Page 3 of Befriending the Bear
Tonight, though, I pulled down a volume of Frank O’Hara. Marcus had loved him, loved the conversational immediacy of the poems. I could still hear his voice reading “Having a Coke with You,” the way he’d look up at me when it—absurdly—mentioned a love for yogurt.
I’d been eating yogurt the day we met at the faculty mixer I’d been dragged to. He’d made some terrible joke about culture, and I’d laughed so hard I’d forgotten to be self-conscious about my speech. Later, he told me he’d fallen a little in love with me in that moment, seeing me unguarded.
The margins were full of his notes. His handwriting had been a terrible, doctor-scrawl I’d learned to decipher like a secret code.Read this aloud to C,one note read.What does this mean to C?another read. Evidence of a life lived together, of someone who’d wanted to share everything with me.
I shelved the book carefully and retreated to my bedroom. It was only nine, but exhaustion pulled at me, that particular tiredness that came from holding yourself apart from the world all day. Tomorrow, I’d have to go to Collins for groceries. Tomorrow, I’d have to navigate more interactions, more moments of being seen but not known.
But tonight, I could close my eyes and pretend the empty space beside me was temporary, that any moment I’d hear Marcus’s key in the lock, his voice calling out “Honey, I’m home” in that ironic way that had made it sincere.
The house settled around me with familiar creaks and sighs. Somewhere in the walls, a mouse scratched out its own quiet life. Maybe we were all trying to find our way through the dark. Some of us were just more lost than others.
This is enough,I whispered to the darkness, practicing the lie until I almost believed it.This has to be enough.
2
FRASER
My truck was being a bastard again.
I stood in Walter’s Auto Repair, watching the mechanic—a kid who couldn’t be more than twenty-five—scratch his head and mutter something about alternators. My right leg throbbed, the way it always did when the barometric pressure dropped. Rain coming, probably. Yes, at fifty-one, I had become the man who could predict the weather based on how his body felt. It would be funny if it weren’t so goddamn offensive.
The cane leaned against the wall where I’d propped it, and I resisted the urge to grab it. Not yet. Not unless I absolutely had to.
“Might take a few days to get the part,” the kid said, finally looking up from under the hood. “That’s if we can find one. These old Chevys, they’re particular about?—”
“It’s fine.” I didn’t want to hear another explanation about why my twenty-year-old truck was more trouble than it was worth. It had carried me through three states and two decades of fire seasons. I wasn’t giving up on it now. “I don’t care how long it takes. Just call me when you know something.”
He nodded, already turning back to another car. I grabbed my cane—fine, the leg was winning today—and headed for the door. The September air hit like a slap, cold and damp with the promise of rain. I’d been in Forestville for a few weeks now, and I still wasn’t used to how green everything was, how the air tasted like growing things instead of smoke.
Some hotshot I’d turned out to be. Thirty years jumping out of planes into wildfires, and now I couldn’t even manage a walk to Main Street without assistance. The doctors called it “significant nerve damage.” I called it karma for all those years of thinking I was invincible.
I was halfway across the parking lot, focused on the uneven asphalt and the way my right foot didn’t quite clear the ground anymore, when it happened. A man came around the corner, nose buried in a book, walking with the distracted confidence of someone who’d taken this route a thousand times.
We collided—not hard, but enough to send him stumbling backward. His book went flying, pages fluttering like wounded birds, and I moved without thinking. My hands caught his upper arms, steadying him before he could fall. The cane clattered to the ground.Fuck.
“Shit, I’m sorry—” I stopped.
Hazel eyes stared up at me, wide with shock. He was smaller than me—most people were since I was six-two—but there was something about the way he held himself, careful and contained, like he was trying to take up less space in the world. Gray threaded through dark hair that looked soft enough to touch, and his face…
Christ, he was beautiful. Not young-beautiful, but the kind that came from character, from living. Late forties, maybe, with laugh lines that suggested he’d seen plenty of happy times, though an air of sadness surrounded him now.
I’d seen him before. We’d almost collided the day before as well, in Brianna’s. Apparently, we were destined to bump into each other.
His mouth opened, closed, opened again. “I-I-I’m…” The word caught, stuck on the repetition, and pink flooded his cheeks. “S-s-sorry, I wasn’t… I didn’t…”
I kept my hands on his arms, steady but not restraining. My experience had taught me to read people’s distress, to know when to push and when to wait. This man needed to wait, needed space to breathe through whatever was happening.
“No harm done,” I said, keeping my voice low and easy. “I wasn’t watching where I was going.”
He pulled back, and I let him go immediately. His hands got busy, straightening his shirt, touching his throat, then dropping to his sides. The book lay spine-up on the asphalt—poetry, I noticed. Mary Oliver. Good choice.
I bent carefully to retrieve it, using the movement to grab my cane too. The cover was a little scuffed, but the pages seemed intact. When I straightened, he was staring at the cane, and I saw the moment his embarrassment shifted to something else. Recognition, maybe, of another person carrying damage.
“Here.” I held out the book. “Hope it’s not too banged up.”
He took it carefully, our fingers not quite touching. “Th-thank you.” The words came out rushed, like he was forcing them past an obstacle. “I’m s-s-sorry about—” He gestured vaguely at the space between us.
“Fraser,” I said, offering my name like a life preserver. “Fraser Strickland. I moved here a few weeks ago.”
