POV: Cal
He found her at the riverbank by accident, which was the only honest way to put it.
He'd come to Tate's Feed & Bait at five-fifteen for the specific and unglamorous purpose of picking up a box of structural screws that Beau had failed to reorder despite being asked twice, which had become a point of professional friction between them that Cal was choosing to address through the quiet medium of doing it himself rather than the louder medium of having a conversation about it. Tate's kept a hardware section in the back that was smaller than it looked and better stocked than you'd expect, and Jimmy Tate had been ordering Cal's preferred screw gauge since Cal was doing his first solo jobs at twenty-four, so it was reliable even when everything else wasn't.
He had the screws. He was walking back to his truck.
The path from Tate's back lot to the parking area ran along the riverbank for about forty yards — the Atchafalaya, tea-brown and unhurried, the cypress knees breaking the surface in irregular rows like the river was making a point about time. The late afternoon light was doing what it did this time of year, going orange at the edges, making the water look like something out of a painting someone had tried too hard on. He walked this path three, four times a week and barely saw it anymore the way you stopped seeing anything you encountered with regularity.
He saw it now because she was in it.
She was twenty feet ahead of him on the bank, camera up, shooting the water. Not the whole river — something specific, a single cypress knee at the waterline where the light hit at an angle, the reflection of the trees in the still part near the bank. She was very still herself when she shot, stiller than he'd expected from her, from someone whose energy the rest of the time had a compressed, kinetic quality, like she was always about to redirect. But with the camera up she went entirely quiet. The whole of her focused down to the point of the lens.
He stopped walking.
He should keep walking. He had screws in a paper bag and dinner to think about and a call to return from the Trosclair job. He had no business standing on the riverbank watching a woman photograph a cypress knee.
He kept standing.
She took three frames, maybe four. Then she lowered the camera and looked at the back of it and then looked at the river and then looked at the back of the camera again, the way photographers did, that constant negotiation between what was there and what they'd managed to catch. Then she looked up and saw him.
Neither of them said anything for a moment.
The river moved at its own pace between them and the opposite bank.
"I was at Tate's," he said.
"I was walking," she said. "I ended up here."
He looked at the river. She looked at the river. The cypress knee caught the light and did what it had been doing for fifty years, existed in its particular way, indifferent to being photographed or not photographed.
"Mind if I—" He gestured at the bank.
"It's a public riverbank," she said, which wasn't a yes but wasn't a no either, and he came and stood at the water's edge a few feet from her.
The evening was cooling faster than the afternoon had promised. Somewhere upstream a heron was doing its statue impression on a half-submerged log. A boat — a flat-bottomed aluminum jonboat, the kind that had been on this river since before Cal was born — moved across the far channel without sound, its small wake spreading to nothing before it reached the bank.
"I used to come here as a kid," she said. She wasn't looking at him. "Summer mornings, early. Before it got hot. My grandmother would send me for crawfish at Tate's and I'd stop here on the way back and she'd never say anything about the ice melting."
"She knew where you were."
"She always knew where I was." Something moved in her voice, under the words. "She knew where everyone was. It was a talent."
He set the paper bag on a relatively level piece of bank. Straightened up. "How long's it been since you were on this bank?"
"Fifteen years, maybe. Sixteen." She considered. "I was seventeen the last summer I was here before college. After that it was — I'd come back for things, holidays, but I'd stopped wandering. Stopped having the time for it."
"Or stopped giving yourself the time."
She looked at him sideways. "Maybe."
The heron decided it was done being a statue and lifted off with the slow, improbable mechanics of something that large achieving flight. They both watched it go.
"Can I ask you something?" she said.
"Go ahead."
"The night of the Guidry wedding." She said it the way you said something you'd decided to say before you could talk yourself out of it — quickly, without preamble. "Ten years ago. On the back steps."
The river kept moving.
"Yes," he said.
"You were going to say something." She turned to look at him fully now. "You started to say something and I went inside and we never — I never —" She stopped. "What were you going to say?"
The question sat between them above the water and the cypress knees and the last of the orange light.
He thought about lying. Not a serious lie — a social lie, the kind that smoothed things over, I don't remember, it was ten years ago, it was nothing. He thought about it and discarded it because she was looking at him with that direct, accurate attention and he had told himself he was not going to perform things in front of her, and because the question deserved better than a convenient answer.
"I was going to ask if you'd considered staying," he said.
The words came out level and plain, the way he said most things, no particular drama applied to them.
She held them. He watched her hold them — saw the slight change in her face, not surprise exactly, more like recognition, the look of someone hearing a thing they'd suspected and were now confirming.
"I wasn't going to stay," she said. "I had a flight."
"I know."
