Page 17 of Knot the Plan
“Rehearsal,” I say. “Somebody's going to ask what I cook for you. Better have an answer.”
She laughs, surprised, the real one with the dimple, the one I've heard through the window all month over the sound of my own sander, and it's even better at close range, which is information I'm going to have to live with now.
“Friday,” she says, backing toward the door. “And Logan? Thank you. Genuinely.”
“Don't thank me yet. You haven't had my cooking.”
She goes inside. The door bangs. Through the window I can see her and Lily collide in the hallway, and Lily's hands come up in a question, and Josie nods, and Lily does a silent scream with her whole body, and I turn around and start packing tools into the truck like a man who wasn't watching.
The drive home is four minutes. I spend all four of them being honest with myself, since there's nobody else in the truck to perform for.
Here's the truth. I've spent a month rebuilding a fence that didn't need me, for a woman who never asked, on the chance she'd cross a window.
And tonight she walked across a whole yard and asked me to hold her hand in front of her family, to learn her coffee order, to kiss her cheek like I've done it a thousand mornings. To be, forexactly a month, the thing I've been not saying out loud since the first time she told a four-year-old that the window licks back.
And then it ends quietly, and we never speak of it again.
I pull into my driveway and sit there with the engine ticking.
My grandfather used to say you should never build something you can't stand to tear down. He was talking about decks. I'm going to choose to believe he was talking about decks.
A month. Whatever her rules turn out to be, and there are rules, she made that much clear.
I can do that.
I carry the level and the sander inside, and I leave the last spare board in the truck, because the fence is finished, it's been finished for a month, and starting Friday I don't need an excuse.
That's the part I keep arriving at, sitting in the dark of my own kitchen, eating cereal at nine at night because I forgot to make anything real.
Starting Friday, pretending is the job.
I'm going to be so good at it. That's the problem.
Chapter 6
Finn
It's been two days and I have not thought about Josie Porter once, which is how I know I've thought about almost nothing else.
The call comes in just after nine. Grass fire off Route 9, the Smiths' fence line, the same cattle gate that's been threatening to start something all week, somebody's trailer chain finally dragging the spark up the grade.
Seven minutes later we're on scene, and it's what I figured. Quarter acre of June grass going up lazy, more smoke than threat, creeping toward a fence post like it's got all morning. Old man Smith's out there swatting at the edge of it with a wet feed sack, which is how men his age get on the news.
“Sir.” I take the sack out of his hands and steer him back by the shoulder, gentle, the way you move furniture you respect. “We've got it.”
“It's barely a fire.”
“Then it'll barely take a minute.”
It takes eleven. Gus runs the line, I cut the edge, the June grass goes from orange to black to steaming, and the whole time my hands do the work clean and my head is two days back, in myown bay, watching a small flammable woman walk out with her chin up like the no hadn't landed.
That's the thought that shows up in the middle of a working fire line. Not the wind. Not the fence post. Her.
“You good?” Gus asks, coiling hose.
“Fine.”
“You've been fine all week. It's unsettling.”
