Asking

The mug went out at 6:04 on Monday and came back at 6:31, clean, upside down on her bottom step, and he did not say a word.

Tuesday, same. Wednesday, same. The compressor kicked on at six and the nail gun went off on the porch rail and June carried the white mug across forty feet of shell and set it on the sawhorse under its little blue tent and walked back, and she did not look at him, and she could feel him not look at her, and it was the exact same thing they’d been doing for two weeks except that it was completely different, because now she knew what his hand felt like on the back of her neck.

Don’t.

She’d turned it over so many times it had stopped having edges. He’d said it low and he’d said it to the truck and not to her, and she had gone up her stairs and lain on her back in the dark and listened to the captain’s voice come across the gravel, slow, saying something about steps, and she had thought, very clearly, okay.

That was all. Okay. She’d grown up in a house with a door that didn’t open, and she’d learned early that you did not knock on it twice. You stood in the hallway and you were a person and you waited, and if the door opened it opened, and if it didn’t you went to school. She’d gotten very good at going to school.

So she made the coffee. She set it on the sawhorse. She went to work.

By Wednesday night she had a hundred and twelve signatures on Carol’s clipboard, and she had gotten every one of them herself, and she sat at the square table with the harbor black in the window and the box of cards open and did the math again. Three hundred and eighty-eight to go. Fifty-one days. Seven and a half a day, if she didn’t take Sundays, and the bakery was tapped and the hardware store was tapped and the post office was tapped and Dell Amundsen had personally walked her down the fuel dock and gotten her nine crabbers and then said, “That’s about all of us that come in on a Tuesday.”

Who’d you take with you today.

Nobody.

Hm.

She put the pen down. She looked at Ferdinand, who was leaning so hard toward the glass he was practically in it.

“I know,” she said. “I know.”

---

She went to the station on Thursday at four.

She’d told herself she’d call, and then she’d stood at the circulation desk with the phone in her hand for six minutes and understood that if she called she’d get the voicemail, and if she got the voicemail she’d leave a message, and if she left a message it would be long and apologetic and end with no obligation, and she’d be back where she started. So she locked the green door at three-fifty and drove up Front Street with the clipboard on the passenger seat and parked on the apron in front of the open bay.

They were all there. That was the first thing. She’d half hoped they wouldn’t be.

Sheehan was on his back under the engine on a rolling board with his boots sticking out. Rosie was on the bumper with a hose and a rag, doing something to a coupling. Fitz was in the doorway to the kitchen with a dish towel over one shoulder and a wooden spoon in his hand like a scepter, and Captain Brannigan was in the office window with his glasses on his forehead, and Gray Donnelly was up in the hose tower. She could see his boots. He was on the ladder inside it with a section of hose over his shoulder, forty feet up, and his boots were the only part of him showing, and they stopped moving when her car door shut.

June got out. She got the clipboard. She walked to the edge of the apron where the concrete met the bay floor and stopped there, because the bay was theirs, and she stood with the clipboard against her chest and a hundred and twelve signatures under her arm and made herself say it before she could dress it up.

“I’m asking.”

Rosie looked up from the coupling.

“The market’s Saturday. The waterfront one. It runs nine to two and everybody in the district who’s going to be anywhere on a Saturday in November is going to walk through it, and I’ve got a hundred and twelve signatures and I need five hundred, and I can’t get four hundred more by myself in a parking lot.” She pushed her glasses up. Her wrist was shaking and she let it. “So I’m asking. If anyone’s off Saturday. I’m asking you to come stand in a parking lot with a clipboard and be from here, because I’m not, and it turns out that matters.”

Nobody said anything for a second.

Sheehan’s board rolled. He came out from under the engine one inch at a time, feet first, then knees, then the rest of him, and lay there on his back on the concrete with a wrench in his hand and looked up at the ceiling.

“Nine’s off Saturday,” said Brannigan, from the window. He didn’t come out. He said it the way he’d said Tuesday, nine, I’ll send somebody on the phone a month ago, and it had the same weight. “All of Nine.”

“Cap —” Fitz started.

“You’re off Saturday, Fitzgibbon.”

“I know I’m off Saturday. I was going to say I’m bringing the tray.” Fitz pointed the spoon at June. “Not cookies. The other thing. Page ninety. It travels.”

“I was going to read,” Rosie said. She’d put the coupling down. “At the coffee line. I’ll read Misty at anybody who doesn’t sign. I’ve got it memorized. That’s a threat.”

