Biscuits and Bad News

You don't sleep. You lie on the cot and listen to the river and watch the stove's glow on the ceiling beams, and every time you close your eyes you see the screen. She'll never find out.

At six-fifteen the big sliding door rattles open and Thorsten Pickard ducks inside, six-foot-four of red beard and wrinkled dress shirt. He's still wearing last night's tie, loosened into a noose.

"I got thrown out," he announces.

You sit up. "Of what?"

"The party. After you left. I told Alton Ashbury he had the manners of a raccoon in a dumpster." He drops onto an overturned bucket. "Her uncle tried to walk me out. I said I'd walk myself. Mordecai threw a dinner roll at someone. It was a whole thing."

You put your face in your hands, and for a second, horribly, you laugh.

"There he is," Thorsten says. "You okay, Ethan?"

"No."

"Yeah. Didn't figure." He looks around the shop. Sees the garbage bags. The crates. "She kicked you out?"

"Changed the locks. Cleaned out the wedding account at midnight." You tell him about the rocker. The sketchbooks. The laptop.

Thorsten goes very quiet. He's been here from the start. He was in the shop the night you finally got the Ridgeline's back splat right, after forty failed steam bends, and the two of you drank warm beer on the loading dock and didn't say anything because you didn't need to.

"Why would she take the sketchbooks?" he says. "She doesn't even like the chair. She said it looked rustic."

"I don't know."

Your phone buzzes on the bench. You've been ignoring it since midnight. Now you make yourself look.

Two hundred and eleven notifications.

Celandine posted at 1 a.m. A photo of the ring on the mantel, the lodge firelight behind it, and a long caption about honesty and choosing yourself and the hardest night of my life. Forty thousand likes. She runs brand for Ashbury Inns; she knows exactly how to write these. Under it, eight hundred comments. Some of them have your name. Some of them have your shop's name.

Cinder Hollow? Isn't that the guy who did the tables for that big Sandy Mush wedding? Yikes.

Never hiring him again.

Men really will cheat on a woman who looks like THAT.

You put the phone face down. It buzzes again immediately. An email this time.

Hi, we've decided to go a different direction with the dining set. Please refund the deposit at your earliest convenience.

Then, nine minutes later, another one. The Callender family, who commissioned a library ladder and four built-ins for their new house in Montford. Given the circumstances...

"How much?" Thorsten asks.

"Thirty-one thousand in work. Six in deposits I have to give back." You look at the account balance, which is the shop account, which is all you have now. "Which I don't have."

The sliding door rattles again.

Fiorella comes in sideways, holding a cardboard tray of coffees in one hand and a grease-spotted paper bag in the other, her phone wedged between her ear and her shoulder. She's in jeans and a green flannel and muddy boots, hair twisted up with a pencil stuck through it, and she looks like she slept even less than you. She also looks, somehow, completely fine, like the most beautiful woman you've ever seen just rolled out of a hayloft.

Thorsten stands up so fast the bucket tips over.

"No, Mom, I heard you," she's saying into the phone. "I heard you the first four times." She sets the coffees on the bench, mouths biscuits at you, and shoves the bag into your hands. "Okay. Put him on, then. Put him on."

She takes the phone off her shoulder, taps the screen, and sets it face up on the bench. On speaker.

"Fiorella." Alton Ashbury's voice fills the shop. You flinch before you can stop yourself. "Where are you?"

She looks straight at you while she answers. "I'm at Cinder Hollow, Dad. Bringing breakfast to a man whose life you all set on fire last night."

"Your sister is devastated."

"My sister has forty thousand likes. She's fine."

"You humiliated this family. Walking out with him in front of everyone—"

"No, you did that. You toasted it." Her voice doesn't rise. That's what's terrifying about it. "You stood up at a table he built and laughed at him with two hundred people watching. I left because it was the only thing in that room that made sense."

A silence on the line. Thorsten is holding his coffee very still, like a man watching a bear cross a campsite.

"You will call your sister," Alton says, "and you will apologize."

"I won't, actually." She picks up the phone. "Love you. Bye." She hangs up.

Then she exhales, puts both hands flat on the workbench, and stands there for a second with her head down.

"Fiorella," you say.

"Eat a biscuit, Ethan. I need one minute." She lifts her head, sees Thorsten. "Hi, Thor."

"I'd die for you," Thorsten says. "Just so you know."

She laughs, startled, and the sound fills up the shop the way it always does, warm and a little too loud. Then she turns to you. "Okay. What happened? You've got your bad face."

You tell her about the cancellations. The account. She reads the emails over your shoulder, and her jaw gets tighter with every line.

"And the house," you say, because it's been sitting in your chest all night. "The rocker's gone. The Cathedral table's gone too. She had it in the dining room. And all eleven sketchbooks and my laptop. Three years of drawings for the whole Ridgeline line."

Fiorella goes still.

"She doesn't even like your furniture," she says slowly. "She called the Cathedral table very farmhouse. Why would she take it?"

"That's what I said," Thorsten says.

Fiorella doesn't answer. Something moves behind her eyes, quick and troubled, and then she shakes it off and grabs a biscuit and starts making a list on the back of a lumber invoice: lawyer, bank, locksmith, find out who J is.

She stays until noon. She answers the phone when you can't. She tells a reporter from the Mountain Xpress that she has no comment and then, after she hangs up, says three things about her sister that make Thorsten whistle.

When she finally leaves, the shop is too quiet.

You spend the afternoon sanding nothing, a scrap of oak, just to feel your hands do something you understand.

At 11:48 that night you're on the cot again, staring at the beams, when your phone lights up on the floor beside you.

Not Celandine. Not the bank.

Fiorella: are you awake.

Then, before you can even pick it up, the screen lights again.