" "You going through again? " I said. She stood for a moment looking somewhere past my left shoulder which I'd noticed before was something she did when she was thinking. I thought about it. She said somewhere I was going.
I thought about whether it was a place I needed to go or a place I was just going. I said what you decide. She looked at me then. I don't know yet. She said I wanted to bring the horse back.
I put the horse in the paddock. I said, "Coffee's on. " She stayed. Not that day. She was gone for another week, but she came back.
And then she went again and came back again. Each time she returned, there was a little more that was hers. A pouch left on the shelf by the door, a knife I hadn't seen before, a dried bundle of something that smelled like sage, and something sharper that I couldn't name hung on the peg by the window. We didn't have a conversation about it. That wasn't how we did things.
We just moved around each other and the space rearranged itself accordingly. By the time the spring grass came in, I'd fixed the barn door hinge. I don't know exactly when I decided to do it. I just found myself with the tools out one afternoon, the old hinge off, the new one set, the door swinging clean and silent. I stood back and pushed it a few times to test it.
She was standing in the yard behind me. She said, "Took you long enough. " I said, "I had my reasons for waiting. " "What reasons? " I put the tools back in the box and picked it up.
Seemed like the kind of job worth doing right when there was someone to notice it. She was quiet for a moment. Then she said, "I noticed it. " And went back to what she'd been doing. That was as close as either of us got to saying anything about what was happening.
There's a particular time of evening in the summer when the light comes flat and gold across the grass and everything goes still and the whole country looks like it's holding its breath. Clara had liked that hour. I'd gotten so I didn't watch it because it was hers and watching it without her felt like a kind of theft. I was sitting on the porch one evening that hour, not quite watching, when Seiya came out and sat on the step below me, which was where she usually sat, leaning back against the post. We didn't say anything for a while.
Then she said, "You don't look at the light. " I said, "I used to. " She let that sit. She understood something about the shape of what I didn't say. After a while, she said, "I had a husband.
He died 5 years ago. I said, "I'm sorry. It was a long time to be by myself. " She said, "You start to forget the shape of having someone. " I said, "Yes.