“That’s assault,” said Fitz.

“It’s literature.”

June stood at the edge of the bay and looked at them and felt something go loose in her chest that she hadn’t known was tight. Sheehan was still on his back on the concrete. He turned his head an inch and looked at her sideways, upside down, with the wrench on his stomach.

“Nine,” he said.

It was the second thing she’d ever heard him say. She wrote it down in her head.

“Nine,” she said. “Thank you. Thank you, I —”

“Don’t,” said Rosie, kindly. “You asked. That’s the whole thing. Go home.”

She went. She looked up at the hose tower once, on the way to her car, and the boots were still on the ladder, and they hadn’t moved, and he didn’t come down.

---

He was there first.

She came around the corner of the cannery at eight-fifteen Saturday with two boxes of yogurt cups on the passenger seat and the clipboard under her arm, and the market was half set up — a dozen pop-up tents in the boat basin lot with their sides down against the wind, Marguerite’s coffee urn steaming on a card table, a man unloading chainsaw-carved bears from a flatbed one at a time like they were sleeping — and at the far end of the lot, where the sidewalk came down from Front Street and everybody coming from town would have to pass, there was a folding table with STATION 9 stenciled on the underside and a man in a Station Nine jacket setting a coffee can of pens on it.

He’d brought a table. He’d brought the table from the station and the coffee can from the sawhorses and he’d set it up at the gate before she got there, and when she pulled in he looked up once, and looked at her, and looked back down at the pens.

She parked. She sat for a second with her hands on the wheel.

Then she got the boxes and carried them over.

“You brought a table,” she said.

“You didn’t have one.”

“I was going to use the seawall.”

“Seawall’s wet.” He squared the coffee can to the edge of the table. He had a clipboard of his own, one of hers — she’d left the stack of thirty at the station Thursday without meaning to, and somebody had counted them out — and he set it down beside the pens. “What’s in the boxes.”

“Spider plants.” She set them down. Forty yogurt cups in two cardboard flats, each one with a runner off Ferdinand or Beatrice pushed into an inch of potting soil, some of them with three leaves and some with six and one with a root already coming out the drainage hole she’d poked with a pencil. “You sign, you get a plant. It’s a — it’s an incentive. The community engagement person said incentives matter.”

He looked at the cups for a while.

“You cut those off yours.”

“They’re babies. They make more.”

“All of them.”

“Ferdinand’s got eleven more runners going. He’s fine. He’s showing off.” She started setting the cups out in a row along the front of the table. “Beatrice is a little put out. She only had four.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He went and got the sign — she saw it when he came back around the table, a piece of white beadboard offcut with THE HARBOR POINT BRANCH IS A NECESSARY PUBLIC SERVICE painted on it in black block capitals, straight, level, in the same hand as NOT PAST HERE — and he leaned it against the front table leg, and then he stood back and looked at the whole thing, the table and the pens and the yogurt cups and the sign, the way he’d looked at the window seat.

“Okay,” he said.

The rest of them came at eight-forty in Rosie’s truck. Rosie got out with a thermos the size of a fire extinguisher and Fitz got out of the passenger side with a foil tray and Sheehan got out of the bed, where he’d apparently ridden, and stood in the lot in a canvas coat and a watch cap and looked at the boats.

“He wouldn’t sit in the cab,” Rosie said. “He said the cab’s for people who talk.”

“He’s right,” said Fitz.

June gave them clipboards. She’d rehearsed a speech — how to introduce the petition, what counted as a district resident, the address line — and she got about a sentence in before Sheehan took his clipboard out of her hand and turned around and walked across the lot toward the fuel dock without a word, and she stopped, and watched him go.

“He knows every man on that dock,” Rosie said. “He’s driven every one of them to Tillamook at some point. Let him work.”

“Is he going to say anything to them?”

“No.”

“Then how —”

“Watch.”

June watched. Sheehan walked to the end of the fuel dock where three crab boats were tied up and a man in orange bibs was coiling line, and he stopped in front of the man, and he held out the clipboard. He didn’t say anything. He held it out at arm’s length with the pen in his other hand and looked at the man with the exact face he’d made at the Headlight-Herald that first day she’d seen him, the face of a man who had already read this page and was waiting for it to be over. The man in bibs looked at the clipboard. He looked at Sheehan. Something passed between them that June couldn’t hear and wasn’t sure had words in it. The man took the pen and signed and handed it back, and Sheehan nodded once and walked to the next boat.

“Oh,” said June.

“Yeah.”

