The bird I painted on the outboard cover looked as if it had come to inspect our drains.
“It’s a loon,” I told Nate.
He put down the sandpaper. “Of course.”
“A local bird.”
“With concerns.”
I looked at the flat black back, the fierce white eye and the beak which had become, through an unfortunate run of paint, a disapproving lower lip.
“It’s the angle.”
“It’s the authority.”
I laughed so hard I put my thumb in the wet wing.
The engine belonged to the marina’s small rental boat. Its cover was old and sound and ugly, and I had announced over coffee that morning that a bird might improve it. Nate had asked whether I painted. I had said how difficult could a bird be, and he had brought out the spare brushes with a solemnity I now recognised as malicious encouragement.
“You knew,” I said.
“That you’d paint a council employee? No.”
“That it would be difficult.”
“Everything looks easy before you have the brush.”
I held it out. “Go on, then.”
He didn’t take it.
“Do you want me to?”
The question stopped me. I had been waiting for him to rescue the bird, then for both of us to pretend that hadn’t been what he was doing. Instead he sat on his overturned bucket and waited.
“No,” I said at last. “I want to make the other wing worse, so it matches.”
“A sound principle.”
He moved the pot within my reach.
We were in his workshop, the single bay beside the winter storage yard. The door was rolled up. May sunlight lay in a square on the concrete, stopping just short of his boots. Nothing in the room was arranged to impress anybody. A half-finished repair occupied the stand, labelled with the owner’s name; the tools had places worn into the board by use. On a high shelf sat a tiny wooden boat, crooked at the stern.
“What’s that?”
He followed my gaze. “First thing I built after leaving the fleet job.”
“Does it float?”
“Briefly.”
I looked from the boat to my bird.
“You keep it.”
“It wasn’t built for a customer.”
I wanted to say something clever about that. Nothing came. All my life I had thrown away the things which revealed I hadn’t immediately known what I was doing. Old sketches. Bread that failed to rise. The first version of a proposal, even when nobody had seen it but me.
Nate had put his imperfect boat where he could look up and see it.
“You can keep the loon,” I said.
“It belongs to the marina.”
“On permanent loan. For regulatory purposes.”
He grinned, the whole expression this time, and I put my brush down because my hand had lost its steadiness.
He saw. The grin faded into something quieter.
“June.”
“I’m not asking you to do anything.”
“I know.”
“I just like looking at you when you forget to be careful.”
He leaned his elbows on his knees. I could see the pulse at the base of his throat. He had taken off his overshirt, and there was a pale line where the sleeve usually ended.
“I haven’t forgotten,” he said.
Neither of us reached across the space. It wasn’t another almost-kiss, another thing interrupted by footsteps. We sat with what I’d said and his answer, allowing it to be true without making it an accident we could later deny.
After a while he picked up the sandpaper.
I went to rinse the brushes at the sink behind him. It was a shallow utility sink, fitted too high for comfort, with a tap which delivered either a thread or a small assault. I turned it too far and soaked the front of my shirt.
Nate set down his work at the sound I made.
“Don’t,” I said.
“I haven’t said anything.”
“Your face is saying it.”
He handed me a clean cloth, his mouth pressed into an unconvincing straight line. I blotted my shirt, then looked down at the spread of water and began to laugh. I had spent the morning arranging myself into someone a man might want to look at, and now I was wearing a wet map of the tap’s ambitions.
“I have a spare shirt,” he said.
“Of course you do.”
“For when I lose an argument with something dirty.”
He brought it from a hook behind the door, an old soft cotton shirt with a fraying cuff. I took it into the little washroom and changed. It smelled of laundry soap and, faintly, of the cupboard in which he’d kept it. I folded my wet shirt over my arm and came out with his cuffs hanging over my hands.
He looked up, and the humour left his face.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing.”
“You’ve seen a shirt before.”
“Not that one on you.”
The words were quiet. No claim in them. No assumption that lending me a shirt had bought him anything. Just an answer which let me feel the force of his attention.
