Page 54 of The Drifter

I went still.

He said it easy, into his coffee, not looking at me. Not pushing. Just laying it down between us.

"You said you weren't going to ask."

"I said I wasn't going to ask last night." He turned his cup a quarter turn on the arm of the chair. "It's morning."

I looked out at the water for a while.

"It's a nursery," I said. "It isn't a nursery. There's nothing in it. But that's what it's for. That's what it's been for since I bought the place. I bought a two-bedroom because one bedroom felt like giving up. Then, I closed the door on the second one. I've been keeping the good morning light in there for a person who doesn't exist, for a lot of years."

He didn't say anything. He let it sit.

"I'd have been a good mother," I said. "That's not a small thing to know about yourself and never get to use. I know how to make a scared person feel safe. I do it many times a day for strangers." My voice did something and I let it. "I just never had the time. That's the whole stupid, ordinary tragedy of it. I was always at the desk. And you can't—there's no version where you tell a child hold on, baby, I've got a group checking in."

The harbor went on shining.

"Anyway," I said. "That's the room."

Clint was quiet a moment. Then he said, "You've got time now."

"I've got two days off, Clint."

"That's not what I mean and you know it." He looked at me, then. "You called in twice. World didn't end. Building's still standing. That thing you thought was going to fall down if you stepped out from under it—it's holding itself up fine." He drank his coffee. "You've got more time than you think. You've been telling yourself a story about how much room there is in your life, and the story's old. I don't think you've checked it lately."

I sat on my towel and looked at him.

Because that was the thing about this man. He didn't flatter. He'd told me I had two voices and one of them was fake. He'd told me my blouse was a uniform. And now, he was sitting naked on my balcony telling me I'd been lying to myself about my own calendar. The maddening part was that he was right.

"You know what you are?" I said.

"Tell me."

"You're a man with nothing to lose telling a woman with everything to lose that she should hold it looser." I said it without heat. "That's easy advice from where you're sitting. You carry a bag. Everything I have, I built. This condo. This view. That desk. It took me my whole life and my mother's whole life before it, and you're telling me to hold it looser like it's a thing a person can just decide."

He took that. He didn't flinch from it. He turned it over the way he turns everything over.

"You're right," he said. "It's easy for me. I don't have anything, so I can't lose anything. That's not wisdom, it's just an empty pack." He looked out at the water. "But I'll tell you what I've watched. The people holding on hardest are the ones already losing the thing. Every time. The grip is what does it. I've seen a man hold onto a rope so hard he couldn't reach the hand that was trying to pull him up."

We sat with that.

"Who was that?" I asked. "The man with the rope."

"Nobody," he said, which meant somebody, and I let it be, the way he let my things be.

The phone rang in the drawer inside.

I knew it was ringing before I heard it, the way you know. And I knew who it was, too, because there is exactly one person who would call instead of text after I'd said talk soon.

I got up. Clint watched me go. I felt him watching, and I didn’t reach for anything to put on. A day ago, I couldn’t have walked to answer a phone without a robe.

I got the phone out of the drawer.

Izzy.

I stood in my bedroom, with the man I'd broken my promise for sitting bare on my balcony behind me, and I looked at her name lighting up my phone. I didn’t answer it.

I let it ring out.