Between Things

The car that came up Cedar Hill at nine-fifteen Monday night had one taillight, and June knew it before it made the last turn, because she had paid for the other one twice.

She was at the table with the graph paper. She’d drawn the tent for the fourth time — a rectangle in the gravel lot, twenty by thirty, with the line running from the side door out to it that said 200 ft cord — grange — and she’d been sitting there with the pencil not moving for ten minutes when the headlights swung across the sawhorse. One headlight, actually. The other had gone the color of weak tea.

She put the pencil down.

Across the turnaround, Gray’s kitchen door opened. She heard it — the brass knob, the fir floor — and saw the line of light fall across his porch and down his steps, and he was standing in it in the gray thermal with his hand on the frame, looking at a hatchback that had been silver once and was mostly primer now, pulled crooked beside her car with the engine still running like it wasn’t sure it was allowed to stop.

The driver’s door opened. A long leg came out. Then the rest of him, unfolding — six-two, all of it, the height that had gone to exactly one Callahan and skipped the other — in a canvas jacket that wasn’t warm enough and a knit cap and a duffel bag over one shoulder that she’d bought him for his twenty-first birthday.

He looked up at the garage. He looked at the porch, and the man in the door of it, and lifted one hand.

“Evening,” said Cormac Callahan, to a fire lieutenant he’d never met, in the voice that had gotten him out of every room he’d ever needed to leave.

Gray didn’t say anything. He looked at June’s brother for exactly as long as he’d have looked at a room for exits, and then he looked up at her door, and she was already on the landing with her hand on the rail.

“It’s my brother,” she said, across the gravel.

He nodded once. He went back inside. The line of light went out.

Cormac came up the stairs. The third tread creaked and he stopped on it and looked down at his boot like it had said something.

“That’s on purpose,” June said.

“The stair?”

“I like it. I know where I am.”

He came the rest of the way up and stood on the landing with the duffel and looked at her, and then he put his arms around her and picked her up off her feet, which he’d been doing since he passed her at fourteen, and she let him, and the coat he had on smelled like diesel and cold and the inside of a car somebody had been living in.

“Hey, June.”

“Hey, Mac.”

He set her down. He looked over her shoulder into the apartment — the lamp, the plants, the window seat with the harbor black behind it — and his face did the thing it did, the brightness coming up like a light on a dimmer, their mother’s face, exactly, the between face.

“Look at this,” he said. “Look at you. You’ve got a view.”

---

He ate the crackers standing up.

He ate the crackers and the last of the yogurt and an apple she’d been saving, and he did it while walking around the apartment with his hands full, looking at things. He put his palm flat on the window seat and said “Huh.” He picked up the knots book and put it down. He read the labels on the cubbies she’d never taken off — she’d left the liquor-store box flaps she’d cut, BOOKS I HAVEN’T READ YET, taped to the inside of the lid, because she hadn’t been able to throw them out — and he laughed, once, and it wasn’t unkind.

“Mom said you’d moved,” he said. “She said ‘June’s got a place on a hill.’ I thought she meant, like, a hill. Not a — this is a hill.”

“How’d you get the address.”

“Your card. The one you sent her. It’s on the fridge.” He sat down at the table, in the chair that didn’t match, and folded his legs under it. “She reads them out loud when I call. Every one. You know that? She reads me your cards.”

June didn’t know that. She stood at the counter with her hands on the edge of it and filed it.

“Where’ve you been.”

“Bay Center.”

“Washington.”

“Oyster farm. Willapa. It was good, June, it was really — I was good at it. You’re out on the flats at four in the morning in waders with a headlamp and the tide’s going out and it’s just you and the birds. I could’ve done that for a while.” He turned the apple core in his fingers. “Then the season went and they kept four guys and I wasn’t one of the four. And Kayla’s got a kid now, so the apartment was — I wasn’t going to make that a thing.”

“Kayla.”

“You’d have liked her.”

“I’m sure I would’ve.”

He heard it. He looked up at her with the brightness still on and something underneath it, and for a second he was six years old at the kitchen table in a house with a closed door down the hall, and she was nine and knew where the cereal was.

“I’m not asking for money,” he said.

“Okay.”

“I’m not. I’ve got — there’s a guy in Garibaldi who runs a charter, he said come down after Christmas, he’s got a deckhand spot opening. That’s three weeks. I just need somewhere to put the bag.” He set the apple core on the table. “A couch.”

“I don’t have a couch.”

He looked around. He looked at the bed against the wall with her quilt on it and the window seat and the pine floor, and his face did the arithmetic she’d already done.

