POV: Cal
Cal was up at five-fifteen, which was not a decision so much as a condition.
He'd been waking at five-fifteen since he was seventeen years old and started working summers with his uncle's framing crew, and nearly two decades later his body still treated it as a standing appointment, alarm or no alarm, weekday or Saturday, regardless of what he'd had to drink the night before or how late he'd stayed up reading. His eyes opened. The ceiling of his bedroom was there. The day had begun.
He lay still for a few minutes the way he always did — not dozing, not thinking exactly, just letting the day arrange itself in his mind before he had to be in it. The Trosclair job over in Breaux Bridge needed the window casings finished this week. Beau had a dentist appointment Thursday that he'd already tried to reschedule twice and Cal had told him if he rescheduled again he'd drive him there himself. The Melancon boy wanted an estimate on his grandmother's gallery railing, which Cal had been putting off because the gallery railing situation was going to be a conversation about what things actually cost versus what people hoped things cost, and he preferred to have that conversation in person and in the morning.
And Savannah Mabry was in Calder's Bend.
He'd known she was coming since Luanne called him three weeks ago with the date, voice bright and informational in the way that meant she was also watching to see how he'd take it. He'd taken it fine. He'd said alright, I'll make sure the heat's working before she gets there and Luanne had said you're a good man, Cal Broussard in the tone people used when they were also saying something else, and he'd thanked her and gotten off the phone and stood in his kitchen for a minute looking at the coffeepot.
Then he'd gone to work.
That was generally his solution to most things.
He got up now, pulled on work clothes — canvas pants, a thermal he'd had so long the cuffs were fraying, boots he laced without looking — and went to the kitchen. The coffee maker was on a timer. He poured a mug and stood at the back door and looked out at his yard in the dark, the fig tree at the property line, the storage shed he kept meaning to re-roof. The neighbor's rooster, who had no understanding of what five-fifteen actually felt like to other living creatures, was already stating his position on the morning.
Cal drank his coffee.
He was not, he told himself, thinking about Savannah Mabry.
He was thinking about the Trosclair window casings, which needed a specific profile router bit he was fairly certain was in the second drawer of the shop, and about the load-bearing question in the Fontenot attic renovation that he wanted a second opinion on before he committed to anything, and about whether the cold front that was supposed to come through Thursday would slow the exterior work on the Cora Mabry house, which he needed to have substantially complete before the listing.
He was not thinking about whether she'd noticed the paint.
He'd done the exterior in September, when the humidity dropped enough to make it worth doing properly. He'd matched the original color — he'd found a fragment of original siding under a later layer of aluminum cladding, the true color, that particular warm yellow that you didn't find in standard paint decks anymore and had to have custom-mixed. He'd spent forty minutes at the paint counter explaining what he was looking for to a kid who thought Benjamin Moore's Sunflower was close enough.
It was not close enough.
He hadn't told himself he was doing it for any particular reason. The house needed paint. He painted it.
He rinsed his mug, filled his thermos, picked up the Clifton from the passenger seat of his truck before he got in — it was a habit now, the book came into the house at night and rode out in the morning — and drove the three blocks from his house to the shop to pick up the router bit.
Beau was already there.
This was unusual enough that Cal stood in the doorway for a moment just looking at him.
"You're here," Cal said.
"I live here spiritually," Beau said, without looking up from whatever he was doing on his phone.
"You're here at five forty-five in the morning."
"I was up." Beau shrugged with the particular looseness of a person who has no relationship with tension. He was twenty-eight years old and had their mother's eyes and their grandfather's total absence of guile, which was either his greatest quality or the thing that would eventually get him into serious trouble, depending on the day. "Also Delia texted me that Savannah Mabry's car was parked on Sycamore Lane last night, so."
Cal located the router bit in the second drawer as predicted and set it in his bag. "So nothing."
"So she came back."
"She came back to sell the house. That's different."
Beau looked up now, the phone screen going dark in his hand. He had the expression he wore when he thought he was being patient and subtle, which meant he thought he was being a lot more patient and subtle than he was being. "You gonna be working on that house."
"I have a contract to complete repairs on that house, yes."
"With her in it."
"Presumably."
"Cal."
"Beau." He said it in the same tone, exact same cadence, no heat in it. Beau pulled a face and went back to his phone. Cal found his tape measure, which he'd also been looking for, behind the router bit. He straightened up. "I need you on the Trosclair casings this morning. I'll be over at the Mabry house to finish the subflooring in the back bedroom, then I'll come by."
"She know you're coming?"
"Luanne knows I'm coming. Same thing."
Beau made a sound that was not quite agreement.
Cal drove to Sycamore Lane in the early gray of the morning and sat in his truck for a moment at the curb.
Her car was there — a rental, dark blue, Nashville plates, which he registered without meaning to. The house sat quiet in the pre-dawn. The porch light was off. He'd meant to replace the bulb but now felt glad he hadn't had the chance, because the dark porch meant she was likely still asleep and he could get in, get the subflooring work done in the back, and be gone before she was up and they had to have the first conversation.
He had a key. He had always had a key. Cora had pressed it into his hand two years ago when the ambulance had come the first time — the episode that turned out not to be a stroke, just a warning — and she'd looked at him with those sharp dark eyes and said Cal, that house has been standing since 1944 and I need it to keep standing and he'd taken the key and said yes ma'am and that had been that.
