The Understory by Elizabeth Leiknes Page A

but in a real way, as if he somehow felt responsible. Several times during their conversation, when he was on the verge of talking, he instead offered her his hands. It was subtle, of course, but Story noticed how he extended them in a vulnerable way, somewhere between a peace offering and a safety net. And yet, other times, he rubbed them, as if they ached. So when he presented his large, working-man hand to Story, and let her do the talking, she felt safe, but also bummed that he saw her as someone who might not be capable of helping herself.
    “A pleasure,” she said as she let his strong hands squeeze hers. After starting down the hall, she turned around for a moment to give one last smile to the beautiful stranger who would stay just that—a stranger.
    Goodbye to the only real prince in Phoenix, the one who might have given me a chance.
    Love,
    Princess Failure



SEVEN
    M any years ago, in a sun-kissed land, a young Hans Turner became a man too soon. Like most tales, Hans’s is many-layered—story upon story stacked inside him like the hand-chiseled wooden blocks he could create to perfection. But just as every fictional fairy tale character has one defining moment—Cinderella’s mother dying, Jack’s run-in with a giant, Snow White’s fickle dad marrying a murderous bitch—so did the very real Hans Turner. It happened in his childhood, and it carved into his life a dark groove that, no matter what he did to smooth it over, remained a deep, lifeless furrow.
    Not that he didn’t try to smooth it over, try to sand it out of his life for good. Ever since it happened, at the age of eight, Hans tried hard to wash his hands of it. But his hands were always, and are, the problem—they failed him once, long ago. To make up for it, he now used his hands as tools to fix and protect, certain that it is actions, not words, that save people—but there is an exception to every rule.
    In stories, words often trump action. In stories, the things people say to each other breathe life into those in need of resuscitation. In stories, words can work magic. But stories lived only in Hans’s past, where they existed on a flat, imaginary page, fixed in time, because any fool knew this: Compared to people in real life, stories always disappoint.
    Though Hans never talked all that much, when people would ask him what his college major had been, he would answer, “I majored in wood,” because it invariably conjured up inappropriate images of horny undergrads lusting their way through four years of school, and it always ended conversations he didn’t want to have about why he wasn’t living up to his potential. Hans was an artist, formally trained, with an MFA in woodworking, but with bills to pay, he gave up creating art to feed his soul, and became a handyman to fill his belly. That’s why he’d been at the Payne house, to fix Claire’s front door, and maybe, in doing so, help fix Claire, just a little.
    Hans knew the difference between bloodwood and coast redwood. He also knew if a piece of wood was ring-porous or diffuse-porous. And he could tell, by looking at the inside layers of a tree, how it had become damaged—reddish brown streaks indicated injury by bird, and black specks suggested insect damage. But what Hans Turner could not do was apply this knowledge of trees and wood to the human realm, and therefore he could not tell, when meeting someone, whether or not he could fix her. So he gave up guessing and attempted to fix everyone. And when he felt he could not fix someone, his hands were the first to know—they ached.
    But recently his hands ached the most when he tried to create true art, as he used to. The lively wooden sculptures he once carved held a story in each engraved curve, but now, if he tried to do anything more than fix damaged wood in a utilitarian fashion, or forge original creations for someone else’s made-to-order vision, his hands throbbed. So Hans decided he’d focus his life on mending