Nate had put two chairs on the dock, facing each other instead of the lake.
I stopped at the top of the ramp.
“An interrogation arrangement.”
“Would you rather look at the water?”
“I’d rather you didn’t have it to look at.”
He accepted that with a nod. No joke to soften it. I sat down, and he handed me coffee in the chipped white mug I had used last summer. Not the dark green one Jonah liked. Not one of the paper cups from the office.
I wished I could have wanted him less for remembering a cup.
“When I bought in,” Nate said, “Jonah asked me not to get involved with you.”
“He asked you not to get involved with somebody you’d met twice?”
“Yes.”
“And you thought that was his decision?”
“I thought I’d found a friend who was willing to put his business beside mine. He was worried we’d make a mess of it. I wanted to make it easy for him to say yes.”
Nate was thirty-two. Old enough to know a friendship wasn’t improved by giving away somebody else’s choices. I was old enough to know that people could understand a thing and still need to learn how to live by it.
“You paid him for your share.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t a gift.”
“I know that too.”
I sipped the coffee. It was hot enough to make me stop being clever for a moment.
“Was it in the agreement?”
“No.”
“Good. I’d hate to find I’d missed the clause about my personal life.”
His eyes came up. “I shouldn’t have agreed.”
There it was, said without asking me to admire him for saying it.
Behind him, a rope knocked against the side of a dinghy. I counted three soft taps before I trusted myself to answer.
“You could have told me.”
“I hoped it wouldn’t matter.”
“Did it?”
“By the end of last summer, every day.”
The plainness of that undid something in me. I had prepared for evasions. I had not prepared for the pleasure of learning I had not spent a summer imagining every pause.
“Then I went away,” I said.
“Yes.”
“You could still have called.”
“Yes.”
“You’re making it difficult to have a satisfactory argument.”
At last he smiled. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t sound so pleased.”
“I’m not pleased that I hurt you.” He set his coffee down. “I am pleased you’re here telling me.”
I looked at his hands, clasped loosely between his knees. Work hands. Ordinary hands. I was tired of turning them into a private drama when the man attached to them was sitting in front of me.
“I don’t want to date a promise,” I said. “I don’t want to spend a summer arguing with Jonah through you.”
“You won’t.”
“Don’t make another one quickly.”
He drew a breath, then nodded.
We let the silence exist. A pair of ducks swam under the dock, quarrelling softly. The office clock struck eight through the open window with its familiar inaccurate little chime.
“There is a business question,” I said. “A real one. You’re not wrong about that.”
“I know.”
“I’m a forty-percent owner. So are you. Jonah has twenty. If we become a couple, he can reasonably ask whether we still hear him.”
“We have to hear him.”
“And each other. Saying no at work can’t become something I apologise for over dinner.”
Nate rubbed a thumb across the side of his mug.
“I don’t want a yes you’ve given me to keep dinner pleasant.”
“People say that before anybody says no.”
He looked at me with enough seriousness that I felt the attraction change shape. It had been his restraint, his quiet amusement, the way he filled a doorway without taking it over. Now it was the possibility that he might let me say something difficult and stay.
“Then you’ll have to find out whether I mean it,” he said.
Scene break
We opened at nine. A customer complained about the price of fuel as if I had personally invented combustion. Britta handed me the new bookings ledger and asked whether I planned to pencil my own hours or keep making a dramatic entrance every morning.
“Pencil,” I said.
“Good. Ink makes people heroic.”
At noon Nate came in with a folder, stopped beside my desk, and asked if I had ten minutes for business. The distinction was deliberate. I felt it in my stomach before I answered.
He had printed our ownership agreement, his existing workshop lease and the marina’s division of responsibilities. My own consultancy dates were already in the shared calendar. Neither of us set the other’s pay alone. We each had a route out of the business and a life outside it. We checked those facts like adults checking a railing, not lovers proving nothing could go wrong.
“The thing I wanted to ask about,” he said, “is the unit next to my workshop. The tenant’s leaving in August.”
He unfolded a plan. There were two rectangles in blue pencil, one labelled CURRENT and the other NEXT DOOR. A little arrow linked them.
“A second heated bay,” I said.
“I could take longer winter repairs. Stop turning them away because there’s nowhere to leave a hull overnight.”
