"Slow," Harold repeated, and shook his head once, carefully, the way he did everything now, as if his neck were also negotiating. "Man spends his life on boats, he ought to be able to cross a kitchen."
Rowan set the small stool where he could see it and did not answer right away, because she had learned, in this room above all rooms, that reassurance offered too quickly was just noise with good intentions. She checked his grip, left hand, right hand, asked him to lift each foot in turn while seated, watched the small tremor in his left ankle that came when he concentrated too hard, and made a note. Then she stood at the end of the bars and held out neither hand nor hurry.
"Slow is not late, Harold," she said. "Slow is on time, if you get there whole. The kettle does not care when you arrive. It cares that you do not fall on the way."
He looked at her over the top of his glasses. "You say that to all your old men, or am I special?"
"You are the only one who argues with me before nine in the morning," she said. "That makes you special."
It took him four minutes to walk the bars with his hand floating an inch above the rail, and Rowan counted his steps silently and did not count them aloud, because Harold hated being counted aloud, hated the feeling that his body had become a public performance. Halfway down, his left foot scuffed and his hand came down hard on the rail and his face did something quick and furious, not at her, not at the room, but at the gap between the man in his memory, hauling traps in February water, and the man gripping a rail in a bright room while his daughter pretended to read page forty one of the same book for the third week.
"We stop," Rowan said, at once, because stopping was also training, and knowing when to stop was the part nobody put on a poster. "You caught yourself. That is the whole job. The foot scuffed and you caught yourself. Six months ago the scuff was the end of the walk. Today it was a moment in the middle of it."
He breathed, annoyed and, under the annoyance, steadied. "Again," he said.
"Once more," she said. "And this time, do not try to be faster. Try to be earlier. Look where the foot is going before it goes. Put your eyes on the place first. The body follows the eyes like a dog follows a whistle."
On the second walk his hand did not touch the rail at all until the final two steps, and when he reached the end he stood holding the upright with his good hand and smiling with the half of his face that had relearned smiling first, and then, a beat later, with the other half too, which always arrived, as he put it, like a ferry running behind schedule. Margaret closed her book. Rowan wrote down the distance and the time and, more important to her than either, the recovery from the scuff, because progress in that clinic rarely announced itself with trumpets. It came the way tide came into Greyhaven harbor, so gradually that you only noticed when the boats that had been sitting in mud were floating again.
That was the work. Rowan had come to it by accident, or by the kind of accident that, looked at later, has a shape. After the knee surgery she had done her own rehab in a clinic much like this one, hating every slow exercise, hating the bands and the balance board and the therapist who refused to let her rush, and somewhere in the third month she had begun, against her will, to understand it. The body did not heal at the speed of wanting. It healed at the speed of tissue, which had its own calendar and did not take requests. When her savings ran low and the clinic in Greyhaven advertised for an assistant, she had applied because the rent on the apartment above the bakery was cheap and because, she told the hiring manager, she was good at waiting with people. It was, she still thought, the truest thing she had ever put in an interview.