I pushed my head-torch up on my forehead, and stretched to get the kinks out of my spine. How come you never see Indiana Jones with lower back pain from spending hours hunched over a pile of dirt? Talk about unrealistic.

There was so much to do here; every time I extracted something from the hard-packed earth behind the basement wall, I got a new thrill of investigation. I’d had to stop myself repeatedly from rushing to my laptop and diving into research on each piece, reminding myself I was only here to do a cursory preliminary investigation.

I could easily spend a year or more here just working on what I’d already uncovered—and the more I looked, the more there was to find. Excited, I stood up and stripped off my latex gloves, wanting to go and tell someone, anyone.

No. Not just anyone. I wanted to tell Cat. I wanted to tell her everything I’d found.

I thought for a minute about her watching me attentively as I carved the new handle for the wardrobe, asking questions, making me explain why preserving the past was important. About the lines of her smile as I handed it to her, and the almost-electric charge that went through my hand when we touched. About the taste of her lips, sweet like strawberry ice-cream on a hot day.

“But,” I muttered to myself as I reached for my water bottle, “she ain’t gonna want to hear this, is she? She said so herself. Might as well face the truth; it’s hard to make something appealing when it means the end of someone’s livelihood.”

My phone rang and I blinked, surprised that I could get reception down here. Peering at the screen in the gloom, I saw my mother’s picture.

“Hi, Mom. Everything okay?”

“Fine, sweetheart. How’s the dig? Yielding anything?” My mother’s voice was warm and rich, and after twenty years with my father, she knew more about archaeological field-work than many academics.

“It’s—it’s fantastic, Mom. There are some things here I’ve never seen before in this stratum. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but we could be rewriting a lot of textbooks based on this find. I wish I could tell Dad; he would have been amazed by some of what I’ve seen today.”

“Well, maybe you can. How is Cable Bay? Your father and I went there a long time ago, although I don’t remember much about it. Picturesque?”

I thought for a minute. “Yeah, picturesque is about right. It’s really pretty, but I get the feeling my arrival in town is the biggest thing that’s happened in a while. The people are nice, though; it’s quite a departure from the city. Everyone’s very welcoming.”

My mother coughed politely. “So I’ve heard. I was talking to Antoinette, and she tells me you’ve met someone.”

“What?” I tried not to spit out a mouthful of water. “You know what sailors are like; they’re always telling tall tales. I have not ‘met someone’. I’ve only been in town a few days.”

“Oh, yes, I know.” There was a pause, which it somehow seemed I was expected to fill. Eventually, I cracked, as I always damn well did with my mother.

“Okay. Look. Fine. I met a girl in a…one evening, and we shared a…kiss. But that was it.”

“Was that it, was it?”

“Yes!”. It wasn’t. “Why am I even having this conversation with you? This is not a son-to-Mom sort of topic. Shouldn’t you be telling me to wrap up warm, or something?”

There was a chuckle from the other end of the line. “Honey, someone has to pay attention to your personal life, since you clearly don’t. Wrap up warm, by the way.”

“Yeah. Thanks, Mom. Also tell Ant that if she never comes back to dry land again, it’ll be too soon.” It’s pretty inexcusable for a grown man to be sarcastic in front of his own mother, but she sure made it hard sometimes. She’d been through a lot with Dad in the past five years, and now she had more free time, I could see parts of the person she’d been many years ago.

Younger than him when they were married, the old photos on their mantelpiece showed her pretty, confident, smiling with a hint of mischief. Mom playing college basketball. Mom in her stewardess’ uniform with a group of pilots; somehow, I’d always thought that was meant to be the other way around. Mom on her motorbike. Keep up with me if you can, that smile said.

She and Dad had always been in my corner, through school and college, telling me I could do anything I wanted, even when I doubted it myself. When I was in graduate school and too poor to afford anything other than ramen noodles for dinner, Mom would invite herself over for coffee most weeks. She’d gripe about how I needed to dust more often, and offhandedly produce some ‘leftovers’.

“Your father and I aren’t going to eat them, so you might as well; they’ll only go to waste otherwise.”

Mom’s leftovers always looked suspiciously like a week’s worth of precooked dinners, but she’d deny it vehemently if I ever mentioned this.

All I wanted to do was to live up to the start you guys gave me, Mom.

“Do you like her? This girl, I mean.”

“Yeah.” I paused. “Maybe I do. She listened to me talk about preserving memories, and I think she actually got it in the end, despite the fact it could mean the end of her job.”

“I see. What’s her name, this girl? Does she like you?”