“That’s — is that a thing? That he does?”

“That’s the only thing he does.” Rosie hefted the thermos. “Give me the coffee line. I’ll be loud.”

She was loud. June could hear her from the table, forty yards off, working Marguerite’s line the way a border collie worked sheep — cheerful, relentless, and impossible to get around. “Sign it and I’ll let you have your coffee. No, I’m not Marguerite, Marguerite’s a saint, I’m the one standing between you and the urn. You live on Cedar? Great. Address. No, your address, not your mother’s. You want to hear about a pony?” A man June didn’t know signed while laughing. A woman signed and then, from the other end of the line, called “Rosie Keough, does your mother know you’re threatening people,” and Rosie called back “She taught me,” and the woman came up and signed a second time on behalf of her husband, and Rosie crossed it out and made her go get him.

Fitz was at the produce tent. He had set his tray on the farmer’s table without asking and taken the foil off and was now in an argument about kale that had drawn a small crowd.

“That’s not lacinato.”

“It’s lacinato.”

“That’s curly. Lacinato’s flat. It’s got the bumps. That’s got frills. You’re selling frills.”

“It’s a variety —”

“It’s a variety of curly.” Fitz put a square of the thing on the tray into the farmer’s hand. “Eat that. That’s page ninety. That’s lacinato. Taste the difference.”

The farmer ate it. His face did something.

“Sign the librarian’s paper,” Fitz said, “and I’ll tell you what’s in it.”

Six people signed at the produce tent in the next four minutes. June watched Fitz take the farmer’s clipboard back and look at the six names and then look at the farmer and say, “You got a mailing list?” and the farmer said “I’ve got a CSA,” and Fitz said “Then we’re going to need another sheet.”

She turned back to her own table. There were three people standing at it. She’d been watching the others so hard she hadn’t seen them come.

“Is this the library thing,” said a woman with a toddler on her hip.

“It’s the library thing.”

“Priya said.”

“Priya’s been busy.” June handed her a pen. “You sign, you get a plant. Pick one. Not that one, that one’s the runt, take the one with the — yes. That one.”

The woman signed. The toddler took the yogurt cup and put a leaf in its mouth and the woman took it out and said “It’s for growing,” and June wrote 1 on a sticky note and stuck it to the corner of the table, and then wrote 2, and then 3, and by ten she’d run out of room on the sticky note and started a second one.

Gray didn’t come back to the table. He stood at the top of the lot where the sidewalk came down, in the jacket, with his clipboard, and he said one word to every single person who walked past him.

“Library.”

That was it. That was the whole pitch. He said it flat and he held out the pen, and about half of them stopped, because a stocky man in a fire department jacket had said a word to them and held out a pen, and stopping was easier than not. And then they read the sign. And then they looked down the lot at the folding table and the row of yogurt cups and the round woman in the cardigan writing numbers on sticky notes, and about half of the half signed.

June counted the ones that walked past him and didn’t stop. She counted the ones who did. She kept the two numbers separate in her head and did not know why, and then she did know why, and stopped.

---

At eleven-forty the wind came up off the water and took the chainsaw-carver’s price sign into the boat basin, and by noon everyone had their hoods up and the lot had thinned, and June sat down on the seawall behind the table for the first time since eight.

Her feet hurt. Her hands were cold to the wrist. She’d had a cup of Rosie’s coffee at nine and nothing else, and there was a granola bar in her bag, and the bag was in the car, and the car was across the lot, and she was going to eat it later.

She got the clipboards out. She’d been collecting them — Sheehan had come back twice for fresh sheets and gone out again without a word, Rosie had run out and taken Fitz’s spare, Fitz had come back with the produce farmer’s sheet and the produce farmer’s cousin’s sheet and something that looked like a receipt with nine names on the back of it — and she laid them out on the seawall beside her in a row and started to count.

Twenty per sheet. Fourteen sheets, some full, some not. She went down them with her finger. She lost her place on the ninth one because a gull screamed and she started over.

Something landed on the clipboard in her lap.

It was half a sandwich. It was on a square of white bakery paper, torn along one edge where it had been ripped from the other half, and it was on Marguerite’s sourdough, and there was turkey in it and something red and a leaf of the frilly kale Fitz had been so exercised about, and it was sitting on top of a hundred and eighty-odd signatures in her lap, and she looked at it and did not understand what it was.

She looked up.