"I had a job in Nashville. I'd just started at the magazine."
"I know."
"So it was —" She looked at the water. "It wouldn't have —"
"No," he agreed. "Probably not."
"Then why ask?"
He was quiet for a moment. "Because I wanted to know if the possibility existed. Even if it didn't change anything that night."
She absorbed this. He gave her time to absorb it. The river moved. The light went another shade toward evening, that last brief window where everything went gold and then was gone.
"I thought about it," she said. "After I went inside. I thought about it the rest of that night and on the drive to the airport and on the plane." She paused. "I thought about what I would have said."
"What would you have said?"
She was quiet for a long moment.
"I don't know," she said, finally. "I think that's — I think that's honest. I genuinely don't know what I would have said."
He nodded slowly. That was its own answer, maybe. Not yes, not no — something more complicated than either, which was probably the truth of who they'd both been at twenty-two and twenty-five, before whatever they'd each become since.
"Does it matter?" she asked. "Now."
He looked at the river. "I don't know that either."
She made a sound — not quite a laugh, not quite not one, the same sound she'd made on the porch about the certainty of things. "We're very honest about what we don't know."
"Seems like the right approach."
"Most people prefer to pretend."
"I've noticed." He picked up the paper bag. "Most people find it easier."
"Do you?"
He looked at her. She was watching him with the direct look, her camera hanging at her side now, her jacket collar turned up against the cooling evening, a strand of her hair moving in the slight wind off the water. She looked like she belonged exactly where she was standing, which was a thought he was not going to finish.
"No," he said. "I don't find it easier."
"Neither do I," she said. "I just do it anyway."
"I know."
Something shifted in her face. "You can't know that. You don't know me."
"I know what you've told me," he said. "I know what you haven't. And I know what Cora said about you." He paused. "And I know you photographed a half-rotten soffit board this morning like it was worth looking at."
She blinked. Then: "I didn't photograph the soffit board."
"You photographed the cabinet box section with the rot. I saw you."
"That was —" She stopped. A pause. "That was for documentation purposes."
He held her gaze and said nothing.
She looked away first. Not in defeat — more like she was choosing to look at the river because the river was also interesting and she had options. "I'm thinking about staying longer than three weeks," she said, to the water.
He was very still.
"Not — I mean the house still needs to sell. That hasn't changed." She said it quickly, in the way of someone clarifying terms before the terms got away from them. "But there's work I've been — I have a project. A photography project. And I think it might be here."
"In Calder's Bend."
"In Calder's Bend. In this house. In this —" She gestured at the river, the bank, the general fact of the place. "In all of this."
He let that settle. "How long?"
"I don't know yet." She looked at him now. "Does that change anything? For the work on the house?"
"No," he said. "The work is the work."
"Okay." She nodded, once. Settled. "Okay."
They stood a moment longer in the evening. The light was almost gone — that abrupt Louisiana dusk that gave you almost no transition between day and dark, just a decision the sky made. The first firefly appeared over the bank grass, which was wrong for October except that it happened most years anyway, the warm stretch before the real cold came.
"Firefly in October," she said.
"It happens."
"I'd forgotten." She raised the camera without deciding to and took one frame, the single light in the blue dusk, and lowered it again. "I keep forgetting things and then remembering them. It's —" She didn't finish.
"Disorienting," he said.
"Yes." She looked at him. "You ever feel that? About a place you've always been?"
He thought about it honestly. "Sometimes I drive past a house I've restored — a year later, two years — and I forget for a second that the damage was there. That it was the thing I had to fix before it could be what it was supposed to be." He paused. "Then I remember and it's both things at once. What it was and what it is."
She was quiet for a long moment. Something moved in her face — that thing he kept half-catching and not quite seeing, the real thing beneath the managed thing.
"That's —" she said. Then: "Yeah."
He picked up his bag. "I should get back."
"Yeah." She didn't move yet. "Cal."
He stopped.
"Thank you," she said. "For the house. For — all of it. I know I haven't said that directly yet."
He looked at her. The firefly had been joined by a second, and then a third, small cold lights in the blue dark over the water.
"Cora asked me to," he said. "But I'd have done it anyway."
He left her on the bank in the almost-dark with the fireflies and the river, and he walked back to his truck and sat in it for a moment with the structural screws in their paper bag on the seat beside him, and he thought about ten years and back steps and sentences that didn't get finished, and whether honesty was the same thing as wisdom, and he concluded, after a moment, that it probably was not, but that he'd never been able to choose one over the other.
He started the truck.
The radio came on — something old, something country, a song about a place a man couldn't stop going back to no matter how many times he told himself he'd gone for good.
He drove home in the dark and didn't change the station.