“Her name’s Cat—uh, Catherine. As for whether she likes me, well, I wouldn’t go that far.” I rubbed my chin. “She might be,”—a flash of Cat astride me, hair falling about her shoulders, eyes wide, gasping as we broke off our kiss—”warming to me, though. Maybe. But it’s irrelevant, because I’m not staying here, right? I’m going to be gone in a week or so.”

“You could stay for a while. You don’t have teaching for the rest of the semester, and you can write there, as well as anywhere.”

I shrugged, although I knew she couldn’t see me. “I don’t know. It’s nice here, but I can’t stay just for a girl. I barely even know her.”

“Ryan.” I could hear a slight tone of admonishment in her voice. “I want you to make time, now and again, to stop and think about what you’re doing, and to be sure you’re happy with it. I’ll tell you a story.”

“Aren’t I a bit old for stories?”

“No. Now listen. When your father and I were first together, he’d come and pick me up, and we would go out for dinner, or go out to dance, or to a movie. But, you know the funny thing? He’d bring me home, and neither of us would have the faintest memory of what we ate, or what movie we saw. We were so engrossed in each other that we’d see the same movie three times over, and barely realize.”

“That’s wonderful, Mom.”

“When I asked him whether he was ever bored by it, he looked aghast. He said that he’d rather be anywhere with me, than anywhere without me.”

In the darkness of the basement, I smiled. “Dad was a lucky guy.”

“I was a lucky girl. What I’m saying is that I want you to have that kind of experience. One day, with someone. That’s all. So maybe give this girl Catherine a chance, huh? If you like her, and she likes you, then that’s something special. If there are problems with you being together, then find a solution. Make it work.”

“Yeah, I know. But maybe it’s best if I do it with someone who lives in the same town as me, and whose home I’m not trying to destroy. Look,” I tried to change the subject, “are you going to visit Dad on Sunday? If you take your phone, we could Skype, and I could talk to him from here.”

A sigh. “We tried that, remember?”

“Then let’s try it again.”

“Okay, it’s just—”

“Mom, if it’s a good day, it’ll make all the difference. Won’t it?”

“Ryan, I hate that…that fucking place.” My mother almost never cursed, and the words were all the more shocking in her mouth as a result. “The worst part is, it’s not even the home. It’s fine, really. It’s me.”

“It’s not you.” I leaned against the wall, ignoring the cold of the earth seeping through into my back, and let her talk.

“One day, it’s a waste of my time, and his. The next day, I have my husband back. I don’t know which one it’s going to be, and I feel so guilty for feeling angry when it’s not…it’s not the day I want.”

“Mom, listen to me.” The dust was stinging my eyes, like it always did when we got to this subject. “We aren’t required to like it, or to pretend it’s okay, because it’s not. We aren’t required to pretend it’s fair, because it’s not. All we’re required to do, is to do the best we can, and try to be as kind as we can. You’ve told me that yourself enough times.”

“How long is it going to be like this? How long before…” There was silence on the line, and I hoped she wasn’t crying. When I was a kid, she never cried.

“I don’t know, Mom. Nobody knows. But all we can do is carry on.”

“Okay.” She sounded calmer now. “I’ll tell you when I’m going.”

I made myself sound positive. “Look, when I’m back, we’ll go together, alright? Just like I said. I’ve got lots of photographs of the dig site here, and we can talk about those. That’ll be an easy conversation. You know I can talk for hours about this stuff.”

She laughed. “I sure do. After listening to your father hold forth for all those years, I’m pretty sure I know where that came from.”

“It’s a miracle you put up with either of us for this long, Mom.”

“It is that.”

“Mark my words, you’ll be stuck with both of us for a while yet.” Hold on tight to the phone, and keep talking. Talking makes everything okay, because it passes the time. Time makes everything okay, and that, you see, is why talking makes everything okay.

“I hope so. Look, I should go, sweetheart, and leave you to work. We’ll talk on the weekend, okay? I love you.”

“Okay, Mom. I love you too. Take care of yourself.”

I hung up the phone, and stared at the notes I’d made.

Note 5: Overall, the set of specimens are significantly different from previous findings in this region and geological stratum. In particular, Specimens 4 and 7 do not match any known findings, and are of considerable interest. If contemporaneous with the other specimens, they may represent a previously unknown and completely novel pattern of migration to this region.

Right now, I was certain that the fossils underneath Cat’s bar were an important discovery, one that would boost my career, and which needed to be investigated in painstaking detail.

I pressed my fingers against my eyelids, and concentrated on feeling happy about what I’d found.