He’d sat down on the seawall. Not beside her — a foot off, with the corner of the table between them, and he had the other half in his hand and his eyes on the lot, and he was eating it. He didn’t look at her. He hadn’t said anything. He’d walked from the gate to the seawall and sat down and torn a sandwich in half and put half of it on her petition and started eating the rest, like it was a thing that happened, like it was the same as setting a coffee can on a table.

“I’m —” she said.

He chewed. He looked at the boats.

She looked back down at the sandwich.

She was thirty-one years old. She did the math on it without meaning to, the way she did all of it. Thirty-one years, and a mother who’d made dinner when she was up to it and not when she wasn’t, and a nine-year-old who’d learned where the cereal was and how much milk was left and how to make a granola bar last until three. Church ladies with casseroles, but the casseroles were for the house, for the family, and you took your plate to your room. A teacher with a drawer, and the drawer was open, and all you had to do was walk up and take one, all you had to do was ask, and she’d stood at the front of that classroom a hundred times with her stomach making the noise and never once walked up. Four moves in six years and a hot plate in every one of them and yogurt from the mini-fridge and I’ll eat it later. She’d been fed. She’d been fed her whole life. She’d been fed the way a library was funded — enough to stay open, if you filled out the forms, if you made the case, if you were the one who said thank you first and loudest so nobody sent you away.

Nobody had ever looked at her and seen hungry and handed her half of what they had without a word.

She picked it up. Her hand was doing the thing it had done on the grass strip with the picture book, and she made it stop, and she took a bite.

It was very good. There was cranberry in it. She ate the whole half sitting on the seawall in the wind with the clipboards laid out beside her and did not count anything, not the signatures, not the bites, not the seconds, and when it was gone she folded the bakery paper into a square the size of a playing card and put it in her cardigan pocket.

He’d finished his. He was brushing crumbs off his knee.

“You didn’t ask,” she said.

He looked at her, then. Just for a second.

“No,” he said.

He got up and went back to the gate.

---

By one-thirty the count was three hundred and nine.

She wrote it on the third sticky note and circled it and sat looking at it the way she’d looked at 39 a month ago, except that this time the number wasn’t a ceiling. It was a floor. Sheehan came off the fuel dock with his last sheet and set it on the table and stood there with his hands in his coat pockets, and she counted it, and it was seventeen, and she looked up at him and he looked at the boats.

“Three twenty-six,” she said.

He nodded once. He went and got in the bed of Rosie’s truck and sat down in it with his back against the cab and closed his eyes.

Fitz came back with the tray, empty, and the produce farmer’s phone number written on a paper plate. Rosie came back hoarse. Marguerite closed the coffee urn and walked over with the last four cups and handed them out and said, “You’ve got half the town on there,” and June said, “Not yet,” and Marguerite said, “You will,” and went to break down her table.

Gray was folding the STATION 9 table. He’d already loaded the sign into the back of his truck and the coffee can of pens and the empty yogurt-cup flats, all forty cups gone, every baby off Ferdinand and Beatrice in somebody’s kitchen window in Harbor Point, and June sat on the seawall with three hundred and twenty-six signatures on her lap and watched him fold the legs under one at a time.

“Gray.”

He looked up.

“What’s the house for?”

He stopped with the second leg half folded.

She hadn’t planned it. She’d been sitting there thinking about forty yogurt cups in forty windows, and about a window seat with nine-inch shelves, and about a man who’d put a roof on a house alone in the rain and built porch steps in nine hours that should have taken four, and the question had been sitting in her since the night in the rain with the candle stub, since Nell had said Walt drove up here last spring to look at the porch and cried, and it had come out.

“The captain,” he said.

He said it to the table leg. He folded it the rest of the way and stood the table on its end.

“The captain lives on Spruce,” June said. “He’s got a house on Spruce with a dog named Biscuit and a wife who’s the reason he’s never at the station past six unless it’s a shift. Walt told Nell. Nell told me.” She pushed her glasses up. “He bought a five-bedroom house on a hill he’s never going to live in, and you’ve spent two years putting it back together board by board, and you sleep on a mattress in the dining room. Rosie didn’t tell me that part. Fitz did, by accident, when he came to borrow the router.”

He didn’t say anything.

“So I’m asking what it’s for.”

“It’s his house.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

He picked up the table. He carried it to his truck and slid it into the bed beside the sign and closed the tailgate, and he stood with his hand on it for a second with his back to her.

“I don’t know,” he said.

It was so quiet she almost didn’t hear it over the wind. She sat very still.

“That’s an honest answer,” she said.

