The Last Pair
Tessa
The boot still had her father’s needle in it.
Tessa had packed the cups, the good scissors, and the chipped blue bowl he had used for his change. She had made three lists and telephoned a man who valued commercial property. None of those things had stopped her. A needle caught halfway through a welt did.
She put down the packing knife.
The workshop window distorted the snow outside into long pale humps. Beyond it, the creek ran past the abandoned mill with a quick, unpleasant sound. She remembered quieter winters here. She remembered being small enough to sleep beneath the bench while her father worked, her cheek on a folded coat that smelled of leather dressing.
At thirty-four she knew better than to confuse a memory with a reason to buy heating oil.
She picked up the boot. Left foot. Broad heel. The leather had been cut for a man whose second toe was longer than his first. Her father had penciled the alteration on the paper pattern tucked inside. Six months since the illness had taken him, and he was still telling her something useful.
The needle resisted when she tried to draw it through.
“Don’t,” she said aloud, catching her other hand reaching for the knife. She would have cut his thread to free it. “Don’t be an idiot.”
She eased the seam with the awl, and the waxed thread followed, dark against her fingers.
A key turned above her head.
Tessa looked toward the stairs. Her father had rented the upper room when she no longer came for whole summers, but the estate correspondence had called the current occupant Mr. Hale. She had pictured somebody old, with slippers and a resentful opinion about visitors.
Dorian Hale came down carrying a stack of folded blankets.
He stopped on the third step from the bottom. His green coat was open over a black sweater, his beard damp as though he had already been outside. The scar through his right eyebrow had not changed. The rest of him had acquired more breadth, which seemed unnecessary.
“I thought you were arriving this afternoon,” he said.
“I arrived last night.”
“Where did you sleep?”
“The lodge. Before you ask, I ate breakfast.”
His mouth shifted. “I was going to ask if you wanted the stove lit.”
“Oh. Yes. That would be less annoying.”
He set the blankets on a clean crate and came down. Tessa had known him as a young timber worker with sawdust lodged in his hair and a capacity for remaining quiet that had infuriated her at twenty-four. A decade later, apparently, she could still be irritated by his mouth without it having said much.
He kept a careful distance from the boot in her hands.
“Your father gave me the upstairs key when the lodge roof was being repaired. I stayed on. I should have written to you directly.”
“There were quite a lot of letters.”
“I know.”
He took a cream envelope from his coat and laid it beside the packing knife. Her name was written across it in block letters.
“Rent through the end of next month. I can be out earlier.”
“I’m not evicting you. I’ve been here twelve minutes.”
“I’m telling you what you can do.”
She put the boot down with its needle balanced on the leather. “You always make yourself sound as though you come with instructions.”
“Most people need instructions.”
“Do I?”
His gaze settled on her face. It did not wander while he considered the answer.
“You need a stove.”
She laughed, and the sound startled her in the close, familiar room.
Dorian crouched by the iron door and began arranging kindling. His sleeve pulled back above his glove, exposing a little of the dark band on his forearm. She looked away before he could mistake her glance for a question. Her father had told her the truth about the valley when she was old enough to decide whether to return. The men here were wolves. Their strength did not make the world kind to them.
She had asked Dorian once, years ago, if it hurt to change. He had answered her with the same patient gravity he gave everything. She had never asked about the mark.
The kindling caught with a dry snap. He shut the stove and held his hands over it.
“You can leave the blankets,” she said. “I’m not packing your things.”
“They’re yours. Your father had them over the repair counter. People waiting for a lift used to get cold.”
Of course he had. Of course there were six more things she had not known she needed to miss.
Tessa lifted the nearest blanket. Something small and hard fell out. A peppermint rolled across the counter in its twisted paper.
“He put those everywhere.”
“His customers stole them.”
“That was the idea. He liked pretending to catch them.”
Dorian picked up the sweet and set it on the dented tin by her elbow. “I remember.”
She flattened the blanket, then folded it differently. If she kept folding things, perhaps the abrupt ache would become a task she could finish.
“The valuation man comes tomorrow,” she said. “He sent an authorization for the inventory. It covers the contents as well as the building.”
