Page 105 of Her Rival

"But you're learning."

"I'm learning."

"Good. Go to bed."

I hung up.

I did not go to bed.

I lay on the bed in my clothes with the lamp off and the dark coming in through the windows and the valley going about its lit-up nighttime business below me, and I thought about a woman on a couch on the other side of the city in a sweatshirt of her best friend's, drinking wine. I thought about the four seconds of stillness her face had done in my kitchen between the words I love you and the next words she'd said. I thought about how I'd told her I loved her back in a voice I hadn't used since the last time I'd said the words out loud, which had been to my sister Mary Beth on a Greyhound platform in Nashville at eighteen years old, and how no woman in my entire adult life had been a woman I'd wanted to say the words to until the woman in my kitchen had said them first.

I'd loved her since the first day.

I'd told her so.

She'd known.

She'd known and she'd also packed her bag.

The two facts coexisted, and I lay in the dark and let them coexist, and I did not try to argue my way to a version of either one that was easier than the other.

I slept eventually.

I did not sleep well.

At six fourteen in the morning I sat at the kitchen island with a fresh coffee and wrote her the text I'd promised.

I did not sleep. The kitchen is yours when you come back. The coffee will be hot.

I read it twice. I sent it. I put the phone face-down.

I went out on the deck.

The sun was coming up gold on the valley the way it had on Saturday and Sunday and Monday and Tuesday and every other morning I'd stood on this deck since I bought the house, except this morning was the first morning the deck didn't feel like the deck I'd been standing on alone. The deck had become a deck a woman had stood next to me on at one in the afternoon yesterday, looking at the same valley, telling me she had nine thousand words and would be deleting most of them. The valley was the same valley. The deck was the same deck. The man at the rail was a man who'd been told by a woman he loved that he'd been slow, and told by his only real friend that he was learning, and the morning was a morning he was going to get through one hour at a time until the woman came back.

The phone vibrated face-down on the deck rail.

I looked at it.

Coffee should be hot when you come back. Also I did not sleep.

It was from her. It had taken her seventeen seconds to write back.

I picked up the phone. I read it again. I did not write back.

I'd told her I would text her twice. I'd used one. I had one left, for tonight. The math was the math.

I put the phone face-down. I drank my coffee.

The morning came up. I had a day to get through. She had a day to get through. We were both going to get through it.

That was, I decided, going to be enough for the day. Getting through was going to be enough. The big things would happen tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever she walked back through my front door, and the man who'd receive her at the door was going to be a man who, for the rest of his life, was going to tell her the size of the things he was carrying without waiting for her to find them in a Delaware secretary-of-state database at four-eighteen on a Wednesday afternoon.

I was going to be that man. I'd decided. I was going to be that man starting today.

I drank my coffee. The sun cleared the rim of the valley. The kitchen was hers when she came back. The coffee would be hot. She would, eventually, walk back through the door.

I had a day to get through.