POV: Savannah
She was noticing things.
This was, on its face, not the problem — noticing things was her profession, her primary skill, the engine of every good photograph she'd ever taken. She noticed light and shadow and the way a room arranged itself around its own history. She noticed the particular slump of a person's shoulders when they were pretending to be fine, the way a space held grief like wood held moisture, the geometry of absence. Noticing was what she did. It was, arguably, the thing she did best.
The problem was what she was noticing.
She was noticing, for instance, the way Cal held a measuring tape — not the extending of it, not the measurement itself, but the moment of reading it, the slight tilt of his head and the absolute stillness of the rest of him while his eyes did the work. She was noticing the specific sound his boots made on the hardwood versus the kitchen linoleum versus the porch — three distinct registers, and she knew all three of them now without looking up. She was noticing that he washed his hands at the kitchen sink before he ate and after he handled anything treated, and that he always left the faucet running for a second after he'd finished as if checking he'd gotten everything, and that he dried his hands on the small towel hung from the oven handle and replaced it exactly as he'd found it.
She was noticing, with a precision that was becoming professionally inconvenient, the physical fact of him.
She was aware this was happening. She was not, at this juncture, doing anything useful about it.
It was Wednesday — four days since she'd arrived, two days since the riverbank, one day since he'd told her the beans were good in handwriting that was careful and square and that she'd put in her jacket pocket like a person with poor decision-making skills. She was in the back bedroom, which had become her default working space because the light through the east window was good until eleven and after that she could move to the porch, and she had her laptop open and her legal pad out and she was ostensibly working on the editorial pitch for the project.
The project had a shape now. Not complete — not even close to complete — but a shape, the way something dark in fog had a shape before you could make out the edges. She'd been writing notes since the riverbank, fast and unkempt, the kind of writing she did when something was arriving faster than she could organize it. Images and fragments and questions:
What does it mean to be half of two things that don't fully claim you?
What does it mean to come from a place you left?
The house as a body. The body as a house. What do you do with the rooms you've locked?
She was not thinking about Cal when she wrote that last one.
She was also, if she was being fully honest with herself, thinking about Cal when she wrote that last one.
From the front of the house came the sounds of the workday — the oscillating saw in measured bursts, the knock and settle of material being moved, the occasional specific silence of a man thinking through a problem before he addressed it. She had learned the sounds of him working the way you learned the sounds of a house, catalogued without meaning to.
She put her pen down.
She picked it up.
She wrote: The project requires presence. Presence requires honesty. What am I being honest about?
She put the pen down again.
Through the bedroom window, the pecan tree was doing something in a mild wind, branches moving in the patient, repetitive way of things that had been doing this for decades and planned to continue. A single pecan fell and hit the porch roof — the specific knock of it, hard shell on tin — and she registered it and didn't look up.
She heard the oscillating saw stop.
She heard the footsteps through the hall — she knew these footsteps — pause at the kitchen, the sound of the sink, the faucet, the towel. Then footsteps again, to the back door, the door opening, the particular shift in the air of the house when the back connected to the outside.
He was going to take his lunch on the porch steps again.
She had, for four days, either been in the kitchen when he ate his lunch on the porch steps or been somewhere else and known he was there. She had not, in four days, gone out while he was on those steps and sat on the other end and talked to him again.
This was a choice she had been making. She recognized it as a choice.
She got up and went to the kitchen.
She was not going to the porch. She was going to the kitchen because she needed more coffee, which was true, and the coffee maker was in the kitchen, which was also true. She made coffee with the focused intentionality of someone demonstrating to themselves that they were doing a perfectly ordinary thing.
Through the kitchen window she could see the back porch steps. He was there, as she'd known he would be, with the same paper bag from Tate's Gas-N-Go — different sandwich today, it looked like — and the thermos, and a folded piece of paper she hadn't seen before that he was reading while he ate.
She poured her coffee.
She looked out the window.
The folded paper was small, pocket-sized, and he was reading it in the way people read things they'd read before and were returning to — not the scanning of new material but the slower engagement of something revisited. His head was slightly tilted, the same tilt as when he was reading a measurement, all the rest of him still.
She thought about the Clifton on the passenger seat of his truck. The dog-eared pages. The pencil annotations she hadn't seen but that she'd thought about more than once since Delia mentioned them, since she'd confirmed it with her own eyes two days ago.
He reads poetry, she thought, which was not a new thought, she'd had it several times, but standing at the kitchen window with her coffee it arrived differently, arrived with the weight of something that was contributing to a larger problem.
She was attracted to the fact that he read poetry the way she was attracted to the care with which he'd matched the paint color, the way she was attracted to him taking his boots off at the door and replacing the dish towel and knocking on the soffit so she wouldn't be startled. She was attracted to someone who treated small things as if they mattered, which in her experience was either the most reliable indicator of character or the most reliable indicator that she was projecting something she needed onto someone who happened to be convenient.
She was a photographer. She knew about projection.
She also knew the difference between a projected image and the real thing, and she was experienced enough to know which one she was looking at.
Which was the problem.
She went to the porch.
Not because she'd decided to. Because she was already moving, coffee in hand, and the decision was apparently a formality her body hadn't waited for.
He heard the door and looked up. He had the paper folded and in his shirt pocket before she'd fully registered that he'd moved. Not hidden — just put away, the gesture of someone used to keeping their private things private.
"Coffee," she said, which explained nothing and everything about why she was standing on the back steps of her grandmother's house at noon on a Wednesday.
"I see that," he said.
She sat on the steps. Far end, same as before. He had a sandwich that turned out to be a muffuletta — she could smell the olive salad, distinctive and immediate, and her stomach made a note about lunch.
"How's the cabinet box?" she said.