“Have you signed?”
“No. I can’t tell whether he means the chairs or every nail in every drawer.”
“Then ask him.”
“I ought to be better at this.”
“Why?”
She stared at him.
He had risen, his hands loose at his sides. “You make boots. Does that mean you ought to know what every contract means?”
“It means I ought to be able to empty one room.”
His eyes went to the boot. Then he pulled an empty crate from beneath the bench, opened the lid and stepped back.
“Choose one thing that belongs in here.”
She wanted to tell him that she did not need to be managed. Instead she considered the shelves. A cracked jar of hardened adhesive. Three broken buckles. A calendar from a year her father had disliked so much he had refused to buy the next one.
She put the adhesive in the crate.
“There,” he said.
“Don’t congratulate me.”
“I wasn’t going to. That stuff will be a nuisance to dispose of.”
This time the laugh came more easily.
They reached for the lid together. Her fingers landed against his bare wrist where he had removed one glove. Warm skin, a ridge of tendon, then the sudden stillness of both their hands. She remembered the old awareness with such physical clarity that she had to swallow.
Dorian lifted his gaze. “Do you want me to let go?”
“Of the crate?”
“Of anything.”
She did not know how to answer without admitting that she had thought about his hands on the drive here. She had thought about Emmett’s grin, too, and Silas leaning over a broken lamp beside her, close enough for his hair to brush her temple. The thoughts had been easier in a moving car, where she could call them nostalgia and keep going.
“The lid,” she said. “Let go of the lid. I need to put the calendar in.”
He moved immediately. It made her want to catch him back.
Emmett arrived with a box balanced on his shoulder and melting snow on his red cap.
“Delivery for Calder,” he announced. Then his face changed. He lowered the box slowly. “Tessa. I didn’t know you were already here.”
“The handwriting on it is his, isn’t it?”
Emmett looked down at the label. “Order was held in Dunmore. The supplier folded it into the next shipment. I should have checked before I came in shouting.”
“You weren’t shouting.”
“My indoor voice travels.”
She crossed to him and put a hand on the cardboard. His fingers moved clear of hers, careful in a way that made the contact between their little fingers more noticeable than a deliberate caress.
“Can we open it?” he asked.
She nodded. Dorian passed her the packing knife handle first.
Inside lay boxes of boot nails. Small ones, large ones, bright ones that had left a yellow stain on the tissue. Underneath them was another order form.
Tessa read the quantity twice.
“He was planning to shoe the mountain.”
“Ambitious man,” Emmett said. “Start with the foothills, work upward.”
She bent over the box, laughing and crying in such quick succession that there was no chance of separating them. Emmett did not hurry to turn one into the other. He took off his wet cap and waited beside her until she could straighten.
“There’s a cloth behind you,” he said. “Clean, before you give me that face.”
She gave him the face anyway and took the cloth.
“You haven’t changed.”
“I’m thirty-five. I’ve changed in expensive places. Knees, mostly.”
“Your knees were never any good.”
“They’ve supported several respectable dances.”
“You counted the steps out loud.”
“You kept changing them.”
Dorian, who had been sorting the order forms, made a quiet sound. Tessa turned on him.
“You remember that?”
“There was a lot of counting.”
“None of you mentioned dancing when I was invited to help repair that lodge floor.”
“That was Emmett’s invitation,” Dorian said.
Emmett looked innocent. “I knew you’d bring sensible shoes.”
She looked between them and felt the dangerous pleasure of being remembered accurately. They knew the woman who had stayed late to finish a job and then moved the tables herself because she wanted a dance. They had seen her before the months of hospital rooms, before phone calls had trained her to expect bad news.
The bell over the door jerked again.
Silas stood beneath it with a task lamp clutched against his chest. His rain shell gleamed with wet. Water dripped from his straight dark hair onto the top of his spectacles.
“I can come back,” he said, looking at her damp face.
“You can put that down before you electrocute someone.”
“It’s unplugged.”
“Then you’ve begun well.”
His answering smile was small and immediate, as though she had opened the exact door he wanted.
