eight years and howthe strangest things follow you through the crossings between worlds.
She opens her car door and looks back at me.
“Twenty-three miles,” she says.
“I know the way,” I say.
She gets in. I go to my car. We pull out of the lot, her ahead, me behind, the two-lane opening up in front of us into the Missouri hills.