“I’ll take the floor,” he said.

“No.”

“June —”

“You’re six-two. You’ll sleep with your feet in the kitchen.” She was already moving. She was pulling the quilt off the bed and the second blanket from the bottom drawer of the dresser that didn’t quite close, and she carried them across the room and laid them on the pine under the window seat, in the strip of floor between the seat and the foot of the bed, and she folded the blanket in thirds so it made a pad and put the quilt over it. “I’m short. I fit. Take the bed.”

“You don’t have to —”

“I know I don’t have to.”

He stood there for a second. He was very tall in her small room, and his hands were empty, and he looked at the pallet on the floor and then at her, and she watched him decide. She’d watched him decide a hundred times. He’d been six and she’d made his lunch, and he’d been eleven and she’d signed his permission slip in their mother’s hand, and he’d been nineteen and she’d wired him two hundred dollars from a library in Eugene without asking what for, and every time he’d looked at her exactly like this, like a person standing at the top of a slide, and then he’d let go.

“Okay,” he said. “Just tonight. Tomorrow I’ll figure out —”

“Take the bed, Mac.”

He took the bed.

She got the spare pillow. She turned off the lamp. She lay down on the pine in the sweatshirt and the flannel pants with the quilt over her and the birch face of the window seat six inches from her nose, and above her, in the first cubby on the left, Firefighter Frank was on its side, cover out, where a man had put it so she’d see it the second she came through the door. She could see it now. It was the last thing she saw before she closed her eyes.

Across the room, her brother was asleep in four minutes. He’d always been able to do that.

She lay on the floor and counted his breathing, and the floor was hard, and it was fine.

---

She was up at five-forty because the floor got her up.

Everything on the left side of her body had opinions. She stood at the counter with her hands flat on it and let them, and then she filled the kettle and put it on and stood there in the dark with the harbor going from black to the idea of black, and Cormac didn’t move, because Cormac had never once in his life heard a kettle.

She made the coffee slow. Four minutes. She poured hers into the READ LOCAL mug and stood with it and looked at the white one on the rack.

It was Tuesday. He was on the hill. The captain had said you don’t come down the hill, you don’t stand on the apron with a coffee, and she’d been on the step beside him Saturday morning with her hand under his when he said it, and she’d said the cornbread’s still Saturday, and neither of them had said anything about Tuesday at 6:04, because there’d never been a Tuesday at 6:04 with him on the hill and nothing to nail.

She poured the second mug.

Her left hip caught on the third step and she stopped and breathed and went on. The turnaround was frozen and it crunched. The sawhorse stood there with nothing on it, and he was standing beside it.

Not working. That was the first thing. He was standing in the gray with his hands in his pockets and the compressor dark on the porch and nothing in a clamp, and he was looking at the road — down Cedar Hill, toward the gap in the fir, toward a brick building he wasn’t allowed to drive to — and he turned when he heard her, and his face wasn’t doing anything, and his eyes went over her once the way they did.

They stopped.

She didn’t know what he saw. Her hair was down because she hadn’t found the clip. She was walking with her weight on the right. She had a mug in each hand and she’d come across forty feet of shell in her sneakers with no coat, and she stopped in front of him and held the white one out, and he took it, and he didn’t drink.

“You slept on the floor,” he said.

She should have said how do you know. She didn’t have the energy to pretend.

“He’s six-two.”

“It’s your bed.”

“It’s one night. He’s got a thing in Garibaldi after Christmas.”

“That’s three weeks.”

“I know how long it is.” She drank. The coffee was too hot and she drank it anyway. “He’s my brother, Gray. He showed up with a bag. What was I going to —”

“Put him on the floor.”

“He wouldn’t fit.”

“He’d fit. He’d fit with his feet in the kitchen and he’d have slept fine, because he’s twenty-six and he’s been sleeping in a hatchback.” He turned the mug in his hands. He said the next thing to it. “He let you.”

She didn’t answer that.

Above them, her door opened.

Cormac came out onto the landing in her quilt. He had it around his shoulders like a cape and his hair was flat on one side and he stood at the rail in the cold with his bare feet on the cedar and looked down at the two of them at the sawhorse with the harbor coming up gray behind him, and he smiled, the whole smile, the one that had gotten a girl named Kayla to give him a key.

“Morning,” he said. “You must be the fireman.”

Gray looked up at him.

“Lieutenant,” he said.

“Lieutenant. Right. Sorry.” Cormac leaned on the rail. It held, because it was thirty-four inches and code. “This your place? The big one?”

