But you do, I think, have to live.
I’m sorry if I’ve spoken out of turn here, so please forgive me if I have.
Sincerely,
Abbey Hanley
It came a few days after Bernborough, when he’d stood on the track till sunrise. The letter was hand-delivered. No stamp and no address. Just Clay Dunbar and left in the letterbox.
* * *
—
A week later, he walked through the racing quarter, and the city, until he reached her. He refused to use the buzzer. He waited for another resident; he slipped through the entrance behind him, and took the lift to the eighteenth floor.
He balked when he reached her door, and took several minutes to knock, and even then he’d done it benignly. He was shocked when she came to open it.
Like before she was kind and immaculate, but quickly overrun with concern. Her hair, and this light, they were lethal.
“Clay?” she said, and stepped closer. She was beautiful even when sad. “God, Clay, you look so thin.”
It took all of his will not to hug her again, to be held in the warmth of her doorway—but he didn’t, he couldn’t allow himself. He could talk to her and that was all.
“I’ll do what you said in your letter,” he said. “I’ll live the way I have to—I’ll go out and finish the bridge.”
His voice was as dry as the riverbed, and Abbey had done things well. She didn’t ask what he meant by the bridge, or for anything else he might tell her.
He’d opened his mouth to speak again, but then wavered, and welled in the eyes. In fury, he wiped the tears away—and Abbey Hanley took a risk, and a gamble; she bet double and to hell with the worry, or her place in this whole mess, or what was right. She did what she’d done once before:
She kissed a pair of her fingers, but placed them across, on his cheek.
He wanted to tell her about Penny then, and Michael, and all that had happened to all of us—and all that had happened to him. Yes, he wanted to tell her everything, but this time he just shook her hand; then caught the lift and ran.
And so, once again, it was.
After he’d met Abbey Hanley with Carey, and she’d torn the first page of The Quarryman out, they could never know what it would mean. At first it was one more yardstick; the start of another beginning, as months flowed in and by them.
In spring, they both came back:
Matador and Queen of Hearts.
In summer, the ache of waiting, given Carey had been forewarned:
She would have to cut the dead wood out, and Clay would make her commit. Clay would make a plan.
* * *
—
In between, as you might guess, the one constant—the thing they loved most—was the book of Michelangelo, whom she lovingly called the sculptor, or the artist, or his favorite: the fourth Buonarroti.
They lay down at The Surrounds.
They read there, chapter for chapter.
They brought flashlights, and batteries for backup.
To protect the fading mattress, she brought a giant sheet of plastic, and when they left they made the bed with it, they tucked the whole thing in. Walking home, she’d link her arm through. Their hips would touch between them.