He set the lamp beside the boot, coiling its repaired cord away from the needle. Her father’s old overhead light buzzed as he reached past it. Tessa had been counting the holes in the boot seam without noticing she was doing it. The buzz stopped when Silas flipped the wall switch.
“That fitting’s loose,” he said. “Task lamp’s safe. May I?”
She nodded. He plugged it in, and warm light spread over the leather.
“Rain tonight,” he said. “Warmer than it ought to be. The snow above the mill is already heavy.”
Emmett’s grin faded. “How heavy?”
“I haven’t been up to look. I’m checking the gauge after this.”
“I’ll walk the intake,” Dorian said.
They spoke without moving her out of their circle. Tessa heard the difference from the conversations people had held around her father’s bed, always just too quietly, as though she could be spared by being excluded.
“Does it flood here?” she asked.
“The low ground does,” Dorian said. “The workshop’s stayed dry since I’ve been here. That’s all I can tell you.”
She appreciated the limit more than she would have appreciated reassurance.
Emmett went to look at the road from the doorway. “I can postpone the run until we know the bank’s holding. I’ve got room for food on the return anyway.”
“You have a delivery?” she asked.
“Nothing that can’t wait an afternoon.”
Silas glanced at him. Emmett shook his head, almost imperceptibly. Tessa filed the exchange away.
Together they lifted the parcel onto a shelf and began opening the repair bags beneath the counter. There were more than she expected. A child’s shoe with a detached strap. A logger’s boot whose sole had come away cleanly. A pair of Sunday shoes polished so carefully the broken heel looked almost indecent.
Names were attached with string. Beside them her father had written payment notes.
“Three jars plums,” Tessa read. “Half load split pine. Fix kitchen latch.”
“I did the latch,” Silas said.
“Was it your shoe?”
“No. Mrs. Armitage couldn’t manage the repair herself, so I did it for her.”
Tessa looked at the note. Her father had drawn a neat line through the debt.
“He had a system.”
“Nell keeps track,” Emmett said. “He never got shorted. Except by people he wanted to let off.”
Tessa pulled the old ledger toward her. The pages smelled of dust and the faint sweet oil he had used on his hands. On the first blank leaf she made a new list: work unfinished, owner, materials still required. She did not copy the barter debts as money owed.
“I’m not sending bills for these,” she said. “But if I open this place, a pair of plums won’t pay the electricity.”
“Probably need four,” Emmett said.
She pointed the pencil at him. “You’re a poor influence on my pricing.”
He put a hand over his heart, and Silas looked away with a smile that became something else when it met Dorian’s eyes.
There it was again. An exchange that went around her.
Tessa set down the pencil.
“Are you all going to keep doing that?”
The men stopped.
“Looking at one another as though you’re deciding who has to tell me I’ve brought the wrong key.”
“We weren’t deciding anything for you,” Dorian said.
“Then tell me what it is.”
Emmett removed his cap again, though it had only just dried enough to put back on. “I was trying not to invite you to supper before you’d had time to unpack.”
“And that requires consultation?”
“It does when the other two want to invite you as well.”
The workshop seemed to grow warmer all at once. Tessa put a fingertip on the pencil to stop it rolling.
“Together?”
“If you’d like that,” Silas said. “All four of us.”
She should have had an easy answer. An ordinary answer, with a joke in it and enough distance for everyone to pretend this meant no more than old friends having a meal. Instead she looked at each man in turn.
None of them rescued her from understanding.
“I have a valuation form to read,” she said.
“Read it,” Dorian answered.
“And a room to empty.”
“Tomorrow’s still there.”
She felt the edge of the bench against her hips. She could leave. They had given her the room, the rent, the tools, the decision. The invitation remained something she could take because she wanted it.
“Supper, then. Here. I know where the plates are.”
Emmett exhaled, visibly. “Good. Because I brought potatoes.”
“You were very sure of yourself.”
“I was sure of the potatoes.”
Outside the window, a length of stripped willow bark caught against the mill grate. Water folded it, drew it down, and let it spring halfway back. Dorian noticed it a moment after she did. He put on his gloves and went to check the creek.
Tessa laid the unsigned valuation form beneath a clean bowl. She would read its terms after the inventory. Nobody was coming to carry her father’s bench away before she knew which parts of its life she wanted.