“It’s the only one I’ve got.”

He came back for the last clipboard. She handed it to him and their hands didn’t touch, and she noticed that they didn’t, and noticed him notice.

“Three twenty-six,” she said.

“You said.”

“I’m saying it again. I like the sound of it.” She stood up. Her knees complained. “I’ve got a hundred and seventy-four to go and seven weeks and a produce farmer’s CSA list, and I got three hundred and twenty-six in one Saturday because four people who owed me nothing stood in a parking lot in the wind, and I’m going to say thank you, and you’re going to have to stand there and take it.”

He stood there. He took it. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t leave either, and his jaw did the thing it did, and she decided that counted.

---

He was at the sawhorses when she came out at four with the yogurt cup.

She’d kept one back. She hadn’t told anyone. It was the runt — three leaves, one of them yellowing at the tip, off Beatrice’s last runner, in a cup that had held peach yogurt and still faintly smelled like it — and she’d put it in her cardigan pocket at seven that morning with the bakery paper that wasn’t there yet, and it had ridden around the market all day against her hip, and she’d forgotten it until she took the cardigan off and it fell out on her floor.

He was cutting trim. The saw was on the crossbar and he had a length of something pale — pine, she thought, or fir — and a pencil, and he’d changed out of the jacket into the gray thermal and there was sawdust on his forearms again, in the hair, over the burn.

She set the cup on the sawhorse beside the saw.

He looked at it.

“That’s the last one,” he said.

“You counted.”

“Forty cups. Thirty-nine signed for them.” He didn’t pick it up. He looked at the three leaves and the yellow tip. “That one’s not going to make it.”

“It’s going to make it. It’s Beatrice’s. Beatrice’s are careful.” She put her hands in her pockets. “You need to know their names. If you’re going to look at the window.”

“I don’t look at the window.”

“You told me Ferdinand was leaning. Wednesday. You said ‘the big one’s leaning’ and you said it to the porch rail, but I heard you.” She let that sit exactly as long as it needed to. “So. Ferdinand. He’s the big one. He came from a cutting off the break room plant in Eugene and he has never once in his life been told no. Beatrice is the medium one, second from the left. She’s careful. She takes her time. She had one baby in a yogurt cup for six weeks before I believed in her, and that baby is Hyacinth, third from the left, who is exactly as much trouble as her name.”

“You named a plant Hyacinth.”

“I was going through a phase.” She pointed at the fourth pot, invisible from here, on the sill inside the garage. “The fourth one didn’t have a name. It’s off Carol’s desk plant. Nell took the cutting the day Carol left and she gave it to me the day I moved, and I’ve had it three weeks with no name because nothing fit.” She took a breath. “I named it this morning. Before the market. I stood at the window at six and it was leaning toward the harbor with the rest of them and I named it Nell.”

He was quiet for a while. The saw sat on the crossbar. The light was going amber over the harbor the way it did at four in November, and the fog wasn’t up yet, and she could see clear across to the far shore where the jetty went out into the gray.

“You told her,” he said.

“On the phone. She said ‘Hm.’”

“That’s a yes.”

“I know what it is.”

He picked up the pencil. He marked the trim. He set the saw and didn’t pull the trigger, and she’d learned by now that this was him deciding, and she waited.

“I’m not going to remember that,” he said.

“Which part.”

“Any of it.”

“Okay.” She turned toward her stairs. “Ferdinand, Beatrice, Hyacinth, Nell. Left to right. Turn them a quarter turn toward the window every night or they grow crooked. Don’t overwater the runt.”

She got to the bottom step. Then the third one, which creaked. Then the landing, and she had her hand on the door when he said it, behind her, to the sawhorse, in the flat voice he used for doors and once and fifty pounds.

“The big one. The careful one. The trouble. And Nell.”

She stopped with her hand on the knob.

She didn’t turn around. She knew what her face was doing and she wasn’t going to let him see it, and she knew what his was doing too, which was nothing, and that was fine. He’d said Nell. He’d said it like it cost something, the way he’d said Gray on a wet apron a month ago, and he’d said the other three the only way he could, by what they were instead of what she’d called them, and he’d gotten every one.

“Or whatever,” he said.

The saw went through the trim in one clean pass.

June went inside. She set the bakery paper square on the window seat in the first cubby on the left, on top of the knots book, where it didn’t belong and where she was going to leave it. She turned all four pots a quarter turn.

“He knows your name,” she told the runt’s mother. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

Beatrice, being careful, said nothing at all.

---