Chapter 10 - Table Thirteen
Two years after the wrong blind date, Hannah stood outside the restaurant on Mercer Avenue and refused to go in.
“You made a reservation?” she asked.
Caleb held the door.
“Yes.”
“Under your actual name?”
“All of it, if required.”
“And the table number is legible?”
“I requested additional lighting.”
She narrowed her eyes, then walked past him.
Table thirteen waited near the window.
No rose petals. No musicians. No crowd holding phones. Just two place settings and a little brass clock between them.
Hannah stopped.
“Dad made that.”
“He did.”
“He said it was for a difficult customer.”
“His description was fair.”
She sat slowly.
Their relationship had not become effortless because the first kiss went well. Caleb sometimes retreated into work when worried. Hannah sometimes said she was fine when she meant she was exhausted and needed somebody else to decide dinner.
They learned.
He stopped making elaborate plans without asking about her schedule. She learned that accepting help did not require surrendering the right to dislike how it was offered.
They argued once about money so thoroughly that neither touched dessert. The following week, they met with a counselor instead of pretending affection would do the bookkeeping for them.
Hannah kept her job. She had moved into a clinical teaching role for part of her schedule and still worked shifts she loved. Her loans were shrinking on a plan she chose. The Subaru had finally retired after an undignified incident involving a grocery cart and a window stuck open during sleet.
She bought its replacement herself.
Caleb celebrated by giving her an ice scraper.
She had laughed for ten minutes.
They had rented a house together that winter, after comparing budgets and discussing what each wanted from a home. Hannah chose the kitchen chairs. Caleb chose a reading lamp. The first thing they hung on the wall was a calendar showing both their schedules.
Now he watched her examine the clock.
“It runs?” she asked.
“Your father threatened consequences if it didn’t.”
Through the window, Old Harbor glowed beneath streetlights. The revised project had opened its first section that spring. The clock shop remained busy enough that Elliot complained about needing holidays, then took them with Mrs. Bell.
The commercial cooperative had its own disagreements, minutes, and spectacularly unpopular parking committee. Hannah considered these excellent signs. People who could argue over parking still had somewhere to go.
The server brought garlic bread without being asked.
Hannah looked at Caleb.
“You’ve become predictable.”
“I hoped for dependable.”
“The review is ongoing.”
He reached into his jacket.
For once, his quiet face did not conceal how nervous he was.
“We’ve talked about marriage,” he said. “About where we’d live. About money and work and the fact that your father will always own more clocks than our house can reasonably contain.”
“He calls that a distribution problem.”
Caleb smiled, then opened the small box.
“I love you. I want the ordinary days, too. Will you marry me?”
Hannah looked at him for a long moment.
Then she glanced at the table number.
“I should check whether this is meant for someone in a red coat.”
He laughed, breathless and helpless.
“Hannah.”
“Yes,” she said, reaching for him. “Absolutely yes.”
They married the following September in the courtyard behind the renovated clock shop. Marisol stood beside Hannah. Elliot walked her down the aisle wearing the watch her mother had given him, newly cleaned and running beautifully.
Caleb wore his brother’s.
At the reception, Elliot raised a glass.
“I spent years believing keeping things meant never changing them,” he said. “My daughter has explained, at considerable volume, that this is occasionally impractical.”
Everyone laughed.
He looked toward the shop, then back at Hannah.
“I’m glad we kept what mattered.”
Later, beneath strings of warm lights, Caleb pulled his wife close enough to ask whether she regretted sitting at the wrong table.
Hannah considered the question with unnecessary seriousness.
“The garlic bread was excellent.”
“Anything else?”
She kissed him, then rested her forehead against his.
May you like
“The company improved.”
Behind them, her father’s clocks began striking the hour. They were not perfectly synchronized. They never had been. Hannah listened to the uneven, familiar music and took Caleb’s hand as their family called them back to the table.
