He said something about the grain pattern of the cedar. Callie nodded slowly like she'd heard both the answer he gave and the one he didn't. It was a Wednesday evening around 6:00 when Raymond went inside to refill the water jug and heard Callie's voice coming through the back screen door. She was on the phone. He wasn't trying to listen.
He was reaching for the jug, but the house was quiet and her words came through clearly. "It's not that I don't want to," she was saying. "I just don't know what I'm looking for anymore. I think I forgot somewhere along the way." A beat of quiet then.
"No, I'm fine. I'll talk to you later." Raymond stood at the kitchen counter for a moment. Through the window he could see Callie sitting on the edge of the half-built deck, her back to the house looking out at the yard the way people do when they're not really looking at anything. He'd assumed, in the uncomplicated way people make assumptions about others, that Callie was simply someone who had her life arranged, competent, self-possessed, easy in her own skin.
It hadn't occurred to him that she might also be carrying something she didn't put down easily. He refilled the jug and went back outside. He didn't mention what he'd heard. But the image of her sitting there alone in a way that had nothing to do with whether anyone else was around stayed with him longer than he expected. By the third week of July, the thing Raymond had been carefully not naming had become harder to ignore.
He noticed when her truck wasn't in front of her place. He noticed when it was. He noticed that Maya had started drawing pictures that included a figure with curly hair standing next to a figure with a tool belt. And he noticed that he didn't correct her when she labeled the curly-haired figure Callie in purple crayon. He bought a new coffee mug.
He didn't throw out the old one. It felt wrong to somehow like discarding evidence of who he'd been before he started wanting things again. The afternoon of the hook happened on a late Friday in July when the heat had settled over Providence like a hand pressed flat against the city. They were finishing a section near the far railing. Raymond was supposed to be reading the measurements on the blueprint in his hands, but he'd read the same line four times and absorbed nothing.
Callie was bent over the board, the DeWalt moving with the efficiency of someone who'd long since stopped thinking about the tool and was only thinking about the work. He didn't plan what he said. That was the honest truth of it. "At this rate," he said, "you're never going to find a husband, Callie." It came out light, deflective, the verbal equivalent of a step taken sideways.
The kind of joke a man makes when he wants to say something real and doesn't quite have the nerve. Callie looked up. She held his gaze for a moment with an expression that was patient in the way only someone paying very close attention can be patient. Then she smiled small, certain like she'd seen the real question underneath the joke and decided to answer that one instead. "Then maybe," she said, "you're the reason why."