Chapter 9: The Window Seat

Eben's POV

I wrote Noted on the back of a trivia card because it was the only word I had that wasn't please.

I knew that by the time I got to my truck.

I knew it by the time I got to the Point house, and by midnight I knew it so well I'd stopped being able to hear anything else.

It was Friday now, the next night.

I was on the floor of the bay window with a circular saw, a stack of old porch rail and the dark coming in over the water.

The wood was the original porch rail from the 1925 house, pulled off in the first week and stacked in the shed.

Heart pine, close-grained, a hundred years of weather in it.

I had cut four boards to length and was sanding the fifth.

There was a Galley napkin pinned to the wall above my head with a roofing nail.

It was soft as cloth now.

I'd kept it in my truck visor for four years, going brown at the creases.

I'd taken it down tonight and flattened it on my knee and driven the nail in myself.

She had drawn it in blue ballpoint, in about a minute and a half, laughing at herself.

It showed a bay window with a bench under it and a little cushion drawn in cross-hatching.

There was a stove to one side, with smoke coming out of it.

A small woman sat on the bench with her feet up and a cup.

Underneath, in her fast slanting handwriting, she'd written: someday.

She had drawn it the week she came back from Boston.

I did not know why she'd come back.

She'd said, I changed my mind, and had looked at me, waiting, and I had said all right.

The day after, I had gone to an estate sale in Thomaston and bought a ring.

I measured the seat along the window again.

Fifty-eight inches.

It would take her feet and a cat and a stack of books.

Nobody had asked me to build it, and nobody would know.

I sanded for a long time with the sound of the water below the porch and the overhead light buzzing on its cord.

My hand hurt.

The stitches were out, but the scar pulled when I closed my fist, and every time it pulled I felt her thumb on my wrist, steady, counting.

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