“It’s the captain’s.”

“Huh. June said you built the — she said you did the porch. That’s good work. My dad did framing for a while, I know what good work looks like.” He said it easily, like a man handing over a card, and June stood in the gravel and heard her brother say my dad did framing about a man who’d done framing for eleven months in 1998 and left in the twelfth, and she didn’t correct it, because she never had. “Is there coffee? I smelled coffee.”

“On the counter,” June said.

“You’re the best.” He turned to go in and stopped. “Hey — you got a spot in town? Somewhere I could pick up a few days? I’ve got three weeks and I’m not going to sit on your floor.”

“You’re not on the floor,” Gray said.

Cormac looked at him. The smile stayed. It stayed exactly where it was, and something behind it did the arithmetic again, faster this time, and June watched her brother look at a stocky man in a thermal shirt holding a white mug and understand precisely who he was and what he’d meant, and decide not to hear it.

“Right,” Cormac said. “No. She wouldn’t let me.” He lifted a hand off the rail. “Nice to meet you, Lieutenant.”

He went in. The door shut.

Gray stood there with the mug.

“He’s not a bad person,” June said.

“I didn’t say he was.”

“He’s — it’s the between. Our mother has it. She’s bright and then she’s not, and he got the bright and never got the not, and he doesn’t know what to do with a season ending.” She heard herself and didn’t stop. “He gets people to give him things. He doesn’t ask. He just stands there being Mac and people hand him the key. It’s not his fault. He learned it from a house where the only way to get anything was to —”

She stopped.

He was looking at her. He was looking at her the way he’d looked at the box that said BOOKS I HAVEN’T READ YET with the label facing him, and she knew what he’d read, and she looked at the harbor.

“Drink your coffee,” she said. “I’ve got to open.”

She went back across the gravel. She let the third tread creak. She stood in her kitchen while her brother drank the last of the press and told her about oysters, and she said mm in the right places, and she found the clip finally in the pocket of the cardigan she’d worn Sunday and put her hair up, and when she left for town at seven-twenty Cormac asked for the car keys and she gave them to him, because he’d said he’d look for work in Tillamook, and she believed him, because she always had.

The white mug was on her bottom step when she came out. Clean. Upside down.

She stood over it a second longer than she needed to. Then she picked it up and went to work.

---

The library did what the library did. Twenty-three at Tuesday story hour, without the department, with Owen’s rope around his wrist and Ms. Iverson’s class on a field trip to the cheese factory. Priya came with both children and no oranges and said “Your brother’s in town” before June had finished stamping her book, because Cormac had stopped at the bakery on his way out of Harbor Point and Marguerite had given him a scone and he had, apparently, called her ma’am in a way she’d found worth reporting.

“He’s tall,” Priya said.

“He got all of it.”

“He said he’s a fisherman.”

“He’s between things.”

Priya looked at her. Priya had a baby on her front and a toddler on a leash and a face that had been tired since October and was less tired now, and she looked at June across the circulation desk for a second longer than a person needed to.

“You look like you slept on a floor,” she said.

Nell called at noon. June said “Good morning” and got it right, finally, because it turned out the way to sound normal to a woman who heard the edges of things was to be so tired you didn’t have any.

“Walt says there’s a car up your hill with one taillight,” Nell said.

“That’s Cormac.”

“The brother.”

“You know about the brother?”

“I know your mother reads your cards out loud. Walt’s cousin cleans for a woman in Eugene who plays bridge with your mother’s neighbor.” Nell paused. “That’s how it works.”

“I know how it works, Nell.”

“Hm,” said Nell, and then, differently: “Where’s he sleeping.”

June didn’t answer.

“Hm,” said Nell again, and it was a whole paragraph, and she hung up.

---

Cormac wasn’t back by five.

He’d said six. She’d known he’d say six and mean seven, and she stood in the turnaround at five-fifteen with her bag over her shoulder and her lunch uneaten in it and looked at the place where her car should have been, and then she looked at the porch.

Gray was on it. He was sitting on the top step with a baluster across his knees and a block plane in his hand, and he wasn’t planing. He had the plane resting on the wood and his eyes on the road, and he’d been like that, she thought, for a while. There were three finished balusters leaning against the rail behind him, the same three that had been there Sunday. He’d had all day and the count hadn’t moved.

She went across. She didn’t decide to. She went up his steps, the steps he’d cut for one, and sat down beside him on the top one with her bag between her feet.

“How was it,” she said.

“How was what.”

“The hill. One shift on it. He said it was a measurement.”

He set the plane down.

