The PowWow

Naomi arrived at ten past two with her coat still on and the expression she wore when working cases in the morgue. Ordered and direct.

She looked around the office. Registered Jacob's empty desk, the cold coffee, the open translation lying face-down at the precise angle of a man who intended to return to it shortly and had opinions about page creasing, or Lord forbid, spine cracking.

"Where is he?"

"Roiya's date with William appears to have gone sideways," I said, from the couch, where I had achieved a comfortable geometry with the legal pad that I was not prepared to abandon lightly. "Jacob went to collect her."

Naomi processed this. "Is she alright?"

"She sent a one-word text that said fine in all capitals, which in Roiya's communication style means she is annoyed but unharmed and would like to be retrieved without further commentary, which in turn means, please send Jacob."

Naomi giggled a bit. She had learned, across the months since she had become a fixture at Jeremiah's table and Jacob's side, to read the family's particular dialects. She understood all-caps fine from Roiya the way she understood Jacob's single-word compressions — not immediately, but now, with the fluency of someone who had done the work.

She sat in Jacob's chair.

Not self-consciously. Just — sat in it, with the ease of a woman who had decided some time ago that Jacob's spaces were becoming her spaces and had stopped marking the transition as notable. She looked at the open translation. Looked at the cold coffee. Looked at the dog bed with his feet-shaped indentation and the patient acceptance of its current function.

Then she looked at me.

"I need help," she said. "Practical help."

I set the legal pad on my knee, trying not to knock over the other pads balanced there too. "Wedding."

"Wedding," she confirmed. "Specifically — Jacob." She folded her hands. "I have decisions to make. Flowers, venue details, the reception format, whether there will be a receiving line—"

"There will not be a receiving line," I said. "He will do it because you ask and because he loves you and because he will stand there for every single person who wants to shake his hand. But there will not be a receiving line."

She looked at me. "That's what I assumed."

"Correct assumption."

"The problem," she said, with the precise patience of a woman who had been assembling this sentence for some time, "is that Jacob communicates in geological time. I ask him what he wants. He tells me he wants whatever I want. I ask him if he has a preference. He says the Lord has it covered." She spread her hands slightly. "Which I find both endearing and completely unhelpful when I'm trying to decide between two reception venues and I would like to know if he has any feelings about natural light."

I looked at her for a moment.

Then I looked at the legal pad on my knee. Two and a half pages of wedding logistics, crossed out and rewritten, with notes that said things like ask Jacob and ask Naomi, Jacob will agree and ask Naomi — see above. I turned it toward her.

She read the top half page. Her expression moved from professional to something quieter.

"You've been thinking about this too," she said.

"Obsessively," I said. "And arriving at the same wall." I set the pad down. "Can I make a suggestion?"

"Please."

"Call Rachel."

Naomi tilted her head. "About the wedding?"

"About the wedding," I said. "She has been talking about this wedding since the night of the engagement. Enthusiastically. With opinions." I paused. "Good ones. The organized kind. She probably has a document."

"A document."

"Color-coded, possibly, tabs, the works."

Naomi looked at me with the expression she sometimes wore when she was deciding if I was being sincere or amusing myself. Finding sincere, which I was, she nodded slowly.

"She'll have practical ideas," I said. "Things you can actually use. And she'll be glad you asked." I settled back against the couch cushions. "She knows the proposal isn't coming from my direction anytime soon. I'm still learning her. She knows it and she's good with it and she has all this wedding energy with nowhere to put it. You'd be doing her a favor. Which would be doing me a favor too."

Something moved in Naomi's expression that was warm and slightly knowing and which I elected not to examine too closely.

"And Jacob himself?" she said.

I looked at the translation lying face-down on his desk. At the dog bed. At the chair she was sitting in, which had adjusted slightly to her — or which she had adjusted to, the geometry of two people becoming one household beginning in the small places before it became official anywhere.

"The simple thing," I said. "And I mean this entirely." I met her eyes. "As long as you're there, he won't care about anything else. That's all he wants. You, as his wife, at the end of it. Everything else is furniture."

Naomi looked at me.

Her expression did something quiet. The smile arrived slowly, the way Jacob's did — not announced, just present, building from the inside, but spreading farther than his usually did. The smile of a woman who had been told something true about someone she loved and was holding it carefully because it deserved that.

The two of them, honestly. The absolute quantity of warmth they generated in each other's direction was something I had observed across months with the particular mixture of sincere happiness and mild personal affectation that came from being regularly adjacent to people who were deeply, fluently, quietly in love. It was a lot. It was a wonderful, occasionally excessive, treasured-for-my-brother lot. I would not have changed a single degree of it. And it echoed Jeremiah and Rebecca, and I prayed often, that when it was time to ask Rachel, I would have that too.

I kept this observation to myself.

"Thank you," Naomi said. She stood, straightening her coat. "I'll call Rachel."

"She'll pick up on the second ring," I said. "Might actually be the first ring, she's been waiting for someone to ask."

Naomi smiled again — the full version this time, unhurried — and moved toward the door. She paused with her hand on the frame and looked back once at Jacob's desk. At the translation, the cold coffee, the dog bed.

Then she walked out.

The office settled into its particular working quiet. The February light through the windows was doing what February light did, which was provide illumination without warmth and seem faintly judgmental about it.

I sat with what I had just said.

As long as you're there, he won't care about anything else.

True. Completely true. Not a thing said to comfort her — the actual answer to her actual question, which I had arrived at easily because it was simply what Jacob was and had always been. When he decided on a thing, the thing had his complete fidelity, and Naomi was the thing he had decided on, and two thousand people in a receiving line or bare feet at a ceremony or flowers or no flowers or natural light or no natural light was unimportant around that central fact.

I chuckled. Low, private, the laugh of a man who had just caught himself.

Because what I had told her, in the end — told her with complete sincerity and full confidence — was ask Naomi. I had told the bride that her groom wanted her, which meant all the decisions were still hers, which meant I had delivered two and a half pages of legal pad notation, a recommendation to call Rachel, and a romantic truth, and the practical outcome was identical to what it had been before she walked in.

Ask Naomi.

Because that was how it was going to go, and Jacob would receive whatever she decided with the complete and genuine contentment of a man for whom the furniture was genuinely furniture.

I picked up the legal pad.

The man with the Bible wasn't going to find himself.