Chapter 14
FOURTEEN
PAUL
I’m making pancakes on a woman’s stove.
I need to sit with that sentence for a minute because it’s the most alarming thing that’s happened to me since yesterday, when I kissed someone in a lighthouse during a thunderstorm, which was previously the most alarming thing that had happened to me in a decade.
My life has become a series of escalating events that I did not plan and cannot control, and I’m responding to this crisis by making breakfast.
Aidan is on his seventh pancake. I know because Millie is tracking the count in the margin of her book with a pencil, and she announced “seven” without looking up, and nobody at this table seems to find it unusual that a ten-year-old is running a statistical analysis of her brother’s eating habits.
“I can do ten.” Aidan reaches for the syrup. His elbow catches the butter dish. The butter dish slides across the table. Every person in the galley watches it travel. It stops at the edge.
“Near miss,” Millie says, and makes a note.
I am standing at this woman's stove wearing yesterday's flannel with a spatula I found in a drawer behind a pasta server shaped like a mermaid. I am flipping pancakes for three children who aren't mine, in a galley that isn't mine, on a boat I tried to evict from my dock.
My father would be thrilled. He would frame this moment and hang it in the dock office.
“You’re very serious about pancakes,” Emma says.
“I’m serious about everything.”
“I’ve noticed.”
“Most people flip too early. You have to wait for the bubbles to set around the edges.” I slide one onto Jenna’s plate. “Patience.”
“Is that your life philosophy?”
“My life philosophy is ‘don’t get involved in things that aren’t your business.’” I look at the table. Four people. Three of them under eighteen. All of them eating my pancakes. “I’m aware of the contradiction.”
Jenna catches Emma’s eye from across the table.
She mouths something I’m not supposed to see.
Emma gives her a look. Jenna gives her a look back.
An entire conversation happens in three seconds without a single word, and I’m reminded that women communicate on a frequency I will never have access to.
“These are the best pancakes I’ve ever had,” Aidan announces, leaning back in his chair at an angle that should be reported to the physics department. “Better than Mom’s. Sorry, Mom.”
“I’m standing right here, Aidan.”
“I know. That’s why I said sorry. I’m being polite about it.”
“You could also be polite by not ranking my cooking against a guest’s.”
“He’s not a guest. Guests don’t show up with wet hair and no shoes. He’s a regular now.” He points his fork at me. “You’re a regular. Congratulations.”
I look at Emma. She looks at me. Her son has just issued a decree and neither of us knows how to respond to it. An eight-year-old with syrup on his chin has more clarity about this situation than either of the adults in the room.
“You’ve got syrup everywhere,” I say, handing him a napkin.
“I’m saving it for later.”
“It’s on your ear.”
He touches his ear. His hand comes back sticky. He stares at it with genuine fascination.
“Huh. I don’t remember putting that there.”
Millie closes her book. “That was seven, by the way. Aidan ate seven.” She tucks the book under her arm. “I’m going to read on the dock. It’s quieter out there.”
She slips out the door without waiting for a response.
Jenna stands up. “I’m going to Dawson’s. Piper and I are going paddleboarding.”
“Sunscreen,” Emma says.
“Already on.”
“The real sunscreen. Not the tinted moisturizer you pretend is sunscreen.”
“It has SPF 30.”
“It has SPF ‘Jenna got a sunburn last week.’”
She grabs her bag and is gone.
Aidan stacks his plates, carries them to the sink, and announces he’s going to check on Steve.
“Tell Steve I said good morning,” I say, and I’m not sure when I became a man who greets a hermit crab but here we are.
Aidan beams. “Steve likes you. I can tell because he didn’t hide in his shell when you walked in. That’s basically a hug in hermit crab language.”
He thunders down the hall. A door slams. Something falls over.
And then it’s quiet.
The galley is small. Morning light through the windows. My coffee mug next to hers on the counter, which feels like a statement I didn’t intend to make. A stack of plates and a syrup-sticky table and the smell of butter and the boat rocking gently.
I pick up a dish towel.
“You don’t have to do that,” she says.
“The pan needs soaking.”
“I’ll do it later.”
“It’ll be harder to clean later. Batter sets.”
I’m already running water. This is what I do—I find the thing that needs fixing and I fix it.
