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And whatever was on that phone, whatever she had flipped face down so fast it slapped the table, had made her laugh so loud the whole Brook turned around. The minute he was gone.

He didn’t want to think the next thought. He thought it anyway.

Whatever it was, she didn’t want me to see it.

* * *

The shelf in aisle four was level.

He knew it was level. He had installed it himself in October and checked it twice. It was, if anything, more level than any shelf had a right to be.

He adjusted it for forty minutes.

He took the brackets off. He put the brackets back on. He got the long level from the back room and set it on the shelf and watched the bubble sit dead center, perfectly content with itself, and then he took the brackets off again anyway, because his hands needed something to do that his head couldn’t ruin.

At minute twenty-two, Doug came and stood at the end of the aisle with his coffee.

“That shelf’s been level since October,” Doug said.

“It had a lean.”

“It had no lean.”

“I’m checking.”

“You’ve checked it four times.”

Shane tightened a bracket. “Then I’ll check it five.”

Doug drank his coffee and looked at him with the expression Shane had been ignoring for twenty-five years. Then, which was so much worse, he just went back to the counter.

Shane checked it five times.

* * *

The honest thing was that it wasn’t jealousy.

He made himself look at that straight on, alone in aisle four with the level in his hands, because if he was going to feel something this badly, he at least owed it to himself to know what it was.

He wasn’t picturing some other man. He didn’t even know if there was anyone to picture. He had never been a jealous man and he didn’t intend to become one at thirty-eight in the fastener aisle of his grandfather’s store.

It was the phone.

It was the sound it made hitting the table.

He had told her about the drawer. He had sat at her kitchen table in the dark with the storm going and told her about the letter from Montana State, the one he had never shown another living soul, the one he’d kept in a desk drawer for nineteen years like a splinter he couldn’t dig out. He had opened that drawer for her.

And this morning, when he walked in, she had turned something over so he couldn’t see it.

That was all. That was the whole thing. It was small, and it was nothing, and he wasn’t even sure he had any right to it. Because what were they, exactly?

He realized, standing there, that he didn’t know.

They had kissed in the snow. They’d had the storm. They’d had Friday, and the cabinet door, and a blanket on a cold porch. And apart from one mug of something warm at The Brook, on a Saturday before any of it, he had never actually asked her anything. He had kissed her before he ever asked her to dinner. She was the one who asked him to dinner. She was the one who said stay. She was the one who said I don’t want to keep almost. He had followed her lead in every single thing since, and the only message he had ever sent her without being prompted was two words about propane.

He was thirty-eight years old and his entire romantic vocabulary was propane.

He set the level down.