Raymond was out back before 7:00. He'd slept badly, not the restless kind of bad sleep, but the kind where you wake up having already made a decision without remembering the moment you made it. He pulled the tarp off the remaining cedar boards, stacked them near the frame, and picked up where he'd left off. 12 boards. He'd been leaving them for weeks the way a person leaves the last chapter of a book they don't want to end or a letter they don't know how to finish.
He wasn't going to leave them anymore. He worked with the kind of focus that had nothing meditative about it, just a man and a task and the sound of the DeWalt cutting clean through cedar, trying to outpace something he'd been carrying since Friday night's dinner table. The sun climbed. Sawdust gathered at his feet. He set the fifth board into place and reached for the sixth.
He heard footsteps on the grass. The DeWalt had been running loud enough to carry down the block and Callie had heard it from her place the way she always knew when he was out there before she arrived. She appeared at the edge of the deck frame holding two cups from the place on Merchant Street, and she wasn't wearing the expression he'd been bracing for, not the wounded kind, not the demanding kind. She just looked like herself standing in his backyard on a Sunday morning like she'd done a dozen times before. She held out one of the cups.
Raymond set down the drill. He took the cup, and for a long moment neither of them said anything, and the only sound was the neighborhood waking up a car somewhere, a screen door, a bird that hadn't gotten the memo about the tension. Then Raymond said, "I owe you an apology." Callie looked at him steadily. "I disappeared," he said.
"No real reason I gave you was the real reason. That wasn't fair." She didn't rush to fill the space after that. She let him have it, which somehow made it harder and easier at the same time. Raymond looked at the deck, at the 12 boards left at the frame he'd built, installed on, and returned to.
He said, "I've been afraid of this. Not you specifically, just this, any of this. The part where someone becomes something to Maya and something to me, and then I do what I apparently do, and everyone ends up worse off than before." He stopped, drank the coffee. "I don't know how to do this without worrying that I'm going to wreck it," he said.
"And I know that's not your problem to solve, but I thought you deserved to hear the actual reason." Callie was quiet for a moment looking at the half-finished deck with the expression of someone reading a structure, assessing the load, calculating what it could bear. Then she said, "Can I tell you something?" Raymond nodded. "When I moved here," she said, "I told myself I just needed to get through the first year, reset, figure out what I actually wanted instead of just moving toward whatever was next on the list."
She turned the cup in her hands. "I had a relationship end. Not badly, exactly. It just ran out. Two people going through the motions of something that had already finished.