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Shane went and stood beside him. He didn’t know why. He just did.

They stood there a while. Harold picked up a box of number eight machine screws. Put it down. Picked up the number tens.

The store was quiet. Somewhere in the back, the furnace ticked.

Shane straightened a row of boxes that was already straight.

Harold didn’t look up from the screws.

“Your grandfather,” he said, “spent the better part of a year being useful to your grandmother before he ever told her how he felt. You know that part. Everybody tells that part.”

Shane went still.

“What nobody tells,” Harold went on, turning the little box over in his big weathered hands, “is that she got tired of waiting. There was a fellow from Kalispell. Good job. Told her plain what he wanted, and what he wanted was her. She almost said yes to him.” He set the box back on the shelf. “Roy found out on a Tuesday. Went and fixed her father’s porch railing that same afternoon. Fixed it beautiful. Best railing in the valley. Then he stood out in the yard looking at it and understood that a railing was never going to say anything for him.”

Shane didn’t breathe.

“He walked into that house that night and said it. Stood in her father’s kitchen with sawdust still on his shirt and said it out loud.” Harold picked up a single screw from the loose bin and held it up to the light, like it was a very interesting screw. “Spent a year being useful instead of honest. Nearly cost him the whole rest of his life.”

He carried the one screw to the counter.

Doug rang it up. Eleven cents.

Harold paid with a quarter and didn’t wait for his change. He stopped at the door with his hand on it, and for one moment he looked back at Shane. His old face was kind the way mountains are kind, which was to say plainly, and with no interest at all in making you comfortable.

“Just needed a screw,” Harold said.

The bell rang.

He was gone.

* * *

Shane stood at the fastener wall for a long time.

He thought about porch railings. He thought about a man with sawdust on his shirt standing in someone’s kitchen saying the thing out loud. He thought about a fixed cabinet door and a text about propane and busy week, inventory, and the sound of her footsteps stopping in the snow and then turning around.

He had fixed her window. He had fixed her pipes. He had fixed her cabinet. He had fixed every single thing he could get his hands on, and the one thing he had never done, not once, was ask her.

Not are you okay. He’d asked that. He’d asked that, and taken fine for an answer, and then spent three days building an entire haunted house out of a phone turned face down on a table.

He had never asked her the real thing. What is this. What do you want. Do you want me.

And he had never said the real thing either.

He had been useful instead of honest.

He looked up and found Doug watching him from the counter. Doug didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. He just nodded, once, the way Shane nodded at things, and went back to his inventory.

* * *

He was at the lake by five on Thursday morning.

It was the coldest morning yet. The snow on the north shore squeaked under his boots in the dark, and the spruce trees stood black and still and heavy, and the granite shelf was glazed with a thin skin of ice he had to scrape away with his glove before he could sit. The lake lay flat and dark beneath a sky full of hard bright stars. His breath rose in clouds. He didn’t bother putting a line in the water.

He wasn’t here to fish.

He was here because this was where he told himself the truth, and he had some truth to tell himself before he went and told it to her.