“I stood at the sawhorse and listened for the tones,” he said. “That’s how it was. There’s no radio up here and I stood there anyway with my head turned toward Front Street like I’d hear them. At nine-forty I heard a truck on the highway and I was halfway to mine before I knew it wasn’t anything.” He looked at the baluster on his knees. “I did that eleven times.”

“You counted.”

“I count.”

She didn’t say okay. She sat there. The harbor was going the color of pewter and the first lights were on in the basin and her car wasn’t on the road.

“He’s got the car,” Gray said.

“He’s looking for work.”

“In Tillamook.”

“There’s nothing here. He’s not wrong about that.”

“He’s not wrong about anything. That’s the thing with him. He stood on your landing in your quilt and asked me where the coffee was and there wasn’t a word of it wrong.” He picked the plane back up. He looked at the edge of it. “Where’d he sleep last night.”

“You know where he slept.”

“Say it.”

“In my bed. I slept on the floor under the seat. It’s one night, Gray, it’s —”

“It’s not one night. It’s never been one night.” He said it to the plane. “He’s been sleeping in your bed since you were nine. You just moved the bed.”

She felt that land. It landed in the place under her ribs where she kept the number forty, and it sat there, and she opened her mouth to say the thing she’d said to Priya, he’s between things, and heard how it would sound out loud on this porch, and didn’t.

“You gave him the bed,” Gray said. “You made him coffee. You gave him your car. You went to work on four hours of floor with your hip going out on my stairs and you counted twenty-three kids and stamped Priya’s book and you’d have stood at that desk till nine before you said one thing about it.” He turned his head and looked at her, finally, and his face wasn’t flat. She’d seen it not flat exactly twice and both times she’d been under it. “You’d give away your own house.”

“I don’t have a house.”

“You have —”

“I have four hundred dollars a month above your garage in a room you built for me and told me was a bench.” Her voice had come up. She heard it come up and didn’t bring it down. “You have a house. You’ve got five bedrooms and a porch with three balusters on it and a kitchen with no doors on the cabinets and a parlor you tore to the studs and drew on, and you sleep on a mattress in the dining room next to a bed in a box that’s been sitting there so long the tape’s gone yellow. I’ve seen it. I walked past it for a tape measure. There’s dust on top of it with nothing in it, Gray, there’s not even a ring where you set a coffee cup down, that’s how long it’s been since you touched it.” She was standing. She hadn’t decided to stand. “Don’t sit on your porch and talk to me about floors.”

He was very still.

“That’s different,” he said.

“How.”

He didn’t answer.

“How is it different. You built a seat for feet that don’t reach and you drew my plant on your wall and you sent me in there to find it and then you shut the door. You sleep six feet from a bed you drove to Portland to buy and you’ve never once opened the box. I asked you on a seawall what the house was for and you said you didn’t know and I believed you, and I stood in your parlor with a tape in my hand and I asked you who sits there and you walked into your kitchen and shut the door like I’d caught you with something.” She was breathing hard. “So I’m asking. Not ‘I don’t know.’ Not ‘it’s the captain’s.’ What is it for.”

“Why can’t you let anyone carry anything.”

“That’s not —”

“Sixty pounds down motel stairs.” He was on his feet now too. He was on his feet on the step below hers and it put them eye to eye and she’d never once in her life been eye to eye with him and she couldn’t look away from it. “Alone. Because if Nell touched it she might drop it, and if she dropped it you’d owe her the picking up. Five hundred signatures by yourself in a parking lot with a clipboard that says Carol on the back, until you were made to ask. You stood on your landing Saturday and sent your mother six-forty with your thumb while I was six feet from you on my knees, and I asked you what you needed, and you stood there with the coffee running down your arm and there was nothing there. You told me. You said people don’t ask you that. And I’ve watched you every day since try to find the place where the answer goes and there isn’t one, June, there’s a hole where you took the shelf out so you’d have room to carry everybody else’s —”

“Don’t.”

“Why can’t you —”

“Because if I stop —”

She stopped.

The wind came around the garage. It pushed her cardigan against her legs and lifted the hair that had come out of the clip, and she stood on his top step with her mouth open and the rest of the sentence right there, and she couldn’t get it out. If I stop they don’t come back. It was the whole thing. It was the church ladies and the granola bars and the neighbor with the car, and it was a nine-year-old at a kitchen table writing thank-you notes so hard her hand cramped, and she had never once said it out loud to another living person and she stood there and found that she couldn’t say it to this one either. Not on his porch. Not with him looking at her like that. Not with a red tag folded in a box with the lid on forty feet behind her that he didn’t know about, that she’d kept from him the way he’d asked her to keep the other thing, that made every word she’d just said about doors a thing she’d have to answer for later.