A room could hold what she had lost without becoming the place she had to stay.
She took her rust scarf off the peg to hang it farther from the stove, then pulled four mismatched chairs around the little table. The last one caught on a floorboard. For a moment she stood with it tilted toward the space where her father used to sit.
Silas waited with a plate in his hands. Emmett had found the potato pan. There was warmth moving out of the stove and the sound of Dorian’s boots on the steps outside.
She left the fourth chair at the table.
Soft Ground
Dorian
The stake came out of the ground when Dorian leaned on it.
He had used it to mark the edge of the timber stack before the first snow. Now the buried end was black and wet, and soil slumped into the hole with a little sucking sound. He set it farther uphill and pushed until it met something firmer.
Across the creek, willow branches had packed themselves into the mill’s old intake. Water struck the knot of them, climbed, and came back upon itself. A ragged strip of white bark lifted and fell in the middle. It was the one Tessa had seen from the window.
He put his boot on a rock and tested it before stepping closer.
The intake had carried water to the mill when there was work here for more men than the valley could house. Now the great wheel stood motionless behind boards, and the side channel grew alders through its bed. The main creek had enough room for an ordinary thaw. Dorian could not see room for the rain that was beginning to darken his coat.
He broke a dead branch to a length he could handle, then lowered it from the bank. He was measuring depth, not strength. No stick in his hands would have persuaded that water to stop.
By the time he drew it back, the pale wood was wet nearly to his wrist.
Emmett called from the road. “Tell me that’s a fishing rod.”
“Bank’s soft. Don’t bring the truck down here.”
The other man came only as far as the gravel. His boots were already black at the edges. “I wasn’t planning to.”
“You’ve planned worse.”
“In my youth.”
“Last spring.”
“A disappointing season, yes.”
Dorian pointed to the downstream bend. “It’s pushing into the timber yard. If the intake fills, it’ll spread toward the workshop. Can you tell the lodge to keep things off their lower track?”
Emmett took his radio from his coat. “And the freight?”
“Your decision.”
“It’s good money.”
“I know.”
Emmett looked at the creek for a while. Then he called the dispatcher in Dunmore and said he could not promise the return road would remain passable. Dorian listened to one half of a conversation that contained fewer jokes than usual.
When it was finished, Emmett shoved the radio away.
“Someone else will get the run.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be. I’m going to bring flour and blankets from the high store before the road gets any worse. If we’re all eating potatoes, I want bread to complain over.”
Dorian nodded. Emmett stood beside him a moment longer, following the water with his eyes.
“You think she’ll stay?”
There it was. The question Dorian had managed not to put to himself since Tessa walked in wearing her father’s exhaustion in the set of her shoulders.
“I think she’s deciding.”
“You can want an answer.”
“Wanting one doesn’t make it ready.”
Emmett scuffed a stone clear of the mud. “I know that. I also know you can turn waiting into a profession.”
It might have been easier if Emmett had been a man Dorian could dislike. Instead he was a friend who had driven through ice to bring a replacement saw chain, who stopped his truck for old people before they had quite raised a hand. He had every right to want Tessa. Silas did too. The trouble had never been discovering that they cared about the same woman. It had been deciding what an honest offer to her could look like.
“She agreed to supper,” Dorian said.
“She did.” Emmett smiled at last. “Try being pleased about it. It’ll frighten her less than that expression.”
He went up the road, and Dorian bent to the first timber sling.
He had rolled the nearest logs into a clear space when Tessa appeared carrying his spare boots.
Her navy coat was buttoned wrong at the bottom. She had tucked the rust scarf under the collar, and a wisp of auburn hair had escaped her braid and stuck to her cheek.
“These have your name on them,” she said.
“I was collecting them tomorrow.”
“Your right heel’s nearly through.”
He looked down at the boots he was wearing.
“From the way you walk,” she added. “I wasn’t examining your feet through the floor.”
“Didn’t think you were.”
“You looked as though you were considering it.”
He took the repaired pair. The stitching on the left upper was her father’s, small and flat and slightly closer together over the curve. Dorian ran his thumb across it without meaning to.
