The Morning After the End

Evangeline woke up to an arm across her ribs and a ceiling she didn't recognize. Then she did recognize it. Water stain in the corner shaped like a dog. Al's ceiling. Al's arm. Al's bed.

Oh no.

She lay still and did the math. Two beers at the Rusty Anchor, maybe three. The argument with Maisie, which had started about parking and ended with Maisie saying "you're gonna die in that workshop and nobody will find you for a week." Then the walk. Then his door. Then, apparently, everything after his door.

She'd been thirty-three when her husband died three years ago. She was thirty-six now, and last night she'd walked across town in the dark to spite her own grief, and the grief had won, and so had Al, whoever that made the loser.

Al was a werewolf. That part hadn't changed. He slept like a furnace, and his arm weighed about what a two-by-four weighs, which she knew because she lifted two-by-fours for a living. She was a carpenter. She rebuilt Victorian houses and she had rebuilt her own life and last night she'd torn a section of it back out like rotten siding.

Careful now. She lifted his arm, finger by finger, the way you ease a clamp off glue that hasn't set. He grumbled in his sleep. She slid out. Floor was cold. Her clothes were in a pile by the door, sorted wrong, one of his socks mixed in with her stuff, which felt like a bad omen or a good joke depending on how mean she felt.

She got her jeans on standing up, which at her age was a small victory, and she had one arm through her shirt when the bed creaked.

"Hey," Al said. His voice was rough with sleep. He was up on one elbow, hair everywhere, and he was smiling.

That was the problem. That smile. Soft and hopeful, as a dog hearing its name. She knew that smile. Two years she'd known that smile, and it meant he thought last night was a beginning.

Her stomach dropped like a mis-set joist.

"Morning," she said. Flat as a level.

"Morning." He stretched. "You're up early."

"Yeah, well." She pulled the shirt the rest of the way on. "Thanks for the night."

She heard it land. She'd meant it to land like that, dead and dry as old paint, and it did, and she watched the smile flicker.

"That's it?" he said.

"That's what we agreed on. Sort of. Neither of us said much."

"Evangeline."

"Don't." She found her boot. "Don't do the full-name thing. I'm a grown woman, I know what I did."

"Do you?" He got out of bed, and she made herself look at the wall instead, at a painting of the harbor he'd never finished. "Because I've got coffee downstairs and about two years of things to say, and you're not leaving before either one."

"I've got a job site at eight."

"It's five forty. I heard your phone buzz."

She stopped with one boot half on. "You checking my phone now?"

"It buzzed on the nightstand. Next to my face. Maisie. She asked if you survived."

"Great. Wonderful. My friend and my mistake are texting."

He laughed at that, short, no joy in it. "Stay there." He went downstairs in his boxers like it was July, and she heard the coffee maker, and she stood there with her boots in her hand and did the math again on the window. Ground floor. Second. Second. She wasn't climbing out a second-story window over a hardware store in October in her socks. Even for her, that was a lot.

He came back with two mugs and set one on the dresser and planted himself in the doorway, which was a move, because the doorway was narrow and he was not.

"Move, Al."

"Hear me out first. Ten minutes. Then the door's open and I'll help you carry your boots to your truck myself."

"I don't want coffee."

"It's good coffee. Howard sends it to me. The man retired from teaching and took up bean snobbery, it's all he talks about."

Against her will, the corner of her mouth moved. She hated that. "Ten minutes."

"Nine, if you're nice."

"I'm never nice before six."

He handed her the mug and she drank it because it was, annoyingly, good coffee. She sat on the edge of the bed because there was nowhere else, and he sat in the desk chair, backwards, arms on the backrest, the way he used to sit in her workshop while she sanded and he talked about shows he was never going to submit to.

"I've been thinking," he said.

"Congratulations."

"Evangeline." He rubbed his face with both hands. "You came to my door at eleven at night, drunk enough that I made you drink water first, and furious at somebody. Me, mostly, I think, or the world wearing my face. And I let you in, and I'm not sorry I did, but I'm not gonna pretend last night was nothing either. So. Ten minutes."

"Nine," she said, into the mug.

"Fine. Nine. Here's mine." He took a breath. "I've been in love with you since before we were together, and I was in love with you after, and I never once said it out loud, and I think that is the entire reason you left."

She stared at him. The radiator ticked. Somewhere below them, on the main street, a delivery truck was backing up with that stupid beep.

"You didn't say it," she agreed. "Not once in two years."

"Because saying it felt like a promise and I didn't know what kind I could keep. You were..."

"Say it. You started it."