"Done. I'm starting on the subfloor in the second bedroom this afternoon."
"How long will that take?"
"Rest of today, probably half of tomorrow." He wrapped his sandwich. "The pier-and-beam question — I want to get under the house this week, see what we're actually dealing with on the northeast corner."
"How do you get under the house?"
"Access panel in the back of the utility closet." He glanced toward the side of the house. "It'll be tight. The crawl space under these raised cottages runs about two feet of clearance."
She looked at him. "You're going to spend time in a two-foot crawl space under a 1944 house."
"That's where the piers are."
"And you just — do that."
He looked at her evenly. "It's work."
"It seems unpleasant."
"Some of the work is unpleasant." A pause. "Most of the important work is."
She drank her coffee. He resumed his sandwich. The fig tree at the property line caught a piece of wind and let it go. The neighborhood had its midday sounds — a dog, a radio, the distant percussion of someone doing something with a vehicle that needed investigating.
"What were you reading?" she said.
He looked at her sideways.
"The paper," she said. "In your pocket. You put it away when I came out."
"It wasn't — I wasn't hiding it."
"I didn't say you were hiding it."
He was quiet a moment. Then he reached into his shirt pocket and unfolded the paper and held it out toward her. She took it.
It was a photocopy — old, the toner faded at the edges — of a poem. blessing the boats by Lucille Clifton. The text was clean except for one line near the bottom that had been underlined in pencil, a single clean line, the care of someone who'd thought about whether to mark it and had decided yes:
and you will love again / the stranger who was yourself.
She read it twice. The paper had been folded and unfolded enough that the creases were soft, like cloth.
She handed it back. He folded it along the same lines and put it back in his pocket.
"That specific poem," she said. "Is it —"
"It's the one I come back to most." He said it simply, without embarrassment, which she found more disarming than she'd have found any performance of vulnerability.
"Why that line?"
He was quiet for a moment, looking at the yard. "I spent a long time after my marriage ended thinking I needed to become someone different than I was. That what I was had been wrong, had been the problem." He paused. "The poem is — it's a reminder that you don't have to become a stranger to yourself to find your way back to something worth having."
The words landed slowly, the way his words usually did — you had to give them a second to arrive fully.
She looked at her coffee mug. "How long ago was that. The marriage."
"Three years."
"Do you — are you —" She stopped. Reorganized. "Sorry. That's not my —"
"I'm fine," he said. "In the way people are fine when they've worked something through and built something on the other side of it." He glanced at her. "Not performing fine."
"I know the difference."
"I know you do."
She leaned back slightly on her palms, looking at the fig tree. "I haven't —" She started and stopped twice. "The thing I'm working through — the thing I should be working through — I keep doing it sideways. Photographing around it instead of at it."
"The project."
"Partly the project. Mostly —" She looked at the house. "Mostly being here. Being in this house without her." The her landed plainly between them. "My mother. I keep — the house keeps — she's very present here and I don't have anywhere to put it."
He didn't fill the silence. She'd noticed he never did.
"I left four days after the funeral," she said, to the fig tree. "I know you know that. Everyone in Calder's Bend knows that. And I've been — I've been carrying the version of that story where I had a deadline, where it was circumstance, where it was practical." She paused. "I don't entirely believe that version anymore."
"What version do you believe?"
She was quiet for a long moment. A squirrel crossed the fence line at the back of the yard — fast, purposeful, arrived at its destination without apparent doubt. She watched it go.
"That I didn't know how to be that sad in front of people," she said. "That grief of that size, with everyone watching — I couldn't — I kept wanting to photograph it. Keep it at lens length. And I couldn't do that to my family, couldn't turn my mother's funeral into something I was documenting, so I left. I got as far away as I could and I picked up the camera again and I — " She stopped. "I've been doing that since. More or less."
The yard was very quiet.
"That's honest," Cal said.
"It's not particularly flattering."
"No." He wasn't unkind about it. "But it's honest."
She looked at him. He was looking at the yard with the same quality of attention he gave everything, steady and complete.
"The poem says love the stranger who was yourself," she said. "Past tense. Does that mean you have to become a stranger to yourself first?"
He thought about it. "Maybe it means you'll look back at who you were and not recognize them. And love them anyway."
She held that.
Her camera was inside on the kitchen table. She was aware of it the way she was sometimes aware of it — as an absence rather than a presence, the thing she'd chosen not to bring, the choice that meant she was here without a lens between herself and the fact of being here.
She was on the back porch steps of her grandmother's house in the October midday with a man she was not going to be stupid about, a man who read Lucille Clifton on his lunch break and kept the poem folded in his shirt pocket and had spent two years tending a house that wasn't his because a woman he admired had asked him to.
She was noticing this. She was noticing all of it.
The problem — the full, clear, inconvenient shape of the problem — was that she was noticing it without the camera, and it was still the most interesting thing she'd seen in years.
She went back inside.
She sat at the kitchen table and opened her laptop and stared at the project pitch document and typed: The project is not about identity as abstraction. It's about return. What it costs. What it gives back. The specific thing you find when you go to the place that made you and stay long enough to be changed by it.
She read it back.
She typed: The subject of this project is also me. I don't know if I'm ready for that.
She read that back too. Closed the laptop.
She picked up her camera from the table. She walked down the hall and stood in the doorway of the front bedroom where she could hear him working — the careful knock of a hammer, measured and certain, the sound of someone who knew exactly how much force a thing needed and applied precisely that amount and no more.
She did not take a photograph.
She stood there and listened and let it be what it was, which was a man doing honest work in her grandmother's house while she stood in a doorway and felt something she was going to have to find a name for eventually.
Not today.
But the day, she was increasingly certain, was coming.