Tessa watched him.
“Do you want to wear them now?”
“Not in this.”
“They were made for work.”
“So were the old ones. They’ve got another wet afternoon in them.”
She crouched beside the empty crate he had brought for gear and put the boots inside, soles together. Then she looked at the stack he had barely begun to shift.
“Where do you want those?”
“Above the stone line.”
“And where do you want me?”
He straightened too quickly. The question had landed somewhere inconvenient.
Tessa’s mouth curved. “Working, Dorian. What can I lift without making you look at me as though I’ve broken a treaty?”
He considered the short planks, the angle of the bank, her leather gloves. “Take the small ends with me. Tell me before you lose your grip.”
“Same goes for you.”
“Yes.”
She checked the ground before moving. He liked that. Not because it made her obedient or careful enough to suit him, but because she respected the part of a job that did not care whether a person felt brave.
They lifted a plank together. Rain rattled along its upper face. Tessa’s end dipped when she found the weight, then leveled as she adjusted.
“All right?” he asked.
“Yes. Walk.”
He walked.
By the fourth load her breath was louder. He set his end down and took his gloves off to wring water out of them. She did the same without pretending the pause had not come at a good moment.
“Do you always have to move this much wood?”
“Usually only once.”
She glanced at the stack uphill. “I begin to understand the appeal of offices.”
“Your office has an iron stove.”
“My office had a landlord who fixed the roof when it leaked. This one appears to have made me the landlord.”
He wanted to ask about the city, the work she had left to come here, whether she had a room with enough light. He had received pieces in letters over the years: a workshop she shared, customers who argued about prices, a neighbor’s child who thought she repaired horse shoes. He had written back less than he should. A man could call restraint courtesy until it became indistinguishable from neglect.
“How long have you got off?” he asked.
“A week. I can work remotely on orders longer if I need to. My business partner’s covering pickups.”
“Good of her.”
“She said she’d rather have me away than standing at the wrong bench pretending I was fine.”
Tessa rubbed a thumb over a patch of glue on her glove. “I thought sorting this place would make it simpler. A building, a price, a list of things to keep. Then I find a jar of his useless old buttons, and I can’t throw away one button because he might have needed it.”
“He doesn’t.”
She looked up sharply. Dorian regretted the words before she had time to answer.
“I know,” she said. “That’s what makes it so stupid.”
“It isn’t stupid. I meant you don’t have to finish everything he left.”
“Including his life?”
The creek made a hard, hollow sound against the intake boards. He waited until a branch turned and the noise settled.
“Including his life,” he said.
She took the wet gloves off altogether. Her fingers were red, the skin at one thumb split from winter work. He had noticed that split in the workshop and stopped himself reaching for it. Now he gave her the dry pair from the inside of his coat.
“They’re too big,” she said.
“Roll the wrists.”
“That sounds like instructions.”
“Useful ones.”
She rolled them, and he felt the pleasure of having something accepted from him without apology. Dangerous, how much a small thing could offer a man who had taught himself to ask for little.
The sling slipped on the next load. He lowered the timber at once and Tessa stepped clear, as agreed. Mud smeared across the rope where it had ridden toward the narrow end.
“My knot?” she asked.
“Wrong balance. I set it badly.”
He changed the sling’s position and showed her the difference. She listened, then pointed to the second support.
“That one’s sinking.”
It was. He replaced it with a flat stone before they lifted again.
They finished the short lengths as rain became a steady veil between the mill and the road. Dorian cut a notch in the gauge post at the edge of the yard, above the current waterline. He would have something solid against which to compare it later. Tessa crouched beside him, watching the clean wood appear under his knife.
“How worried should I be?”
“Enough to keep boxes off the floor. Not enough to stop eating.”
“Is there a scale for that?”
“I’m inventing it.”
She smiled, but kept looking at the post. He told her exactly what he had seen: the soft bank, the blocked intake, water going around rather than through the knot of branches. He could not tell her whether it would loosen in an hour or build all night.
“Silas will know more about the side channel,” he said. “We’ll check it.”
“Then I’ll move the papers first.”
