Chapter 10 - Clear Glass and Unfiltered Air
The second winter in Maine did not arrive like a season; it arrived like an argument that had been settled in advance.
By December, the harbor had frozen out to the inner spindle—a sheet of gray, salt-puckered ice that rose and fell six feet with the tide, groaning against the granite piers like an old floorboard under a heavy boot.
I had seventy-four clients on the active roster.
None of them knew who Thatcher Ward was. None of them had ever seen a sixty-second reel about *Trauma-Informed Entertaining*.
On a Tuesday afternoon between the low tide and the dark, Beckett came down the lane in an old green Ford pickup that had more primer on the fenders than paint. In the bed sat a four-foot dining table he had built from three planks of white pine he had salvaged from the floor of an abandoned grain elevator in Gardiner.
The wood was three inches thick. It had not been planed smooth; it had been worked with an adze until the surface had the soft, undulating wave of water passing over sand.
“Where do you want it?” he asked.
He was wearing a wool watch cap pulled down over his ears, and his knuckles were rough, red, and scarred with little crescent-shaped gouges from his chisels. He had put on fifteen pounds around his middle—not the soft, gin-and-tonic bloat of Thatcher’s country club weekends, but the dense, heavy meat of a man who carried twenty-foot timbers up a steep ramp every morning at seven.
“In the center,” I said. “Where the sun hits the floor at noon.”
We carried it in together.
It was heavy. We had to take the front door off its brass hinges to clear the legs, our boots tracking gray slush across the painted pine of the kitchen floor.
When we set it down, it didn't rock.
Not an eighth of an inch.
Beckett stood back, his hands tucked into the pockets of his mackinaw, his breath still coming in white plumes that drifted toward the ceiling beams.
“June’s grades came,” he said.
“I know,” I told him. “She showed me the portal yesterday. A-minus in micro-anatomy.”
“She wants to do the trauma rotation at Eastern Maine Medical in Bangor next summer.”
“She will,” I said. “She has the hands for it.”
Beckett walked to the kitchen window and looked out toward the lane where the maples stood black and bare against the snow.
“Mother sold the house in Rye,” he said quietly.
“Sarah told me.”
“She’s in an assisted living wing in Delray Beach,” Beckett said. He didn't sound sad. He didn't sound angry. He sounded like an appraiser reading an inventory of dry goods. “She told the intake coordinator that she was a consultant for a digital media brand. She told them Delaney was going to produce a documentary about the facility for PBS.”
“Is Delaney?”
Beckett made a small, short sound in his nose.
A laugh.
An actual, unproduced laugh that came from his diaphragm and moved his shoulders.
“Delaney is selling crystals on Pinterest, Sloan. She has a three-bedroom ranch in Scottsdale with a pool that needs a new liner, and she has Hayes’s third cousin suing her for ninety thousand dollars in unpaid production fees from the wedding pilot.”
He reached out and laid his flat palm against the top of the pine table he had made.
His skin was rough. It made a dry, whispering sound against the grain.
“You have a scar,” he said.
“I have three,” I said.
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when someone tries to tell me it’s an Edwardian hair-comb,” I said.
Beckett looked down at his boots.
For thirty seconds, the only sound in the house was the small, steady tick of the woodstove cooling down and the wind coming off the ledges, rattling the double-hung sash on the north wall.
“I’m sorry, Sloan,” he said.
It was the first time he had said it without a lawyer in the room.
Without a settlement agreement on the table.
Without Clara’s will sitting between us like an unexploded shell.
“I know, Beck,” I said.
“I was so scared of them.”
“I know.”
“They made everything seem so... loud,” he whispered. “Like if you didn't keep up with the story they were telling, you were just going to disappear into the woods and freeze to death.”
I walked to the table, pulled out one of the four rush-seated chairs we had bought at the church bazaar in Hope, and sat down.
I laid both hands flat on the white pine.
The wood was cool, but under the cool was the density of the tree—eighty years of slow, northern growth that had never been photographed, never been color-graded, and never needed forty thousand people to hit a heart on a screen to prove that it was standing in the dirt.
“Sit down, Beckett,” I said.
He sat.
The rush seat groaned under his weight, then settled.
“June will be home in an hour,” I told him. “She’s bringing four pounds of haddock from the co-op. You know how to fry fish without burning the butter?”
Beckett Ward looked up.
His eyes were clear. The gray graphite was gone from his cuticles, replaced by the clean, sharp smell of pine sawdust and the salt air of the bay.
May you like
“I’m an architect, Sloan,” he said. “I know how to build a fire.”
“Good,” I said, looking out through the clear, uncurated glass of the window toward the gray water where the tide was coming back in, steady, cold, and right on time. “Then build it.”
