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“I’ll be an hour.”
“You’ll be two.”
She’s right. It’s two.
Delgado’s fence took more than wind. The post rotted out at the base, which he didn’t know and I don’t tell him, because a man in his eighties doesn’t need to hear that the thing he built forty years ago finally gave up. We dig out the old post. We set a new one. He hands me screws one at a time and tells me the same story about his late wife twice, and I let him, because some stories are better the second time and because he doesn’t have many people left to tell them to.
The whole time, in the back of my head, there’s Olivia.
There’s been Olivia in the back of my head for two weeks. It’s not a problem, exactly. It’s more like a radio I can’t quite turn off, playing low under everything else. Her voice going dry when she’s nervous. Her face in the driveway Saturday night, turned up to mine, and the twelve inches of good sense it took not to close that gap.
I decide something in the midst of my thoughts.
I’m going to ask her on a real date. Not coffee. Not friends. A date, with the word date in it, so neither of us has room to pretend anymore.
I just have to figure out how to say it to a woman who spooks like a deer every time something feels like more than she planned for.
I finish Delgado’s fence, turn down the twenty he tries to press on me, and walk home rehearsing it like a teenager.
Shower first. I still smell like fence and yesterday’s shift. I stand under the water longer than I need to, working out the wording, and by the time I get out I’ve got most of a plan and none of the nerve, which is about right.
I grab my phone off the dresser to text her before I lose it.
There’s already a message.
From last night. Sitting there since nine-forty, unanswered, because at nine-forty last night I was on the shoulder of a highway and my phone was locked in a station locker.
Olivia
Do you have a rec for a plumber?
She needed something, reached for me, and I wasn’t there to answer. I don’t love how much I don’t love that.
Luke
Why? What’s wrong?
Olivia
My garbage disposal isn’t working.
Luke
I’m on it. You home?
Olivia
You can fix a garbage disposal?
I grin at my reflection in the mirror like an idiot.
Luke
Yep.
What’s your address?
Three dots pop up just as fast as they disappear. She’s deciding something, probably whether letting me into her apartment counts as a violation of all the careful lines she keeps drawing between us.