He nodded. She had taken the information and made a decision. He liked the clean sense of working beside her. It made what he wanted harder to keep folded away.
On the path back, her boot skidded where sawdust had collected over mud. She caught his sleeve before he could offer it. Her weight came against his arm for a single step, warm through layers of wet wool.
“That’s two useful things you’ve done,” she said.
“I’m keeping count.”
“Don’t. I’ll get competitive.”
He let her keep her hand there until the ground grew firm.
At the workshop they hung wet gloves by the stove. Dorian put the repaired boots beside his chair upstairs and returned to find Tessa holding the fourth place mat above the table.
“It was his,” she said before he asked.
“I know.”
“Every chair was his, really. But that was where he sat.”
Dorian looked at the little table. She had laid knives and forks with their handles straight. The plates were mismatched, her father’s favorites and the two ugly ones he had kept because they were too sturdy to break. There was no way to sit here without sitting in something that had belonged to him.
“You can move the table,” he said.
She blinked.
“If you’d rather. Chairs too. It doesn’t have to stay as it was.”
“Everyone keeps telling me to take my time.”
“That doesn’t mean nothing can move.”
He had stayed in places because leaving felt like admitting he had failed them. Jobs, rooms, conversations in which there was no longer anything to say. He knew what a virtue patience could appear to be from the outside. He knew how much cowardice could live comfortably inside it.
He wanted to be wanted without making her responsible for his waiting.
Tessa folded the place mat into quarters. “Did you stay upstairs because you hoped I’d come back?”
He could have given her the easy answer. The roof repairs had been real. The rent was fair. His crew started work nearby. All true, and none enough for the way she was looking at him.
“I stayed because I liked living here. I wanted the place looked after. I hoped you’d come back because I wanted to see you. Those things aren’t the same, even if they’ve got tangled.”
She pressed the folded mat against her waist. “What happens if I sell?”
“I find another room.”
“And us?”
He held still.
Tessa’s cheeks warmed, but she did not look away. “Whatever there might be. I didn’t mean to say there already was.”
“I want there to be.”
The stove ticked as its metal warmed. He waited through the sound, resisting the old habit of offering her an exit before she had reached a door.
“Do Emmett and Silas know?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“And you’re all right with what they want?”
“I’m all right with them wanting you. What we do about it depends on you, and on what we can give each other honestly.”
She drew a breath, slow and unsteady. “I don’t know how to do that. I know how to be someone’s girlfriend. One person’s. Usually rather badly, by the end.”
“I haven’t done this either.”
“You sound so certain.”
“I’m certain I want to try. That’s the part I can answer for.”
She set down the mat. “And if I want to kiss you before I’ve worked everything out?”
His hands had gone hot. He kept them at his sides.
“Then I’d ask whether I could kiss you back.”
She came to him across the narrow space between the counter and the table. Her palm settled against his chest, light at first, then flat enough for him to feel the shape of it through his sweater.
“You can,” she said.
He lowered his head. She rose onto her toes, impatient with the last inch, and her mouth met his before he had finished being careful.
For a moment there was nothing quiet about him. He put a hand at her waist and felt her answer in the way she moved nearer. Her other hand slid into his damp hair. She made a little sound when he kissed her again, and he had to remind himself that wanting more did not mean taking the space she had not offered.
He drew back just enough to see her.
Tessa was smiling. Not politely. Her thumb brushed his beard, testing its texture as though she intended to remember.
“Was that a useful thing?” she asked.
“I might have lost count.”
Her laugh warmed his cheek.
They stayed close until she rested her forehead against his chest. He let the moment settle without asking it to become a promise. Outside, the window shook under a harder burst of rain.
Emmett called from the porch that he had food and was not prepared to drown with it. Tessa stepped back, still smiling, and opened the door.
Silas came behind him with a wet notebook. “Water’s up another mark,” he said. “The lower path’s going soft.”
Dorian looked past them toward the yard. The notch he had cut was a pale fleck above gray water. Lower than it had been. He could feel Tessa beside him, the heat of her shoulder, the life she had not yet decided to bring here.
There were things he could do before asking her for anything else.
Dorian took the wet gloves back outside and began moving the wood higher.