He was waiting. He’d asked her a question and he was standing on the step below her waiting for the answer the way he’d waited on her stairs with a drill in his hand, and this time she didn’t have the excuse of surprise. She knew exactly what the answer was.

She didn’t say it.

He didn’t say his.

They stood there. The harbor lay pewter below them with the basin lights on it and the wind came and went, and June understood that she was standing on the porch of a house she’d just demanded an accounting for, refusing to give one, and that the man in front of her was doing the exact same thing, and that they were both right, and that being right was not going to get either of them off this step.

A headlight came up Cedar Hill.

One. Weak tea. It swung across the sawhorse and up the side of the garage and across the two of them standing eye to eye on the top step of the porch with a foot of cold air between them, and held there for one long second the way another set of headlights had held on another night, and then the hatchback swung in beside Gray’s truck and stopped and the engine coughed and quit.

Cormac got out. He had a paper bag from somewhere. He looked at the porch.

“Hey,” he said. “Sorry. There was a thing at the — is everything —”

June went down the steps.

She went past Gray without touching him. She crossed the gravel and stopped in front of her brother and held out her hand, and he looked at it, and then he looked at her face, and whatever he saw there made him put the keys in her palm without a word.

“Bed’s yours,” she said. “There’s crackers. Turn the plants a quarter turn toward the window before you sleep, all four, left to right, and don’t overwater the — don’t water anything. Just turn them.”

“June —”

“I’m going to work.”

“It’s five-thirty —”

“I know what time it is, Mac.”

She got in the car. It smelled like her brother — diesel and cold and a scone — and the seat was back a foot from where she kept it and she didn’t fix it. She started it. The one headlight came on. She backed out past a stocky man standing on a porch with a block plane in his hand who was not allowed to come down the hill, and she didn’t look at him, and she went down Cedar Hill through the gap in the fir with the branches scraping the roof and her hands steady on the wheel.

They were completely steady. That was the worst part.

---

The green door opened the way it always did.

She didn’t flip the lights. She stood in the dark hall with her hand on the switch and thought about a man in a tan windbreaker on a step stool saying cloth, and she took her hand off the switch and left it, because nothing on the thirteenth that wasn’t on the twelfth was a rule, and she was good at rules, she had a doctorate in them.

The main room was a floor. Forty-one by twenty-six of industrial carpet with the ranges against the walls where she and a lieutenant had rolled them Thursday morning with the lights half on and Rosie’s truck going by. The streetlight over the door came in the front window and lay across the open carpet in a long yellow shape with the beige computer’s dead screen catching a corner of it, and the stacks stood around the edges like people who’d moved to the walls to let something happen in the middle.

She went to the 600s.

They were against the north wall now, the double-sided range turned so one face showed and the other was six inches from brick, and she stood in front of the third shelf and put her hand flat on the spines where Nell’s fingers had been curled around the edge when she went down. Then she got down on the carpet.

She lay on her side with her back against the bottom shelf and her cardigan pulled around her and her bag under her head, and the 600s stood over her in the dark going up six feet, and she could smell them. Paper and dust and the carpet cleaner from the children’s room that had never quite come out of the building. She’d left his coat on the newel post. She’d seen it hanging there when she came out for the keys and she’d walked past it and she was cold now and it was the right thing and it was awful.

She reached up without looking and pulled a book off the shelf above her.

She held it in the dark. Hardcover. Heavy. The laminate on the spine label had a ridge she could feel with her thumb, and she ran her thumb along it and tried — the way she’d watched an eighty-year-old woman do it for eleven weeks — to know what it was. The weight. The roughness of the cloth. The way the pages fell when she tilted it.

She couldn’t. She had no idea what it was. She held a book she couldn’t read in a building she couldn’t light, on the floor of a room she’d cleared for a hundred and twenty-eight people who were coming Saturday to a thing that a woman with a silver bob had told her to think very carefully about, and across the harbor and up a hill a man was standing on a porch with a question she hadn’t answered, and her brother was in her bed, and her mother’s rent was paid.

She put the book back. She found the gap by feel and slid it in and it went flush, and she didn’t know if it was in the right place, and there was nobody in the building to tell her.

She didn’t count anything. She lay there with her hand on the shelf until the streetlight had moved off the computer and onto the carpet, and then she closed her eyes, and it was the first night in three months she’d slept without a window that faced the water.

---