Blond Horizon

The screen door banged shut behind me, and I didn't turn around. I knew who it was without looking. I knew it from the particular rhythm of his footsteps on the porch boards, the way he paused before the last step, like he was giving me a chance to disappear if I wanted to.

I didn't want to.

"Your mom said you'd be out here."

I kept my eyes on the tomato plants. They were doing that thing they do in late July, going wild and unruly, the vines heavy with fruit that was almost ripe, still a little green at the shoulders. My grandmother used to say you could tell a lot about a person by how they treated a tomato plant. She never told me what, exactly, but I'd spent enough summers in this garden to have my own theories.

"I'm always out here," I said.

"I know."

He sat down on the edge of the porch, his feet on the grass, not quite close enough to touch. I was on my knees in the dirt, my hands buried in the soil, doing nothing useful. Just feeling it. The coolness underneath the surface, the way it held onto the night even when the sun was high. There were worms in there somewhere, doing their quiet work, turning everything over, making it new again.

I pulled a weed. It came up easy, roots and all, and I shook the dirt off and tossed it into the bucket.

"You're going to get your hands dirty," I said.

"I don't mind."

That was the thing about him. He never minded. He never minded anything, which was either the most attractive quality a person could have or the most infuriating, depending on the day. Today it was infuriating. Today I wanted him to mind something. I wanted him to mind that I'd been avoiding him for three weeks, that I'd stopped answering his texts, that I'd walked past his house twice on purpose and then taken the long way home so I wouldn't have to do it a third time.

But he just sat there, patient as the grass, watching me pull weeds.

"The tomatoes are coming in," I said.

"I can see that."

"I'm going to make sauce. Freeze it for winter."

"That's smart."

I yanked another weed harder than I needed to. The stem snapped and I scraped my knuckle against a rock. A bead of blood welled up, bright and small, and I stuck the knuckle in my mouth before he could see it.

"Are you going to say anything?" I asked, my voice muffled around my finger.

"Should I?"

That was the question, wasn't it. Should he. Should he say something about the way I'd left things, about the way I'd stood on his front lawn at eleven o'clock at night three weeks ago and told him I needed space, that I needed to think, that I didn't know what I wanted. Should he say something about how I'd seen his face when I said it, how it had gone still and careful, like he was bracing for a punch he'd known was coming but had hoped wouldn't land.

I took my finger out of my mouth. The bleeding had stopped.

"I don't know," I said. "Probably not."

He nodded. He had this way of nodding that made you feel like he understood everything you weren't saying, which was both a comfort and a problem. Because if he understood everything, then he understood that I'd been lying. That I hadn't needed space. That I'd needed something else entirely, something I couldn't name, something that scared me so much I'd run in the opposite direction.

I sat back on my heels and looked at him for the first time. He was wearing that gray t-shirt, the one with the hole in the collar, the one I'd told him a hundred times to throw away. His hair was too long, curling at the ends, and there was a smudge of something on his forearm, grease maybe, from whatever he'd been doing under the hood of his truck. He worked on that truck like it was a living thing, like it needed his attention the way a dog needs a walk.

"You've been working on the Ford," I said.

"Trying to get the carburetor right. It's stubborn."

"Everything's stubborn with you."

"I know."

I stood up and brushed the dirt off my knees. My hands were filthy, the kind of filthy that takes two washes to get out, and I wiped them on my shorts and left brown streaks on the fabric. My mother would kill me. She'd bought those shorts at the outlet mall in May and told me not to ruin them, and here I was, ruining them, because I couldn't stand still and I couldn't think of anything else to do with my hands.

"You want some lemonade?" I asked.

"Sure."

I walked past him into the house. The kitchen was dim and cool, the way old houses get in the summer, the windows shaded by the porch and the lilac bushes that had gone leggy and overgrown. I pulled the pitcher from the fridge and poured two glasses, and I stood there for a minute with my hands on the counter, breathing.

He was still on the porch when I came back. Still sitting in the same spot. Still patient.

I handed him the glass and sat down on the step next to him, close enough that our shoulders almost touched. Almost. That word had been following me around for weeks.

"Three weeks," he said.

"I know."

"That's a long time."

"I know."

He took a drink of his lemonade. I watched his throat move. I watched the way his hand wrapped around the glass, the way his thumb rested on the rim. I'd spent a lot of time watching his hands. I'd spent a lot of time watching a lot of things about him, cataloging them, storing them away, like I was building a case for something I wasn't ready to argue.

"I'm not going to push you," he said. "You know that."

"I know."

"But I'm not going to wait forever."

There it was. The thing he'd been not saying. The thing I'd been not asking. The thing that had been sitting between us like a third person on the step, taking up space, breathing our air.

I looked out at the yard. The grass needed mowing. The tomatoes needed staking. The whole world needed tending, and I was sitting here with a glass of lemonade and a boy who wouldn't wait forever, and I didn't know what to do with any of it.

"I don't know what I want," I said. It came out quiet. Almost a whisper.

"I know."

"That's not fair to you."

"Probably not."

I turned to look at him. He was already looking at me. His eyes were brown, the kind of brown that goes gold in certain light, and they were steady and patient and a little sad, and I felt something crack open in my chest, something I'd been holding shut for weeks.

"I don't want you to wait," I said. "But I don't want you to leave."

He didn't say anything. He just sat there, holding his lemonade, looking at me like I was a puzzle he'd already solved and was waiting for me to catch up.

The screen door banged again. My mother's voice, calling from the kitchen, asking if we wanted sandwiches. The sound of it broke something, the quiet, the tension, the way we'd been circling each other without ever landing.

"I should go," he said.

"Okay."

He stood up and set his glass on the railing. He looked at me for a long moment, and I thought he might say something else, something that would change everything, but he just nodded and walked down the steps and across the yard, past the tomato plants, past the lilac bushes, through the gate that never latched right.

I watched him go. I watched until he turned the corner and disappeared, and then I sat there on the step with my dirty hands and my ruined shorts and my half-drunk lemonade, and I thought about how some things you can't unsee once you've seen them. How some doors, once opened, never quite close the same way again.

The tomatoes were almost ripe. I could smell them, that green, sharp smell, the smell of something almost ready.