It’s easier than standing in a woman’s kitchen with nothing to do and no idea what comes next.
Yesterday I kissed her in a lighthouse. This morning her son yelled at me from a dock and I came over in bare feet because apparently I have no defenses left.
I’ve been stripped of all my emotional fortifications by a woman with a camera and three kids and a hermit crab named Steve, and the only thing I can think to do about it is wash dishes.
We work in the small galley, careful around each other. Her arm brushes mine reaching for the dish soap. She hands me a plate. Our fingers overlap on the rim and neither of us pulls away for a beat longer than necessary.
“Thank you,” she says. “For the pancakes. For being here.”
“Your son yelled at me from the dock. There wasn’t a lot of choice involved.”
“There was. You could have said no.”
“I don’t think your son understands the word no. I think he hears it as ‘try a different angle.’”
“He gets that from me.” She pauses. “Or from his father. Matt was persistent about things he cared about. The problem was the list of things he cared about was very specific and didn’t include his family.”
Her voice changes when she says it. Goes flat and careful, the way mine goes when someone says Holly’s name. I know that tone. It’s the sound of a wound that hasn’t finished healing.
My hands still in the soapy water. “What did he care about?”
She leans against the counter.
“Model trains.”
I wait. Because I’ve learned that when Emma is about to say something real, you don’t rush her. You just stand there and let her get to it.
“He had this setup in our garage. Mountains, tunnels, a miniature village—the whole thing. He could spend all day painting individual bricks and tiny window frames. He was talented. I’ll give him that.
He could build a whole world in a four-by-eight-foot space.
” She picks at a spot of dried batter on the counter.
“He just forgot he had a real world on the other side of the garage door.”
This woman—this warm, funny, impossible woman who kissed me in a lighthouse and feeds her kids pancakes and carries everything on her back—was married to a man who chose a hobby over her. Who had Emma Mills in his house and spent his time painting miniature scenery.
I have opinions about this. None of them are charitable.
“How long?”
“Our whole marriage, really. It started small. A hobby. Then it was every evening. Then it was where he went when Aidan had colic and I was walking the floor at two in the morning, and where he stayed when Jenna needed help with her science project.” She pauses.
“The garage had climate control. He installed it himself. Our bedroom didn’t. That tells you everything.”
It tells me everything. It tells me a man air-conditioned a room full of toy trains and let his wife sweat. I dry a plate. Set it down. Pick up another one, because if I’m not holding something I’m going to say things about her ex-husband that aren’t appropriate for a first breakfast.
“He wasn’t mean,” she says. “People hear ‘divorce’ and they assume someone was terrible. Matt wasn’t terrible.
He was just—gone. Physically present, mentally in a miniature mountain range.
He once drove ninety minutes to pick up a custom-painted caboose but couldn’t remember it was his turn to pack Jenna’s school lunch. ”
“That’s its own kind of terrible,” I say.
Because I know what it looks like when someone disappears from their own life.
I did it. Not into a garage—into grief. Into silence.
Into making my world as small as possible so nothing could hurt me again.
The method was different but the result was the same. Someone who loved me got left behind.
“Being ignored by someone who’s right there,” I say. “That’s worse than being left. At least when someone leaves, you know where you stand. When they stay and check out —” I stop. Set the plate down. “You’re competing with something that isn’t even real.”
“Tiny mountains,” she says.
“Tiny mountains.”
“So I did everything myself. Kids, house, business, bills. All of it. And now I don’t know how to stop.”
“And now you don’t know how to let someone help.”
“Now I don’t trust that someone will actually follow through if they offer.”
She says it looking straight at me. Not accusing.
Just honest. And I hear what she’s really saying—I don’t know if you’ll follow through.
I don’t know if you’ll stay or if you’ll find your own version of that garage.
And she’s right to wonder. She’s right to be careful.
Because I spent a decade in my own version, and the fact that mine was made of grief instead of model trains doesn’t make it less real.
I fold the dish towel. Set it on the counter. Turn to face her.
“Holly would have hated him,” I say.
I don’t plan to say it. It just comes out. Holly’s name in Emma’s kitchen, on a morning that smells like pancakes and dish soap, and it doesn’t hurt the way it usually hurts. It hurts differently. Like stretching a muscle that’s been locked up too long.