Chapter 10: The Clawfoot Tub

My flat over the bakery on Mill Street smelled of yeast and cinnamon by five in the morning.

By ten on Monday night, it smelled of Gunnar.

He filled the doorway of my kitchen with a bag of groceries in each arm.

"You said you had no food," he said.

"I said I had cereal."

"That is not food."

He put the bags on the counter and looked around my tiny living room.

He took in the stacks of paperbacks and the secondhand sofa.

"It's small," I said.

"It's yours."

"That's the same thing."

"It's a good thing," he said, and kissed me.

He cooked for me, badly, because he had not used my stove, and I laughed at him the whole time.

We ate sitting on the floor with the plates on the coffee table.

Afterwards I ran a bath in the old clawfoot tub.

The hot water on Mill Street is the one thing the bakery owner never complains about.

"Come in," I said.

"It won't hold me."

"It held a blacksmith in nineteen-ten."

He laughed and undressed, and the tub took him with a groan.

I climbed in between his knees with my back against his chest.

The water came up to our shoulders, and it was warm, and he wrapped both arms around me.

"Tell me something," he said into my wet hair.

"What?"

"Something you haven't told anyone."

I looked at the steam on the window.

"When I was twenty-four I was offered a fellowship in Edinburgh," I said.

"Two years, paid, to study a collection of Norse manuscripts."

"The dream."

"The dream. I got the letter on a Tuesday."

"What did you do?"

"I told my fiance," I said.

"He said, we're meant to be here.

He said it was fate that we'd found each other in Duluth, and that if I left, I'd be throwing it away."

Gunnar's arms tightened.

"I believed him," I said. "I turned it down."

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