Here So Far Away(39)

“I know,” Francis said. “That’s why I want to do it.”

He walked down the slope a ways. “Every day I wake up and open the window and I can’t believe how beautiful it is. Look at those trees.”

I joined him, the water from our clothes dripping onto the ground like raindrops from an eaves trough after a storm. The valley was alight with fall colors, Rupert’s blueberry patch a lava-like spread of deep pinks and reds. “You’ve seen better trees than this, I’m sure.”

“I know it’s hard for you to believe it, but in this one way, it’s better here. And it’s better in there”—he nodded toward the house—“because of you. And better at work too. So thanks.”





Eighteen


It started with “The Fish,” I think, and got stronger at the pumpkin regatta, but really took hold when I went to clean the bathroom sink.

It wasn’t Rupert’s fingernail I found there. He liked to sit in an old rocking chair on the side veranda and file his nails while he looked over the fields. And here’s the thing: If you see a fingernail in a rose-colored bathroom sink—or anywhere—and you do not want to murder its owner for the offense of leaving it for someone to find, when not too long ago that same person’s tea bag crimes were enraging, and if sweeping said nail into the garbage can feels intimate and homey and leads you to wonder if he has any dirty laundry you could take care of, then you are in a new kind of trouble.

Each week the temperature had dropped one degree outdoors and warmed one degree between me and Francis. We no longer moved around each other like accidental contact would be nuclear, though we were still a smidge too polite, a touch too agreeable—not like people who had made out but also not like people who were over the fact that they’d made out.

I’d watched him race for the detachment at the regatta—a fierce contest, with accusations that the fire marshal’s vessel was leaking because it’d been tampered with, possibly by the handbell choir. Francis had to give him a tow, and still came in second. When he climbed out of his giant pumpkin, his uniform sopping wet and covered in pumpkin slime, he saluted the crowd before accepting the second-place ribbon and handing it to me in the stands to pass on to my father.

“Lot of people said they missed seeing you this year,” I told Dad when I gave it to him.

“They’d still be missing me if I’d gone,” he said, “seeing as I’m not myself.”

That stuck with me, and I noodled it again as I finished cleaning Rupert’s upstairs bathroom. Did Dad think that people only wanted him around if he was being the tough but fair-minded and always reliable Sergeant? I’d always thought people liked him as much, maybe more, when he was strutting along the dock in his purple tutu.

I placed a fresh bar of herbal mint soap—Francis’s favorite—in the shower and stood there staring at it. I’d gotten into the habit of doing little things for him, like shining his black work shoes and lining them neatly at the bottom of the back staircase, or stuffing the tea box to overflowing, which finally broke him of the tea bag habit. Just being friendly, right? Can’t read anything into a tea bag or a bar of soap.

Bullshite, I heard Lisa say. So clearly, I almost turned around to see if she was standing behind me.

Right. And what would Nat say, if we were exchanging more than the occasional smile? That if Francis and I were real friends, he’d be doing things for me too.

I took the soap out of the shower and brought it downstairs with the cleaning supplies, then went up and put it back and then took it out again.

“Get it together, Frances,” I muttered, forcing myself to drop it in the dish for the third time.

Francis came home before I could change my mind again. “I’ve been meaning to ask you how the chords are going,” he said, pulling off the shoes I’d polished for him. He tossed them in the direction of the mudroom off the kitchen.

“Great.”

“Show me your left hand.”

I held it up, and he crossed the freshly scrubbed linoleum and touched the pads of his fingers to mine. I’d backed into the kitchen counter as he came toward me, and a drawer handle was now digging into the back of my hip. I could also feel a faint throbbing in my hand—was it his pulse or my pulse? Maybe he felt it too—or standing like a pair of mimes got too awkward.

“No calluses,” he said, heading for the fridge.

“I don’t callus.”

“Not if you don’t practice, you don’t.”

I escaped upstairs again, where I had nothing left to do, so I changed Rupert’s sheets sooner than they needed it. I crept down, slipped the pink tennis shoes I’d taken to wearing around the farmhouse into my bag, and grabbed my coat from the banister. The top button, the button that had been hanging loose for weeks, was tightly sewn in place. My mother or . . . ?

Francis was in the doorway, holding two guitars. “Hey. Thanks,” I said.

He shrugged. “Before you go, come in here and show me what you’ve been doing.”

I put the coat back on the banister and followed him into the living room, where Rupert was dozing in his yellow rocker. “Oh!” he said, jerking awake. “Very good.”

The cheery wood guitar Francis handed me was so much better than my old beater. Not only did mine not have a good sound, there was also the rack situation. If I tucked my chest behind the guitar, I felt like I was miles away from the strings and my shoulders and ribs would begin to ache within minutes. The alternative was to use the top of the guitar as a breast display shelf. This guitar of Francis’s was thinner, slicker, accommodated my chest behind the instrument, and it rang out beautifully.