I put my wet clothes on a stool and walked back to him.
“Roll the sleeves?” I asked, holding out one hand.
He set down the brush. Took the edge of the cuff between his fingers. His knuckles grazed the inside of my wrist as he folded the cloth, and I felt it everywhere.
I could have done it myself. That was the point. I was asking for a small, unnecessary tenderness, and he understood enough to take his time.
When he’d rolled both sleeves, he didn’t immediately let go. His fingers rested lightly beneath my wrist, giving me every opportunity to step back. I turned my hand into his and held it.
“You’re making it very difficult to keep this sensible,” I said.
“I’m not sure sensible is the thing I want.”
He looked at my mouth. I could hear the water dripping from the tap behind us, smell the clean cotton warming against my skin. My attention narrowed to the place where his thumb moved once over the inside of my wrist.
“What do you want?”
His answer took time. Not because he was withholding it. Because he was making himself speak without shelter.
“To see you when neither of us has a reason to leave.”
I held his gaze. There was more he might have said, more I would have liked to hear. This was enough for that moment. It told me the wanting wasn’t only mine and that the boundary between us wasn’t his indifference.
“We could start with an evening,” I said.
“We could.”
I let go of his hand, because the next choice deserved to be made somewhere neither of us was being paid to remain. His expression changed, a flicker of disappointment he didn’t try to turn into pressure. I liked him for that too.
“I’m keeping the shirt until mine dries,” I said.
“I was going to insist on a deposit.”
“The loon is valuable collateral.”
He laughed, and the room became a place we could breathe in again.
“Your bird needs to dry.”
“So do I, apparently.”
He lowered his head, laughing into his hand.
Scene break
The customer with the broken ladder arrived at four. He wasn’t a customer of ours; he wanted to borrow a tool and then discovered he wanted Nate to use it. I watched Nate examine a hinge, check the time, and begin clearing the bench.
“I thought you were going home,” I said when the man went to get the ladder from his truck.
“It’s ten minutes.”
“Is it safe?”
“I’ll know when I open it.”
“Then it isn’t ten minutes.”
Nate looked at me, not quite pleased. I knew that expression. I wore it whenever somebody noticed me volunteering for a task I didn’t want.
“I can handle a ladder.”
“I know. Can you handle saying you’re closed?”
The man returned, carrying a ladder which looked ready to retire. Nate took one look at the bent brace and told him it wasn’t a safe repair. Gently, firmly, without offering to find him a replacement that evening.
When the truck had gone, Nate stood with his hands on the bench.
“I like being asked,” he said.
“Even by a ladder?”
“Especially by a ladder. A ladder knows what it needs.”
I put the lid on the black paint.
“You don’t have to earn every evening you spend with someone.”
“Neither do you.”
It was unfair of him to see that so quickly. It was also why I wanted him.
Outside, the afternoon had begun to loosen into evening. A child in a life jacket argued with an adult over a paddle; the adult lost. Nothing urgent needed us. I could feel how unfamiliar that was to both of us, this hour nobody had yet claimed.
“I’m going to the grocery store,” I said. “Then I’m going home. My lamp works.”
“Congratulations.”
“You could come for supper tomorrow.”
He didn’t immediately answer. I made myself leave the invitation alone. No justification about too much food. No helpful mention of a shelf he might look at.
“I’d like that,” he said.
“Seven.”
“What can I bring?”
“Nothing that needs repairing.”
He looked at the bird drying on the bench.
“That rules out the guest of honour.”
I left him smiling. Halfway across the yard I turned back to look, and he was still standing in the open doorway, watching me go.
I raised my hand. He raised his.
I was still wearing his shirt. I had forgotten to change back, or decided not to remember. It moved against my skin in the warm evening air, too large and unexpectedly intimate. At home, after I’d hung my own shirt to dry, I stood in front of the mirror and saw a woman wearing something she’d asked for.
Not a uniform. Not a useful role. A choice.
I kept it on until bedtime.
For once, neither of us pretended it was a signal about work.