The Kitchen Renovation Crew Stayed Three Weeks Longer Than the Quote novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: Grout

Kou sets tile on a Saturday and lets her hold the trowel; his hands stay on hers, and she locks the back door.

By ten in the morning Kou had the first row of floor tile down.

He hadn't said a word to me that wasn't a polite one.

I stood in the doorway with two mugs of coffee and watched him work.

He knelt on a pair of foam pads, with a notched trowel in one hand and a stack of plastic spacers hooked over his belt.

Each tile went down square, got pressed, got checked with the level, and got a spacer in each corner.

He did it again and again without changing the speed of his hands.

"Ms. Sundquist," he said, without turning around. "You don't have to watch. It's boring."

"I'm not bored. I picked it," I said. "I like seeing it go down."

He glanced back over his shoulder, and his glasses slid an inch down his nose.

I put the mug beside him on a bucket lid.

"Thank you," he said, and went pink again.

I stayed, and told myself I was supervising.

I told myself that again at noon, when I brought him a sandwich.

At two he asked where I wanted the pattern to land at the doorway, and I knelt down on the bare plywood to show him.

He explained why he had started the layout from the center of the room and not the wall.

He explained it carefully and in order, and I could have listened to him all day.

His voice was low and even, a little formal, and every sentence ended exactly where he meant it to.

"Can I try one?" I said.

Kou looked at me.

"It's thinset. It will ruin your hands," Kou said.

"I'll wash them."

"Your pants, then."

"They're old pants," I said.

He sat back on his heels, and there was a long moment where I could see him decide.

Then he held out the trowel.

I took the foam pad he pushed over for me and knelt beside him on the plywood.

"Hold it flat," he said. "Like this."

He put his hands over mine.

They were narrow and warm and dry in spite of the work.

The grip was firm.

But it didn't squeeze.

He drew the trowel through the thinset in long straight rows, and I let him steer.

Close up, he smelled of cement dust and laundry soap.

"Now the other direction," he said, almost into my ear. "Across the ridges. Gently."

His thumb moved.

It slid across the inside of my wrist, once, from the bone to the pulse.

I felt it all the way up my arm.

He felt me feel it.

His hands didn't leave mine.

Neither of us said anything for as long as it took to cross the row.

"That's good," Kou said. "That's right."

His voice had gone rough on the second word.

I pressed the tile into the bed myself.

It sat flat, and he nodded at it, not at me.

When he let go, he took his hands back slowly, one finger at a time.

I sat there on my own floor with my wrist burning and my breath short, forty years old and doing a thing I'd have teased a teenager for.

At five he began to clean the trowels in a bucket at the mudroom door.

I stayed at the island, pretending to write a grocery list.

He came back for his jacket, which hung on the stool next to me.

He stood there a moment with his back to me.

Then he took it, and put it in front of him, folded over his arm and held low against his belt.

He kept it there when he turned around.

I looked at his face and not at the jacket, and I'm proud of that.

He was red to the roots of his hair.

I understood exactly what the jacket was for.

I told myself there were other reasons a man held a jacket like that.

I did not tell myself very hard.

"I'm finished for the day," he said. "The tile needs to set overnight. Please don't walk on it."

"I won't."

"I'll come back Monday to check the lines." He stopped. "I mean, if you want me to."

"Kou."

"Yes?"

"What did you think I'd say?" I asked.

He looked down at the sealed tubs of grout stacked by the wall, and then at the floor, and then at me.

"Mr. Eide said you've had a hard year," he said. "And I'm only the tile guy. You've been kind to me. I know it isn't anything."

That was all he said.

He said it plainly.

I thought: I am not being kind.

I thought: I am not forty-year-old furniture you politely leave alone.

I thought: you are looking at me as a woman.

I can't remember the last time that happened before this month.

I didn't say any of it.

I stood up off the stool instead, and set my pencil down.

"You can go," I said. "I won't stop you. Go home if you want to."

His fingers tightened on the jacket.

"Ms. Sundquist."

"Or you can stay."

"I would like," Kou said, very carefully, "to be told which one."

I walked past him to the mudroom.

I locked the back door, and the deadbolt turned with a heavy click.

Then I came back through the kitchen and turned off the lights, one switch at a time.

The only glow left came from the dusk in the window, across the new tile and the two of us.

"Stay," I said.

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