He let himself in quietly, left his boots at the door out of habit, moved through the living room toward the back of the house.
He stopped in the hall.
The door to the back bedroom was open. From where he stood he could see the edge of the wedding ring quilt, and a pair of boots — women's boots, still on — at the foot of the bed, and in the pale first light coming through the curtain, Savannah Mabry asleep on top of the covers with one arm thrown over her face.
Cal stood very still.
She was smaller than he remembered, which was probably his memory's fault. He had, over ten years, occasionally and involuntarily thought about the night of the Guidry wedding, and memory had a way of making things slightly larger than life — the night, the Spanish moss, the quality of the silence between them. The actual woman in the actual bed looked tired in the way of someone who drove four hours and then couldn't let themselves rest properly, like she'd fallen asleep before she meant to.
Her hair had come loose from whatever she'd had it in. There was a camera bag on the floor next to the bed, half-unzipped. She was still in her jacket.
He backed up two careful steps and went through the kitchen instead.
He worked in the front bedroom — there was a section of subflooring near the window that had soft spots he'd been monitoring, and he'd brought the materials to sister the joists and reinforce it. He worked quietly and with the focused economy of someone who's done this long enough that the work itself is almost meditative: the careful pull of the damaged boards, the assessment of what was beneath, the satisfaction of structural problem becoming structural solution. Outside the window the sky went from gray to the pale gold of early morning. A mockingbird started up in the oak tree.
He heard her when she woke — not the waking exactly, but the sequence of sounds that followed it. Movement. Then stillness, which was the moment of realizing where you were. Then footsteps, slow at first, then quicker when she heard him.
She appeared in the doorway in her jacket and her socks and an expression that was working very hard to be neutral.
"You're here," she said.
He sat back on his heels and looked at her. Ten years. She had the same quality he remembered — that precision in the eyes, the sense of a person taking an extremely accurate reading of everything in their field of vision. She was doing it right now. He let her.
"Morning," he said. "I'm sorry — I thought I'd be done before you were up. I tried to be quiet."
"You were." She looked at the open subfloor, the tools, back at him. She was doing the calculation he'd expected her to do — the same calculation she'd probably been doing since she walked into this house and found it maintained. "How long have you had a key?"
"Two years." He didn't elaborate and didn't apologize. He'd done what Cora asked him to. He'd answer for it, but he wasn't going to perform remorse over it.
Something moved across her face that he didn't quite catch. "You painted the house."
"It needed it."
"You matched the original color."
"I found the original cladding under the aluminum. That's the actual color." He paused. "I can repaint it if you'd prefer something else before the listing."
She looked at him for a long moment. He held it steady — not a challenge, just a willingness to be looked at directly. Most people broke eye contact first. Savannah didn't. He remembered that about her.
"No," she said finally. "The color's right."
She disappeared and came back a few minutes later without the jacket, hair pulled back, carrying two mugs. She held one out toward him. He took it. It was Cora's coffee — the chicory blend from the French Market that Cora special-ordered twice a year and kept in the freezer, and the fact that Savannah knew where it was and how to make it did something complicated to the air between them.
"Luanne said you'd be by," she said. She leaned against the doorframe, both hands around her mug. "She didn't say this morning."
"I can work around whatever schedule suits you."
"I don't have a schedule. I just —" She stopped. Looked at the exposed subfloor. "What's wrong with it?"
"Moisture got under the sill at some point, soft spots developed in the joists. I'm sistering them — it's not structural, it's precautionary." He picked up the sister joist and showed her the grain. "Good wood, just needed support in the right places."
She looked at the wood in his hands with the specific attention she probably gave everything she was about to photograph and then chose not to. He'd noticed the camera bag on the bedroom floor. Noticed she hadn't brought it with her into this room.
"How long will the repairs take?" she said. "Total."
"Three weeks, realistically. Maybe two and a half if the weather holds."
She absorbed this. He could see it cost her — the timeline, the delay, the obligation to stay inside something she'd come here to move through quickly. "Luanne said it had to be done before listing."
"Any decent inspector's going to find it. Better to address it upfront."
"And you're the —" She stopped again, mid-sentence, in a way that made him think the end of it was only option and she'd thought better of saying it quite like that.
"I'm the one who knows this house," he said simply. "But I can give you names in Baton Rouge if you'd rather."
She looked at him. He looked back.
"No," she said, for the second time in five minutes. "You know the house."
He turned back to the subfloor. She stayed in the doorway a moment longer — he could feel her there, the slight weight of her attention — and then she went to the kitchen and he heard the sound of the back door opening, and then the porch, and then the particular silence of someone standing outside by themselves looking at something they haven't decided how to feel about yet.
He worked.
She'd set his coffee mug next to his tool bag without him asking, within reach, at the right height. He didn't know when she'd done it. He hadn't heard her cross the room.
He picked it up and drank and kept working and did not think, with great and practiced discipline, about the Guidry wedding or the back steps or the sentence he'd never finished, or the fact that she'd said you know the house in a voice that had nothing to do with carpentry.
Outside, the mockingbird found a higher branch and started over from the beginning.