You're very confident about things. One of us has to be. She tilted her head. Are you going to stand on my porch all morning, or are you going to go finish whatever you were working on? Windsor chairs, he said.
Mortise joints. Go fix your chairs, Marcus. He went, but at the gate between the two properties, he stopped and turned back. Elena. She was still in the doorway.
The toolbox, he said. The chisels. Was any of that Did you plan that She looked at him. A long moment. Honest.
I found the toolbox at an estate sale, she said. Six months before I moved here. I didn't know you then. A pause. When I met you and saw your workshop, I thought you would use these right.
So, I gave them to you. She met his gaze. Not everything is a plan. Some things are just recognition. He held that.
Then he nodded once and went through the gate. He spent the rest of the morning on the Windsor chairs. His hands were steady. The mortise joints came out clean, but every 20 minutes or so, his mind would surface back to the same image, a woman he'd never seen standing in a room full of people watching his hands. Things don't break the same way twice.
You have to meet them where they are. He had said that about a piece of furniture. He understood now that she had heard it differently. At 4:00 in the afternoon, he was seating the second chair's rear leg when Hank barked the particular bark. Marcus straightened up.
Through the workshop window, he saw a car he didn't recognize parked in front of Elena's house. Dark sedan. A man getting out of it, early 40s, athletic, the ease of someone who is used to arriving in places and being expected. He went to Elena's door without hesitating. The door opened.
Marcus watched Elena's body language from 30 ft away. He'd learned to read her the way you learn to read anything you pay enough attention to. She wasn't stiff. She wasn't warm, either. Not the way she was warm with him.
There was a history in the way she stood straight, contained more careful than her usual self. They went inside. Marcus looked at his chair. He picked up his mallet. He put it back down.
He was not going to be the kind of person who stood in a workshop window watching someone else's front door. He picked up the mallet again and went back to work and did an absolutely terrible job of the next 40 minutes because he was paying zero attention to the chair. The dark sedan was still there when he finished for the day. It was gone by the time he came back out after dinner. Elena knocked on his door at 8:30.
He opened it. She looked not upset, but organized in the particular way she got when she'd been managing something complicated. "That was my ex," she said. He hadn't asked. She said it anyway.
"His name is Grant. We ended things 14 months ago. He's in Savannah for work and wanted" She stopped. Pressed her lips together briefly. "He wanted to revisit. " Marcus said nothing.
"I told him no," she said. He still said nothing. But he stepped back from the door opening it wider. She came in. Hank met her in the hallway and pressed against her leg and she put her hand on his head and took a breath that was slightly steadier than the one before it.
"He's not a bad person," she said. "He just He wanted me to fit into a life that was already built. There wasn't any room in it to actually be known. " Marcus listened. "He always said he loved me," she said, "constantly. The word was never the problem. " She looked up at Marcus.
"The problem was that he never once sat on a porch and let the evening go quiet. " Marcus understood what she was saying. He understood it his body, not just his mind. "You want coffee? " he said. "Yes. " she said. He made coffee.
They sat at his kitchen table this time. The walnut surface his ex-wife had sat at that morning, which now felt like a week ago, and the evening moved around them the way evenings do when you stop trying to steer them. She was there for 2 hours. When she left, she paused in his doorway and looked at him with the same expression she'd had in the gallery, that quiet definite look that registered something. "Marcus. " she said.
"Yeah. " "Thank you for not asking questions. " He looked at her. "I had questions. " "I know. " She smiled the real one, not the social one. "That's what I'm thanking you for. " She went home. Marcus closed the door. He stood in the hallway with his hand still on the doorknob, and he thought about what Diana had said that morning.
"Don't close down and call it being strong. " He thought about a woman standing in a gallery watching his hands making a decision. He thought about doors, the ones he'd walked through and the ones he'd spent 3 years keeping shut. He went to his workshop. He turned on the single work light. He sat on the stool and picked up the marking gauge she'd given him and held it in both hands.
And for the first time in a very long time, Marcus Johnson let himself want something. Not a project, not a piece of furniture, not solitude or safety or any of the familiar things he'd built walls around. Something alive. Something ongoing. Something that would require him to keep showing up.
He set the gauge down. He turned off the light. He went to bed. He slept better than he had in 3 years. He slept better than he had in 3 years, and then Diana called at 7:00 in the morning and undid all of it.
He was on his second coffee, Hank at his feet, when the phone lit up on the kitchen counter. He looked at it. Her name again. Two days in a row, which had not happened in 2 years. He answered.
"I forgot to tell you something yesterday. " Diana said, no greeting. She never led with greetings when she had something to deliver. "I ran into James Whitfield at a function last month. He mentioned you. " "Said you'd turned down the Coastal Museum Commission last spring. " Marcus said nothing. "That was a significant project, Marcus. " "I had reasons. " "What reasons you couldn't do the work?