WIP - Work in Progress- Like most of us...
They met between peaches and promises at the Saturday market. Diane laughed with her whole face. Jack mistook the flash for sunrise and bought her a jar of honey to make it last.
For a while, everything tasted like that honey—toast, coffee, even the air. They’d park by the old football field where August still smells like grass and brass. The soft-serve stand’s flickering neon spoon buzzed along with the radio’s three stubborn chords. They ate on the hood of Jack’s fading red car and talked the way kids do—big, careless, permanent.
Then came the tiny foxes.
The flowers were almost the right color, the restaurant nearly the right corner table. The napkins, she said, should’ve been swans. Jack apologized in handfuls. Diane smiled with her mouth and not her eyes. Thunder muttered somewhere offstage.
Nights, Diane kept a quiet ritual. She’d set her phone face down, then turn it over anyway, then face down again. A glass of water beside the bed. Two little white tablets she rarely took, like sentries. A spiral notebook with a list that started with “call Mom” and slid, neat and inevitable, into “what if,” “what if,” “what if.” Sleep came like a stingy landlord. When it did, she’d wake at three to count the refrigerator’s clicks and imagine them as problems lining up for roll call.
On good mornings she ran the museum in her head with the lights off. On the other kind, she opened it early: rooms of perfect kitchens and round-the-world trips, rings held up against Paris, babies asleep in houses that smelled like cedar and certainty. Standing among those frames, her own life looked like a photocopy.
Peace made her suspicious. If the day was kind, she’d tap the barometer on the mantle, lightly, like asking a wound if it remembered. If the day wasn’t, she’d say, “There it is,” and the weather would obey.
Jack tried to rescue the sky. He changed his cologne because once she called the old one “a little sweet.” He asked the barber for “Sharper.” He worked longer. He worked less. He cooked. He ordered in. He learned to read the air around her—how the jaw meant “not now,” the thumb worrying a seam meant “hold steady,” the too-quick smile meant “don’t ask.” A man can make a wick from himself, and he did, and the room got light but there wasn’t much Jack left afterward.
On Wednesdays a preacher sold produce out the side door of the church. Jack bought tomatoes he didn’t need. The preacher dropped an extra one into the bag without looking up. “For luck.” It landed heavy, true as a stone.
Diane found her oracle at the laundromat—an old woman who folded towels like treaties. They never spoke. The dryers turned. A quarter once spun loose from a child’s pocket and rolled a bright, perfect circle until it lay down. Diane watched it settle and felt the same gravity working in her.
They stayed together. Not a decision—more a string of not-leavings. The town practiced spring. Jack planed the door that stuck. Diane hung wind chimes tuned to a key that sounded like memory.
There were days the weather in her turned fast. She’d be brushing her hair when the floor moved half an inch to the left. She’d sit and breathe like a student taking a test she hadn’t studied for. The notebook helped if she wrote small enough. On the worst afternoons, she drove the long loop past the mill mural and the diner with the neon spoon. She let other people’s lives pass her windshield and tried not to narrate them.
One night the power quit on their street. They lit a candle in an old sugar jar from the diner. Cards on the table. The wax climbed its slow white mountain. Diane dealt quick, neat hands. Her fingers trembled—only a little, only where a person watching would be polite enough not to see.
“Tell me a secret,” she said.
Jack thought of the tomatoes, the extra weight, the preacher not looking up. “Sometimes I want to leave a note and drive till the map runs out.”
Diane looked at him the way a diver looks at the surface. “Sometimes I want to wake up in a kitchen that already knows where the glasses are.” She pressed her palms flat on the table until the flutter in her ribs lost interest.
They left the secrets with the bent queen of hearts and blew out the candle. The room remembered how to be dark.
Morning opened like a locker door. Jack went to the hardware store for sandpaper and screws. Diane stopped at the soft-serve stand. Two teens laughed on the tailgate of a truck, knees knocking, futures loud. The radio from inside leaked a backbeat that knew every town by first name. She watched too long for an adult, then ordered a cone and ate it fast before it dripped. For a few minutes, the museum stayed shut.
Back home, the door leaned against the wall, edge newly true. Jack had sawdust in his hair and that quiet look a man gets when something finally fits. Diane ran her finger along the planed wood, felt the smoothness, nodded like a doctor approving a heartbeat.
They ate late—eggs and toast, the kind of food that forgives being late. Diane set her phone face down and didn’t turn it over. Jack told her about a woman at the hardware store who refused help carrying a sack of gravel. “She said strength spoils if you don’t use it.” Diane smiled with her eyes.
They slept with the window open. At three, rain came—the decent kind that minds its business. The familiar flutter started in Diane’s chest and found no purchase. She listened to Jack breathe, even and ordinary. She reached out, changed her mind, changed it back, and rested her hand lightly on his shoulder as if quiet had weight.
Some days were good in the simple way a chair is good—sturdy, there. Others, the museum flung its doors wide and offered free admission. On those, Diane would stand at the window, thumb worrying a seam in the curtain, while the wind chimes tried and failed to be music. She was careful with the sharp things—newsfeeds, mirrors, other people’s perfect sentences. She learned the streets with fewer billboards.
Once, at the laundromat, the old woman miscounted a stack and chuckled to herself. “Mercy,” she said to the towels, as if they’d made an honest mistake. Diane surprised herself by laughing out loud. The sound felt like a bridge built from both sides at once.
They still drove nowhere sometimes. Past the field, now quiet. Past the diner’s neon spoon, still buzzing. Past a billboard promising a bigger life an hour up the highway. They didn’t chase it. Not that day.
Evenings found them on the porch. Cicadas stitched the air. The door swung clean on its hinges. Jack handed Diane a mug. She took it with both hands—the way you hold something warm when the weather inside you is deciding. Down the block, wind shook a tree and then apologized.
They didn’t make plans. They let the small work be the work: a door shaved true, a phone left alone, a notebook line crossed out because it belonged to yesterday. In the bedroom, the two little white tablets stayed where they were, sentries at ease.
Somewhere, a radio found those same three chords again and played them like a promise it could keep. The town kept moving the way towns do—forward, sideways, on. Inside the house, the museum left its lights off a while longer. Outside, the chimes stopped trying to be anything but honest.
On a Sunday that looked like Saturday, they went back to the market. Peaches and promises. Diane picked up a jar of honey and held it to the sun the way a person checks for cracks. It was clear, amber, steady. She put it in the basket.
Jack didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to. The weather would do what it does. The jar would taste like itself. And for a long, ordinary moment, that was enough.
I’m launching a series exploring what it means to grow up now—the pressures, the pitfalls, and the small victories of being a 'kid' in a world that never powers down. Growing Up Online.
STAY TUNED as they used to say...
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