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* * *
The sky had started its shift, the black beginning to differentiate itself at the eastern ridge, the earliest suggestion of something coming. He watched it for a while, the way the dark changed quality before it changed color, the way the mountains started to exist again as shapes before they were fully visible.
He thought about Roy.
Roy had spent a year being useful. Roy had been patient and deliberate and had not kissed Shane’s grandmother in the snow outside the town square before asking her to dinner. Roy had done the thing in the right order.
He had not done the thing in the right order.
He let out a breath he’d been holding for a while. It made a small cloud in the cold air and disappeared.
The honest thing (and here at the lake, in the dark, with nobody watching, he owed himself the honest thing) was that he didn’t know if he’d handled it well. He knew what he felt. He knew it wasn’t nothing and hadn’t been nothing for a long time. He knew she’d kissed him back and said his name and laughed, the small surprised sound of it, and that he’d almost smiled in the way he almost never did and hadn’t wanted to leave for considerably longer than was reasonable.
He knew all of that.
What he didn’t know was whether she’d woken up this morning and felt the same things he was feeling, or whether she’d woken up and thought that was too fast or I wasn’t ready or any of the other things a person who’d been hurt could reasonably think when something moved quickly.
He didn’t know.
And he couldn’t fix not knowing the way he fixed a fence board or a pipe or a window that had been sticking since October.
He sat with this for a long time.
The light came eventually, the way it always did, the peaks going from gray to rose to white, the snow on the valley floor catching it and brightening, Clearwater Lake going from dark to silver in the slow way of winter light. He sat in it and felt the cold through every layer and thought about the things he could do and the things he couldn’t do and the difference between being careful about something because you were afraid and being careful about something because you valued it.
He valued this.
He was going to be careful with it.
He was going to... and this was a decision he made sitting on the cold granite at the north shore of Clearwater Lake with the December light coming over the mountains... he was going to give her the chance to set the pace. He’d moved last night. She could move next. And if she needed time, or space, or a conversation he’d fumbled his way through, or all three, he was going to provide whatever she needed because that was what you did when something mattered.
He stayed at the lake until the cold had gone through every layer.
He walked back to the hardware store.
He opened up.
He stood behind the counter and turned it over one more time, and arrived at the same place he always arrived at:
He’d kissed her and she’d kissed him back.
Whatever came next, that was true.
He could work with true.
* * *
Doug arrived at seven fifty.
He looked at Shane.
He went to make coffee.
He came back and set a cup by Shane’s hand.
He said nothing, which was its own kind of saying everything, and the morning went on around them, and at some point Shane moved twelve things that didn’t need moving and put them back and looked at the inventory and looked at the door and thought about whether to call her, whether that was too much, whether that was exactly right, whether he was overthinking this the way he was overthinking everything right now, and decided that Doug’s silence was easier to sit with than his own thoughts and went to find something useful to do.
There was always something useful to do.