“Your business or the marina’s?”
“That’s the question. I’d like to propose it as the marina’s. We share the return, and Britta has winter hours. But I’d need you both to look at the numbers.”
I ran my finger along the line of the wall. “How long have you wanted this?”
He gave me an answer about the lease, then stopped.
“Since before I came here.”
“That’s a different length of time.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll look properly. I won’t say yes because you’re standing there.”
His mouth tipped. “Then I’ll sit down.”
“That may make it worse.”
For a moment the office was too small for us, though he was on the other side of my desk. I could hear Britta talking to a customer outside. Smell hot dust from the old computer. See Nate’s attention settle on my mouth and lift again, without apology.
I wanted him to cross the room.
Instead I put a date on the proposal and told him what information I needed. He wrote it down. Nothing about the exchange was romantic, except the fact that he didn’t make it be.
At six I walked out with my bag, and he followed as far as the gravel.
“I’d like to call you,” he said.
“You have my number.”
“For no reason.”
I turned. He looked almost annoyed with himself for needing to ask, and that tenderness was more dangerous to me than any practised confidence could have been.
“Tonight,” I said. “After eight.”
“About the floating mower?”
“You may have to develop new material.”
At eight eleven, my phone rang. I was sitting on the floor assembling the lamp, and when he asked how I was I told him I had made an expensive sculpture that did not yet produce light.
He didn’t offer to come and fix it.
He asked me what shape it was.
“At the moment? A very expensive question mark.”
“A suitable lamp for a consultant.”
I laughed and lay back on the floor, phone beside my ear, the parts arranged around me like evidence of a small domestic crime.
“Tell me something that isn’t work,” I said.
“I bought a peach yesterday.”
“Ambitious opening.”
“It wasn’t ripe. I put it on the windowsill. I keep checking it as if I can persuade it.”
“Can you?”
“Not so far.”
I looked at the ceiling. There was a hairline crack above the lamp cord, a shape like a river on a map.
“I have a client who asks for daily progress reports on things that take a week. I could send him to supervise your peach.”
“You said not work.”
“You’re right. Sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry. I like hearing you talk about it. I just thought you might like a minute off.”
The kindness of that made me quiet. He did not fill the silence with a new question. I could hear a tap running at his end, then a cupboard closing. He was in a room I barely knew, doing the ordinary things he did without me, and had made a space in them for my voice.
“I used to tell people I preferred being away,” I said. “It made leaving easier. If I acted as if I’d outgrown Cedar Lake, nobody would see how much I missed it.”
“Do you prefer being away?”
“Sometimes. I like new work. I like being somewhere my name doesn’t tell people who I ought to be.”
“And sometimes?”
“Sometimes I want to go into a shop and have someone ask whether Jonah has fixed the sign. Then I come back and resent being asked.”
“You contain several difficult customers.”
I laughed. “You have no idea.”
“I’m beginning to.”
There was affection in it. I could hear it plainly enough that I stopped looking for the safer interpretation.
“What do you miss?” I asked.
“About where I was before?”
“About anything.”
He took his time.
“The noise of somebody else in the next room. Not every day. Enough that a quiet house is a choice.”
I sat up. The answer made me want to be at his table, watching the peach fail to ripen, rather than holding a phone in my own half-furnished flat.
“I’m not going to tell you to get a radio,” I said.
“Thank you.”
“People do that, don’t they? Offer you an appliance when you tell them something lonely.”
“Sometimes.”
“I’m lonely sometimes too.”
The admission surprised me. I had planned to be amusing, perhaps a little provocative. I had not planned to be a woman sitting on the floor saying she missed the sound of somebody choosing to remain nearby.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“I try to keep moving before anybody notices.”
“I’ve noticed.”
I shut my eyes. Wanted him sharply then, not as a cure for loneliness but as the particular person who had recognised my method and liked me enough to let me name it myself.
We talked until the room went dark around the unassembled lamp. When he said he should let me sleep, I told him I wasn’t ready to end the call.
“Five more minutes,” he said.
We took fifteen. At the end he told me he was glad I’d asked him to call, and I said I was glad he’d done it.
Afterwards I finished the lamp. It lit on the first try, casting a warm circle over the tools I no longer needed.
I left them until morning.