Chapter 11 – Ask Me Properly

He stood at the grave for a long time. He did not talk out loud the way he sometimes did when Clara was not there; he just stood. He looked at the headstone, the mountains beyond it, and the iron holder with last week’s flowers, frozen now at the edges.

He thought about Annie. He thought about three years of Fridays and what they had been—not only grief, though they had been that too, but a way of continuing a conversation that had been interrupted, a way of remaining faithful to someone who deserved faithfulness.

Curiously, he thought about what faithfulness actually was. Annie had sent every letter. She had been decisive about correspondence. She had told him once, when he had been slow about a decision that mattered, that staying still was not the same as being careful—it was just fear with a quieter name.

He thought about Clara, who had asked a question she almost hadn’t asked, had put lavender in the bouquet without being told, had kept the darker coffee, and had done all of it without asking for anything in return—and who now had an offer from Denver that she was holding in her hands like something that might hurt her if she opened it too quickly.

He thought about James, who had not had the chance to be James. He thought about what it meant to carry that, not as punishment, but as love that had nowhere to go.

He looked at the grave. He did not ask Annie’s permission. Standing on the cold hill in the February morning, he understood that he did not need permission—that Annie would have known this before he did, and that she would have told him with some directness, and probably a specific opinion about how long he had taken, that fidelity to the dead was not the same as refusing the living.

He picked up the frozen flowers from the holder and replaced them with the fresh ones he had brought. He stood for another moment. “I know,” he said out loud, to no one who could answer, and to someone who already had.

He walked back down the hill into Millfield and went to the flower shop. Clara was inside working, and she looked up when he opened the door the way she always looked up. He looked at her the way he had been looking at her for months, without saying what the looking meant.

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“I’d like you to stay,” he said. “Not because Denver isn’t right, but because I’d like the chance to be worth staying for.”

She looked at him for a long moment, then set down what she was holding. “Ask me properly,” she said.