Page 67

Chapter 17

First Names

He fixed the window on a Thursday morning in early December.

He’d been meaning to fix it since October. The reason it had taken this long had nothing to do with his schedule, which had been full but not unusually so, and everything to do with the location of the window in question, which was at the end of the east hallway in the art room, which belonged to a person he had been having complicated feelings about since approximately August and had been managing those feelings with varying degrees of success ever since.

He had left Thanksgiving before the pie to check a pipe he had fixed properly the first time. He had known it was fixed. He had checked it anyway, flat on his back under the Kowalskis’ sink at nine at night, because a pipe was a thing he knew how to do and sitting across a table from her in front of the whole town was not. He had been thinking about that for a week.

He went before the school day. Seven in the morning, frost still on the ground, the hallways empty and lit with the flat institutional light that made everything look slightly unreal. He had his tools. He had a plan. He was going to fix the window in twenty minutes and leave.

He tested the frame. Top right corner, swollen from moisture, resisting in the way of wood that had been fighting its housing through a season change and lost. Straightforward. He set up and started working.

He had been at it for eight minutes when he heard the door.

He knew before he turned around.

He’d been knowing before he turned around for four months now, the quality of her arrival in a space, something in the air that shifted, something he had stopped trying to explain to himself because the explanations all led somewhere he was still deciding whether to go.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was in here.”

“Window,” he said.

“I know it’s been sticking. I mentioned it to...”

“Helen. I heard.”

He kept working. He heard her set her bag down and begin her morning, drawers opening, the sound of water briefly running, the rustling of a person settling into a space they knew well. The classroom doing what it always did around her, which was wake up.

He was aware of her the way he was aware of weather, not looking at it, just knowing it was there, adjusting accordingly.

“You don’t have to stop,” she said.

“I wasn’t going to.”

The room settled into the quiet that belonged to the two of them, the kind he’d stopped being surprised by and hadn’t stopped noticing. Outside the window he was working on, the school grounds were silver with frost, the mountains behind the tree line going from shadow to pale gold as the sun cleared the eastern ridge.

He planed a thin strip from the frame. Tested it. Better but not right.

“The kids are doing winter projects next week,” she said, from somewhere behind him. “I’ve been thinking about light. The afternoon light in December is going to be a problem.”

“South facing windows,” he said. “Library has two. Helen would probably let you use the space.”

A pause.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” she said.

He applied a second pass with the plane.

The morning was very quiet. He could hear the frost stiff branches of the spruce outside moving in the slight wind, and the distant sound of the first buses arriving, and underneath all of it the quality of her being in the room behind him, which was not a sound exactly but which he had become, against his better judgment, extremely attuned to.

“Shane.”

He stopped.

Not the tools, the tools kept moving, the plane completing its stroke, but something in him stopped, the way things stopped when you heard your name said in a register, the register that meant someone was about to say something real.

“The Thanksgiving dinner,” she said. “You fixed the Kowalskis’ pipe and you still came.”