"You were drowning," he said. "Your husband had been dead three years and you were still under the water. And I was treading water next to you going, hey, isn't it nice out here, look how free we are, no plans, no weights, isn't freedom great. And you needed an anchor and I was offering you a kite."

She hadn't expected him to see it that way. She'd spent two years telling the story the other direction, that he was a man-child who wouldn't commit, which was true, but it was only half the truth and she'd known it.

"Say the rest," she said quietly.

"Two years ago you sat me down in your workshop and you said, Al, I need a future, and I said, why does the future have to have a shape, and you looked at me like I'd answered my own question for you." He turned the chair a little, facing her square. "I was thirty-two then. I'm thirty-four now. I got sabbatical and I spent a year in Port Angeles painting nothing good, and then Howard sat me down and asked me what I was running from, and I couldn't answer, and that's when I knew."

"Knew what?"

"That the shapeless life was just me being scared of failing at a shaped one."

The radiator ticked. She looked at her coffee.

"Al, I didn't come here last night for a speech."

"I know why you came."

"Then you know it wasn't kind."

"It was spite," he said. "You wanted to feel something meaner than the grief for a few hours. Yeah. I got that. I signed up for it with my eyes open, because I'm a grown man and I'll take spite if it's all you're handing out." He said it without any self-pity, which was almost worse. "But Evangeline, I changed the shape of my life. I'm asking. Nine minutes in, I'm asking. What would it take?"

And that was when the memory came up, the way memories do, all at once, whole.

Three years back, almost four, she'd found him at a faculty art show because Maisie dragged her out of the workshop by the sleeve. He'd been thirty-one and loud and funny, a grad student teaching intro drawing, and he'd told her the painting she stopped in front of was technically bad and emotionally perfect and she'd laughed for the first time since the funeral. Then he'd painted the mural in her workshop, herons in a blue dawn, and she'd fallen for him the way lumber falls, slow and heavy and certain about where it's going.

And for two years it was good. It was so good. He'd cook at midnight and never ask what she was worried about tomorrow because he didn't believe in tomorrow, that was the charm of him, that was exactly the thing. And she'd sit there at the table with the bills and the will paperwork and the question of the roof on the workshop, and he'd be floating around being free, and every month it was like standing on a dock that was pulling loose from shore one plank at a time.

She'd told him once, near the end. She'd said, I need somebody who plans. He'd said, planning is how you jinx things. And she'd known then. You can love somebody and still not be able to build with them, and she was a carpenter, she knew about materials that don't bond.

"Evangeline?" Al said.

She came back to the room. Nine minutes was up. Eleven was up. The truck outside had stopped beeping.

"Al," she said, "you can't ask me that. What would it take. You can't."

"Try me."

"You want the honest answer? The honest answer is I don't know. That's the worst part. I don't know if anything would, and I don't know if nothing would, and I've got a job site at eight and I came here out of spite and you're sitting there talking about love like it's still on the table."

"It is on the table."

"Then that's your mistake," she said, and put the mug down, and stood, and this time he moved out of the doorway.

She got as far as the hallway before she stopped. Not because he said anything. Because of the wall.

There were papers pinned to it, maybe twenty of them, and under the string of cheap clip lights they were the first things in the apartment she'd actually looked at since she walked in last night. She'd been busy looking at other things. She'd been busy not looking at anything, honestly.

Now she was looking.

"Those are new," she said, without turning around.

"Yeah," Al said from the doorway behind her. "Last eighteen months or so."

They weren't sketches of anything much. A storefront, over and over, drawn from slightly different angles. A floor plan with notes in the margins. A spreadsheet done in pencil, of all things, with numbers crossed out and redone. And off to the side, on the last sheet, a sign. A hand-lettered sign that said THE HERON ROOM in plain block capitals, and under it, smaller, a second line that just said EST. 2027.

She stepped closer.

"That's not a gallery I know," she said.

"No. It's mine."

She turned around. He was leaning in the doorway of his own apartment, arms crossed, boxers and an old flannel, looking as though he had been waiting two years for her to notice the wall and knew better than to point at it.

"Since when do you make floor plans?"

"Since I started taking night classes. Business classes. At the community college in Port Angeles, when I was there, and then online when I came back. Bookkeeping, small business law, a marketing class that nearly killed me." He shrugged. "I'm bad at it. That's fine. I'm doing it anyway."

"Al."

"Thirty-one credits," he said. "I counted this morning for some reason. Thirty-one credits and a business plan and a lease option on a storefront on Pine Street that Howard says is cursed because two restaurants died in it. I'm going to open a gallery. My own. Not teaching somebody else's intro