The Name She Says

Jayme Nichols got to the lake before the sun did.

That was the point. Not the lake specifically - Jayme would have been wherever the water was, whatever still surface was close enough to reach at four-forty-five in the morning when the alarm went off and the only honest answer to the question of whether to get up was to get up immediately, before the honest answer changed its mind. She'd found this particular lake three years ago, a reservoir outside of DFW with a fishing dock that was almost never occupied at this hour, and she had been coming to it every Wednesday for three years, and in those three years she had not missed a single one.

Ten minutes. That was the whole ritual. She sat at the end of the dock, and she looked at the water, and she did not think about the office or the division or the pitch or the season or the brand that went sideways two years ago or anything Melissa had said on Tuesday or anything Cynthia might be thinking in Dallas. She thought about a name.

The name was her own business and not the audience's, not yet, maybe not ever. But it lived in the ten minutes the way a word lives in a song - structurally, underneath everything, the thing that makes the rest of it make sense without being the thing you can point to. She said it in her head, not out loud, and the gray water absorbed it the way it absorbed everything, which was completely, without opinion.

This was what helped. Not the peace - the peace was conditional, the peace depended on nothing going wrong at work, on the clients being reasonable, on the division holding together, and the division was always in some state of not-quite-holding-together, which was the nature of a division that was built on real work and real people. The peace was not reliable. The water was reliable. The ten minutes were reliable. The name she said in her head was reliable, which was the whole reason she said it.

She had known, listening to Melissa on Tuesday, that something had shifted. Not because Melissa was right - Melissa was usually right, that was one of the things that made the fifteen years of this friendship feel like fifteen years in a fast current - but because Melissa had said it in a way she hadn't said it before. Without the pitch underneath it. Without the ask wrapped inside the tell. Just the thing itself, the observation without agenda, and Jayme had said I hear you and meant it, which was different from the ways she usually meant things when it came to Melissa and the topic of the thing Melissa wanted to build.

She sat at the end of the dock and said the name in her head and let the water be the water.

The caution was not cowardice. She knew that. Melissa knew it too, which was why Melissa had said so, which was an act of unusual generosity from someone who wanted what Melissa wanted and had been waiting as long as Melissa had been waiting. The caution was scar tissue, yes, and the scar tissue was the residue of two quarters Jayme had carried without dropping, and carrying things without dropping them left marks, and the marks sometimes looked like hesitation from the outside when they were not hesitation, they were knowledge.

But knowledge had its own cost. You could know so much about the weight of a thing that you stopped asking whether it was worth lifting.

She sat with that. The sun came up at the edge of the reservoir, low and orange, and the gray water went gold and then pale and then just water again, and the ten minutes were gone, and she stood up and went to the car.

She was the same person who had sat down. She was also, in some specific and not-fully-nameable way, the person who would hear the pitch when Melissa was ready to say it. When the room was right. She didn't know yet when that was. She knew it wasn't tabled.

That was the difference. The tabling was over.

This entry is part of The Marfa Munchies, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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