“Well, now I’m not alone. Got you here. Is that better or worse?”
“Come on out, would you? My back’s starting to hurt.”
“Yeah? At least it’s not seared to the underside of an engine.” She flattened her elbows and winged low and slow between the muddy grit of road and the catch of metal out from underneath the car. The man put a hand down to help her up, but Raney rolled away from it and he stepped back, arms held out palms up like you might show a dog you meant no harm. After a moment of standoff she said, “I don’t know if I should be thanking you or cursing you.”
“Cursing, probably. I offered them a lift back in Clallam. Should have smelled what they were. Your spare is flat, you know.”
“Course I know. Makes all the sense in the world to jack your truck up to change one flat for another.” The man was no taller than her, shorter if he took off his boots, she guessed; dark eyes, hair, skin, his teeth shone in the big square light he’d left sitting on the hood of the car. They looked clean. Frequently flossed.
“I can give you a lift. Backseat or front, your choice. You can drive, if that’s better.”
“I don’t need a lift from you.” The man drew his arms tight around himself and traced a circle with the heel of his boot before he looked up the black, deserted road, waited for her to go on. “Give me your keys.”
He nodded once and put his car keys in her hand. “Name’s Cleet.”
“I don’t give a shit what your name is,” Raney answered.
—
Cleet Flores’s grandfather had been a strawberry farmer on Bainbridge
Island until the early sixties, when a lot of the Filipino communities scattered as land there became too expensive to keep for crops. People wanted houses and stores and restaurants. Supermarkets where you could buy canned and frozen foods. The fields he had cultivated and picked as a child were a high school and a shopping center now. If his grandfather had held on to a tenth of it, Cleet’s father and even Cleet and his mother and brother would have been rich. Instead, Cleet’s dad was caught betwixt and between—not a farmer but not gentry. Not educated but not able to earn a living with the skills he’d practiced. He took up fishing for a number of years, working out of Alaska in the summers and hiring onto any local boat that would have him the rest of the year.
One fall his father came back from Alaska and found twelve-year-old Cleet at home alone, Cleet’s mother and brother packed up and gone back to the Philippines, where, her letter said, at least her own father still owned a house. Cleet had refused to leave. When his father left to fish four years later and never came back, Cleet took stock of his options. He sat in a chair in the middle of their two-room, rented cabin and considered what he had and what he wanted to have. He considered what every person wants, at baseline. How little they really need but cannot do without and thus will always pay for—food, water, warmth, shelter. A good solid bed, a kitchen table and chairs. He looked at his father’s life, and at his bank account. And he looked at his hands. He studied the pliant joints and the efficient design of size and strength and flexibility. Hands—a gift of birth, which could not be taken or taxed or licensed. He dropped out of high school and passed his GED, took the money he’d saved from his own fishing work, and enrolled in Gompers Woodworking School to become a carpenter and furniture maker. Now he lived in Port Townsend, building cabinets and kitchens for retirees who were buying up the old Victorian homes, occasionally selling his own handcrafted pieces to tourists in the local galleries.
Raney heard only the bones of his story on the ride back to Quentin, where she stopped the car and got out half a mile from her house so she could remain anonymous and lost to him. His hands had been conscientiously folded on his lap the whole way, like weapons laid down for truce. They didn’t look like weapons, she had to admit before they’d even reached the cutoff back toward 113. More like Buddha hands. Calm and intentional. On a surreptitious closer glance she saw the wear of his work across the fingertips and palms, as if they were aging ahead of him, and was surprised to catch herself wondering how they would look in twenty years, stained with wood polish, nicked with scars but just as calm, she thought. Just as calm.
