Page 14 of Held By the Stubborn Mountain Man
I look at Rivet.
Rivet looks at my pocket.
Wrench lifts his head from below the sideboard.
Penny opens one eye.
"What is happening?" Maple says, watching the dogs.
"I don't know," I say. This is a lie. Rivet has known about the box since the night I brought it home. She sniffed my jacket for thirty seconds and then sat on my foot and looked at me in a way that could only meanget on with it.Apparently, she has decided that today is the day.
She is not wrong.
I put my coffee down.
Maple turns around and looks at me. Something in my face must be different because she goes still in that particular way of hers. Fully present. Fully paying attention. The way she was in the back parlour the first time. The way she's been every time it mattered.
I get the box out of my jacket pocket.
It's not a big box. It doesn't need to be. The ring inside is a narrow gold band with a single oval stone, deep green, the colour of the library wallpaper she had a conservator come up from the coast to assess. I found it at an estate sale in November and I knew immediately. I have been carrying it for three weeks because I am, as she has noted on multiple occasions, stubborn.
She looks at the box. She looks at me.
"Nash," she says.
"I fixed a pipe," I say. "At midnight. In October. And everything after that was consequence." I open the box. "I want the rest of the consequences. All of them. For as long as this house stands."
She puts her hand over her mouth.
Rivet makes a small sound from the middle of the kitchen floor. Unmistakably smug.
Wrench gets up from below the sideboard and comes and leans his entire weight against my leg. I brace.
Penny gets up from her towel and walks to Maple and sits on her foot. She has not voluntarily approached a human being in six months. She looks up at Maple with her ancient, deaf, utterly certain eyes and does not move.
Maple looks down at Penny. Then at the ring. Then at me. Her eyes are bright and her hand is still over her mouth. The pearl earrings are in. The flour is still on her wrist. The hotel she built out of nothing but stubbornness and her great-aunt's letters is full of guests and awards and people who drove three hours to stay one night in a room she made with her own hands.
She did all of that. I just kept the pipes running.
"Yes," she says. "Obviously yes. Nash, obviously."
I put the ring on her finger. She throws both arms around my neck and I pick her up off the floor because I can and because she's mine. She laughs, that real low surprised laugh I have been collecting since October, and I feel it against my jaw.
Rivet barks once. Sharp and satisfied. The bark of a dog whose long-running project has reached its correct conclusion.
Wrench sits down on both our feet. Penny has not moved from her spot and shows no intention of moving.
We are, all five of us, exactly where we're supposed to be.
"The kettle," Maple says, into my neck.
"It can wait," I say.
"Yes," she says. "It can."
Through the kitchen window, the gate sits open on its hinge, true and quiet, exactly as it should.
