An Appointment with the Sky
The first thing Jodi asked me was why the town clock lost four minutes every week when everybody knew it did. I was selling her a secondhand telescope. I had prepared a charming account of its previous owner and its excellent condition. She had already found a loose fitting, adjusted it with a coin, and noticed that the tower across the square was wrong. I told her people had learned to allow for the time. She looked at me over the telescope and asked what else we allowed for.
Within a month she had borrowed the tower key, offended two councilors, and repaired the clock with help from a woman who serviced sewing machines. She did not accept the council's invitation to be photographed beside it. That afternoon she was at the river teaching children to measure a shadow with string. She arrived for our first dinner with a leaf caught in her sleeve and a precise question about something I had said three weeks earlier. I had never been attended to so carefully or felt so unable to prepare.
People mistook her departures for carelessness. She would vanish from a party to help somebody carry a washing machine upstairs, then forget to say where she had gone. She could listen to a friend for three hours and refuse a stranger three minutes. Her boundaries had edges. They were not always convenient to stand beside. When I described her as impossible to predict, she asked whether I had wanted a weather report or a person. I had no answer that made me look good.
In winter she began restoring an abandoned hillside observatory. The grant committee wanted a visitor attraction. She wanted children who had never left the valley to see a planet as a place rather than an illustration. She argued with the committee, lost the grant, and started collecting parts. I carried ladders and privately expected gratitude to become some kind of claim. One evening she told me she had accepted a seasonal post across the sea. I asked what that meant for us. She asked why my first question had not been whether she wanted to go.
We had our worst argument beside a dismantled dome. I accused her of keeping a way out of everything. She showed me the messages from people she had answered through years of changing addresses, the observatory account emptied into repairs, the care she took arranging cover for her father's appointments. Staying visible to me was not the same as staying faithful to what mattered. I knew that before she finished. Knowing did not immediately make me generous. We worked in silence until the cold made both our hands clumsy.
She left in April and returned in August with a crate of donated lenses and an ugly little bowl she had thought I would like. She was right about the bowl. By then I had learned to ask questions that did not contain a fence. She had learned to tell me when she needed time to disappear into a problem. We opened the observatory on a night with terrible cloud cover. Nobody saw a planet. Jodi taught the children to take the telescope apart, and they stayed an hour past closing.
Later the sky cleared. She woke me by tapping a pebble against the bedroom window, grinning at the absurdity of standing outside a house she had a key to. We climbed the hill with our coats over our nightclothes. At the eyepiece she was utterly still. I could see the fierce concentration in the set of her mouth, the woman who repaired clocks and ignored invitations, who had come back carrying a bowl. I waited for her to finish looking. There was nowhere else I needed her to be.
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