Grandpa wrangled a buddy from the machine shop to rescue the truck, and a week or so later Raney found herself poking through woodworking galleries in Port Townsend. In the third one along, not on Water Street but only a block off, she stopped in front of a simple table just large enough for a lamp and a book, a simple cove along the edge, the wood rubbed so silky you wanted to lay your cheek upon it like a pillow. How could anything so smooth be solid enough to stand on its own? The facing panel had a small bird carved in relief, a heron crouched in sinewy angles like some Asian dancer. Raney asked the clerk for the price and he gave her a quote, adding, “I can discount that some. It’s been here a while and we have a new shipment due.” He wrote a figure on the back of a card that read “Heron Designs, Cleet Flores.” There was a PO box and phone number in one corner. She tucked the card into the back pocket of her blue jeans. She bought a cup of clam chowder and carried it out to the pier, where she sat down and ate, watching freighters skim the line of horizon bellowing smoke like spouting gray whales, and she felt Cleet’s card burning through her jeans so hot she wondered if she might discover the mirrored letters of his name branded onto her bottom.
—
It still took her more than five months to call him, “just to say thanks, you know, for helping me out.” She turned him down when he asked her if she’d like to go for coffee or a beer. A month later she found a job in an art gallery down the street from where she’d seen Cleet’s table—it hardly paid for the gas it took to drive there and back every day, but it was worth it to be working with other painters, to talk to customers about color and shadow and stroke instead of French dressing versus ranch, baked potato or fries. She was crating a show one evening, alone in the rear of the shop, when the bell rang and she walked out to the desk with her white cotton gloves still on. There he was. Different than she’d remembered but better too. Shanks of black hair angling this way and that, a curl of sawdust caught near his left temple. Nice teeth, still; they looked all the creamier in his soft brown face. She felt herself blush and hated herself for it, which made her face go even hotter. “The door was supposed to be locked—we close at six. What can I do for you?”
“I saw the truck out front. You got it back. That’s good.”
“Course we got it back.” Why had she called him that day, months ago? It was a foolish business all around. The product of loneliness, living in a falling-down house with an old man in a town all her friends had long escaped. He had a cut on his hand, small but still bright with blood, a fresh line in the map of his scars. She took off one white glove and wrapped it about his hand. He stared at the glove for a long moment and she saw him tilt his head, puzzling something out. “Except it cost more to tow it home than we could sell it for. Did you come in here to buy a painting or just to hassle me about my truck?” she said.
“I came in to ask you to go to dinner with me.”
“Well, you are just the consummate rescuer, aren’t you?”
“I’d hardly say buying you dinner is rescuing. Unless you’re starving, which you don’t look to be.”
—
For the next year it was a stutter of walks and lunches, chance meetings when Raney was arriving or leaving the gallery, too frequently to be anything but carefully planned. She let it be that way, evasive about commitments, never calling anything a date but more and more often shifting her schedule so that it was predictable enough to intercept.
She locked up late one evening shortly before Christmas and found him waiting beside the truck, wondering if she wanted to go out for some fresh crab. She offered to drive, but he said the restaurant wasn’t far. A cold snap had cleared the air and Water Street was crowded with Christmas shoppers, the sidewalks noisy and the bars full and already smelling of stale beer. Cleet pulled Raney close against him when a group blocked the path from curb to storefront, so enraptured by their own conversation they moved as a single, oblivious herd. She kept waiting for him to choose a restaurant, asked where he wanted to eat, and he said just another few blocks down. Finally he cut between two buildings and took a narrow stairway to the beach.
It was another town altogether here, the voices of shoppers and partiers blocked by the buildings, the sound of low surf washing in true and endless. Her feet slipped and dug into the rocky sand, and they had to carve their way around ghost-pale drift logs dropped by higher tides like the toothpicks of giants. Raney saw a point of yellow light ahead and soon they got to a campfire, a cooler filled with cooked crabs, rice, salad . . . Cleet unzipped a duffel hidden behind a log and handed Raney a heavy men’s sea coat, then he built up the fire and spread a blanket over the log and nearby sand. He melted butter in a small pot and served the meal on real glass plates.
