Page 33 of The Quiet Tenant

When we return to the finish line, Mrs.Cooper is approaching, supple and elegant in her navy-blue leggings and white vest, her ponytail bouncing with each stride.

I cup my hands around my mouth. “Almost there, Mrs.Cooper!” It feels forced, like a performance I put on. But what happened in the kitchen with Aidan has lifted me up, and I’m willing to play along. Mrs.Cooper gives me a little wave. Less than a minute later, she’s the official winner of the first Thomas Family 5K.

Judge Byrne claps and extends congratulations. There are nomedals, no race swag. Just the promise of hot cocoa, which I go to pour into a paper cup.

Aidan materializes at my side. He pushes down on the handle as I position the cup under the spout. Before I can say anything, two more runners show up—Seth, one of the kids from my former high school, and his father, Mr.Roberts, who works in the city. Together, we pour two more cups.

Soon runners are coming in at a steady pace. We find a rhythm. I’m on paper cup duty, he manages the handle. I hand out each cup along with words of admiration—So well done, you were amazing, I never could have.Aidan focuses on the task at hand. He fiddles with the stack of cups, checks that the dispenser still feels hot to the touch. This is the man who sits at my bar: allergic to attention, shoulders hunched, eyes trained on anything but your own. His kid sits on a bench on the other side of the road, headphone wires snaking from her pocket to her ears. Her father’s daughter.

About forty minutes in, finishers become more spread out. Mrs.Cooper is chatting with Judge Byrne, asking if he could officiate her cousin’s wedding in Poughkeepsie three weeks from now. Aidanand I wait for our next runner in silence. The momentum we’d built up at the height of the race has died down. We’ve run out of tasks to keep our hands busy.

“So how’s work?” I try.

He smiles. “Work’s good.”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

He says of course.

“I don’t think I really know what a lineman does. I know it has to do with power lines, obviously. But that’s about it.”

A laugh. “No one knows what linemen do.” He rolls his eyes. “Even some linemen seem confused about that.”

Basically, he tells me, their mission is to keep electricity running in people’s homes. “That’s why you see us up there, fiddling with power lines. We fix the ones that are broken, maintain the ones that aren’t. If there’s a storm and the lines get knocked down, we work on that. Sometimes we go to people’s houses and update their installations.”

I nod. “So I take it you’re not afraid of heights.”

He shakes his head no. “I love it up there. It’s so…peaceful, if that makes sense?”

I tell him I get it. Working on a project, head literally in the clouds, and no one to bother him: it does sound like his element.

“Besides,” he adds, “you get such a good view of everything from up there. The river, the mountains…I mean, look what I saw the other day.”

He takes his phone out of his pocket and leans toward me. I smell pine needles and laundry detergent and freshly shampooed hair. I want to close my eyes and commit the combination to memory so I can remember it at night, search for him next time I wash my clothes or go for a hike. But there’s something he wants to show me, and I must focus. His thumb flicks through a series of images. I catch flashes of hills and rooftops, a screenshot of a recipe for veggie lasagna, his daughter on a trail.

His finger stops on the image he was looking for: a large bird of prey, wings open, gliding over the beech trees behind the church.

“Wow.”

It’s my turn to get closer. I have an excuse now. I need to see the bird. I can pretend this has nothing to do with the proximity of hisbody next to mine, his strong arms and taut abdomen and his neck like a swan’s, long and slim and graceful and proud.

“It’s so…majestic,” I say.

“That’s what I thought, too.”

He contemplates the bird, then turns his gaze to me. It’s like he’s been holding on to this photo for weeks, until he found someone who could appreciate it as much as he does.

“It’s a red-tailed hawk,” he says. “At least according to the internet.”

“He’s so big. I bet he could pick up a small dog.”

He nods.

I slide two fingers across his phone screen, zoom closer on the hawk.

“Look at it,” I say. “Surveying his domain. Hunting for prey. He’s so beautiful.”

Something hangs between us, a deeper truth that neither of us would know how to put into words.

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