Shelter from the Rain

The car died on the coast road at half past ten. One minute the wipers were going, the next there was a clunk under the hood and everything went dark. Dash lights, headlights, all of it. I coasted onto the gravel shoulder and sat there in the rain, thirty-four miles of nothing between me and anywhere.

I'm fifty-one years old. I should have known better than to skip the oil light for two weeks. But I did, and now here I was, a therapist who tells other people to take care of themselves, standing in a ditch in heels that were turning to mud.

The tow truck said forty minutes minimum. The last bus into town came in twenty. So I grabbed my bag, locked nothing, and walked a quarter mile to the stop with rain running down the back of my collar.

The bus was nearly empty. Two kids in headphones up front, an old man asleep by the wheel wells, and one person in the back row under a flickering light, reading something with a cracked cover.

I took a seat about halfway back. The windows were all fogged and streaked. The whole town smeared sideways out there, wet gold lights. I dug out my phone. No signal. Of course.

"Greta?"

I looked up. The person in the back row was standing, one hand on the seat back, and the light flickered again and I saw the face under the hood of the raincoat.

"Kai," I said. "Oh my god!"

He came up the aisle. Kai Wen, from grad school. We'd done our clinical psych masters together, twenty-something years ago, in a cohort of nine people and one broken coffee machine. He'd been the quiet one. Sat near the window. We'd had coffee exactly once, at a place near campus that's a phone shop now, and then he'd left the program and I'd lost track of him.

"You look," he started, and stopped, and laughed. "You look exactly the same."

"I look exactly the same like someone who ignored her oil light for two weeks and is now soaked to the skin." I gestured at myself. My hair was flat. My blazer was a lost cause.

"Sit with me," he said. "It's warmer at the back. Engine heat comes up through the floor."

So I sat with him. He smelled like rain and stone dust, which is a smell I didn't know I remembered. (I did remember it, apparently. Funny what the brain keeps.)

"You're on this bus?" I said. "I thought you left town. Left the program, left the country, something dramatic."

"Left the program. Never left town." He set his book down. The cover said something about Roman roads. "I'm a stonemason. Have been for twenty-something years. Work the yards out past the harbor. Lintels, headstones, restoration work on the church."

"Stonemason. Really."

"Everyone says it like that. Really?"

"No, it suits you. It does. Your hands were always..." I stopped. "You always seemed like someone who liked working with actual things. You hated the seminar discussions."

"I hated them so much," he said, and grinned, and it was the same grin. "You were the only one who ever argued back at me about attachment theory."

"You argued better than me. That's why I remember you."

The bus swayed around a bend. He put a steadying hand out, almost touched my arm, thought better of it. The light above us buzzed, went out, came back.

"Married?" I asked.

"Was. Briefly. Twenty-five to twenty-nine. No kids. You?"

"Never. A couple of long stretches. Nobody current." Why did I say that part? I don't know. The bus was dark and the rain was loud and he was looking at me like the last twenty-seven years were a minor clerical error.

"I'm at the Llewellyn stop," I said, checking the window as the town came up. "Next one."

"That's two stops from mine," he said. Then, quick, like he'd rather get it out than hold it: "Look, it's coming down sideways and you're already soaked. I've got a flat on Sea View Row. I can walk you up under the umbrella, or walk you to your door, whichever. No agenda. I just don't like the idea of you walking that hill alone at eleven at night in this."

There was a pause about two seconds long. In my head, about four hundred things got said. I'm a professional. I hear men say "no agenda" all week and I know exactly what's under it, usually.

But Kai had always been the one who meant what he said. He'd sat by the window and said true, unglamorous things while everyone else performed.

"Walk me up, then," I said. "And if the rain's still going, I'll take that tea."

"Tea," he said. "I can do tea. The kettle works. Most other things in that flat are a work in progress."

My stop came. He got the umbrella open before the doors even finished folding back, and held it over both of us, and the rain hammered the nylon like gravel thrown from above. We went up the hill shoulder to shoulder. My heels sank in twice and he took my elbow both times, matter of fact, no fuss about it.

Sea View Row was four terraced houses and a wall. His was the end one, blue door, a boot scraper shaped like a fish. I stopped at the bottom step.

"The rain's not stopping," I said. Looking at it, you could see it wasn't. It was the kind of rain with plans.

"It's not," he agreed. "Come in, Greta. If you want. You can leave whenever you like, I'll walk you down again after."

"If I want," I repeated. And I did want, which surprised me, in the plain way it surprises you when something turns out to be simple after all.

"Then come in."

* * *

The flat was warm and small and smelled like wax and old paper. Books on the stone mantel. A fire going low, banked coals. A towel rack with three towels on it, folded, which told me something about a man who lived alone and kept three towels folded.

He took off the raincoat in the little hall, and I got my second surprise of the night, the big one.

Under the raincoat he'd been wearing his work jacket, canvas, stone dust in the seams. Under the jacket there was no shirt. There was a camisole. Black, lace-trimmed, fitted close over a body that twenty-odd years of hauling stone had made solid. And below that, where I'd assumed work trousers, a skirt. A soft grey skirt, knee length, with the hem of a slip showing at the edge of it. Stockings. Heels with a low block, sensible ones, the heels of someone who walks in them often.

He stood there holding the wet coat, and I stood there with my mouth open, and the fire popped somewhere behind us.

"I should explain," he said.

"You don't have to," I said. Then, "I mean. Only if you want to."

"I've worn them under the work clothes for years," he said, level, watching my face like a man reading stone for a fault line. "Since long before the marriage. It's not a performance and it's not a costume. It's just what I like