He must have been cooking and hauling stuff all day, Raney guessed. So this would be the night, then. He would make his move right here on these blankets, probably had a whole other duffel bag packed with pillows and sleeping bags. Her appetite disappeared and she found herself thinking through everything she said before she said it, so the echo of her conversation sounded contrived and pointless. Cleet acted totally relaxed—probably assuming they were both on the same page here. Raney began to shiver inside the coat, not sure what page she was on or even if she and Cleet were inside the same book at all. There was no moon. The cold front had whipped the sky clear as new glass and with the town lights going out, the stars looked like the edge of the universe and close enough to touch. Cleet slid off the log to put more wood on the fire, then stretched out on the blanket with one hand under his head, holding his other straight up to trace out various constellations, some Raney knew—Orion, Cassiopeia, the Dippers—more that she did not know—Hydra, Lynx, Leo. He’d learned them on the boats in Alaska when he’d worked with his dad, he said.
“How often did you go with him?”
“Three or four trips, halibut and sardines. Pay was great—I saved enough in those trips to cover school and set up my shop. Hated every minute of it!” and he laughed. He had a nice laugh. It never sounded forced or polite. Always genuine—a grace note to his general aura of calm coping. Raney got up to pour herself a second glass of wine, but rather than stepping over him to the log, she sat down on the blanket, her crossed leg touching his waist. “Turn out a few more lights in town and we might see some of the Geminid shower, over in the east, near Castor,” Cleet said.
“Ah! Castor,” Raney repeated, exaggerating the word to emphasize that she had no clue where to find it.
“One of the twins. Castor and Pollux.” He tried to direct Raney’s untrained eyes. “Castor is white—there. Pollux is darker. An orange star. The myth says the twins protect shipwrecked sailors.”
“And were you ever shipwrecked?”
He laughed, more to himself this time, took a minute to answer, “No less than most.”
She started pointing to other stars, making up constellations and laughing when he showed her the real ones hidden in her own inventions—she would have made a good shepherd, he said. The fire burned lower; they were both quiet. She knew he would reach for her soon, but she also knew she didn’t want to force the night to a close. She wouldn’t pretend she hadn’t noticed his mouth, its deep, full curves that looked slow and easy. But what would happen after a kiss? She didn’t want to risk losing his company just to find out what his lips might feel like. She’d just have to tell him. Make it clear but face-saving—she liked him too much to play any games. Cleet’s eyes were closed, and in the firelight his face looked as smooth and proud as one of his polished wood carvings. Her legs were falling asleep and she stretched out; it was warm beside him. She pulled the edge of the blanket up to cover them both, rolling toward him to make it reach fully across. He smelled like cedar. His face was so close . . .
He startled awake, and she saw him recollect where he was. He tried to focus on her, his eyes still lazy with sleep. His full mouth curved into a smile. “Sorry! What time is it?” He held his watch so the firelight illuminated the dial. “We better get going. I have to finish a chair tonight for delivery tomorrow.” He shook out the blankets and packed everything into the cooler and duffel, hid them behind a pile of drift, and said he’d get them tomorrow. Then he walked her back to her truck and waved good night from the curb while she got in and drove herself home, feeling like a total idiot.
—
In May, Cleet took a five-week job in Bremerton, and Raney was startled, annoyed even, to find that she missed him. He dropped by the gallery a few days after he returned to town, and she could tell he recognized that his absence had made a difference to her. It sparked a new confidence in his eyes; for the first time he exuded a masculine purposefulness as subtle as a shift in his scent but there nonetheless, pulling her as invisibly as the moon pulls the tide.
He came by again the next Friday afternoon. “Going for a drive tomorrow—it should be a nice day. I can pick you up—go up the old logging roads back of the park near the ranger station.”
“I have a lot to do.”
“Name the time.”
“Grandpa hasn’t been feeling so good.”
“We can call him. Check in over the day.” He waited only a beat. “Twelve thirty, then. Only you have to tell me your address.”
He did not come until twelve forty-five, time enough to check her hair twice, add a braid, and take it out again. She knew him well enough to know that his tardiness was as well planned as the lunch he had packed for the two of them and the six-pack of beer he brought for her grandfather. He knocked at the back screen door and waited while she called upstairs to Grandpa and put the beer in the refrigerator.