He’d come back.
He hadn’t knocked. He hadn’t called or texted. He’d simply put her finished chair onto her porch exactly where she always sat and disappeared the way he always did when something mattered too much for words.
She rocked some more and thought about the look on his face two weeks ago when he’d said, I should go, and walked off her porch with his hands in his pockets like a man trying not to run.
She thought about how this chair was not the one she’d imagined but something better because he’d built it with his own hands while she’d wrestled with her decision and finally called her mother to say no.
And he’d answered her with a chair.
As she sat here now, she didn’t know which she’d been more afraid of — that he would never come back, or that he would come back too soon, before she’d made the decision completely on her own.
She’d been afraid of both.
And somehow, he’d managed to return at exactly the right moment, by the only method that made sense, which was not words at all but something concrete. Real. He’d chosen action over talk, demonstration over declaration. He finished the thing he’d started making for her and brought it to her.
She rocked until the cardinals turned into a chorus and she heard Brown Dog’s toenails on Arlo’s porch as the old man came outside for his morning coffee.
She stood up, draped the old blanket that lay over the back of Makaylas rocker around her shoulders over her nightgown, slid her feet into her pink rubber barn boots that she’d left by the front door yesterday, and walked across the wet grass toward the property line.
Arlo and Brown Dog watched her cross the pasture.
“Mornin’.”
“Good morning, Arlo.”
“You found it.”
“I did.”
He nodded, his gaze locked on the lake.
She felt the wet him of her nightgown brushing the tops of her boots, and realized her hair was a tangled mess around her shoulders. But she asked the question anyways that she’d come to ask.
“Arlo. Would you build a third one?”
He took a slow sip of his coffee. “A third what?”
“Don’t be like that.”
His pale blue eyes glinted briefly with humor. “How soon you need it?”
“As soon as possible. Next week, if you can.”
“Mm. Be tight.” A pause. “What size?”
“Bigger than mine. Sturdier in the seat. For someone, say, six-foot-two with broad shoulders.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Will you do it?”
“Reckon I will.”
“Thank you.”
“Heard there’s a talent show today.”
“It’s at three.”