Chapter 27
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jack
It took her two weeks to leave me completely stumped.
More than any engine I’d ever pulled apart, more than any problem I’d encountered on a rig in North Dakota or a highway in Nevada, more than anything my father had ever thrown at me or my own head had managed to come up with in thirty-six years of trying.
Two weeks, and she did it over macaroni and cheese on a Tuesday night.
She didn't even look up from her bowl when she said it.
"Are you my dad now?"
I set my fork down.
She was eating, still, working through the macaroni with her usual methodical focus. She asked it the way she asked everything. Straight, no preamble, like it was just a missing piece of a puzzle she needed to find.
"I'm your uncle," I said. "Your mom's brother."
She considered this, her spoon hovering mid-air. "But you live here now."
"Yeah."
"And you pick me up from school."
"Yeah."
"And you make my dinner." She looked down at the bowl. "Mostly."
I let that one go. I knew exactly where I stood in the culinary rankings, and it was somewhere just above "cereal for dinner."
She put her spoon down and looked at me properly for the first time since she’d asked. "Tommy Henderson has a dad," she said. "He picks him up on Fridays. They go to McDonald’s." A pause. "I had a dad once."
"I know," I said. My voice felt thick in my throat.
"I don't remember him though." She said it without particular sadness, just as a fact. "Mommy said he was very kind. And that he had a nice smile." She looked at her own small face in the toaster’s reflection. "She said I have his smile."
I didn't say anything. I couldn't.
"Mommy said he’s in heaven," she said. "Looking down at me." She looked at the table, her brow furrowed. "Is she there too? With him?"
The kitchen was very quiet. Even the hum of the refrigerator seemed to cut out, leaving us alone with the question.
"Yeah," I said. "I think so."
She nodded slowly, like this was satisfactory information. Then: "Do you think they can see us right now?"
"I don't know," I said. "Maybe."
She looked up at the ceiling for a moment, assessing the plaster as if it were a two-way mirror. Then she picked her spoon back up. "I hope she can’t see my room," she said. "It’s messy."
Something moved in my chest that I didn’t have a name for—something heavy and sharp that felt like it had been waiting years for a reason to wake up.
We ate in silence for a moment. Then she said, without looking up: "If you're my dad now, will I get a new mom too?"
"That's not really how it works," I said carefully.
"Tommy Henderson’s dad got a new girlfriend," she said. "She makes him eat broccoli. He doesn't like it." She paused, considering the trade-off. "I don't mind broccoli."
"Good to know."
She was quiet for a moment, eating. Then she looked up.
"I don't want a new mom."
"Cassie's your mom," I said. I leaned in a little, making sure she saw the truth of it in my face. "She'll always be your mom, Lily. Nothing changes that. Not ever."
She held my gaze for a moment, checking that I meant it. Then she went back to her macaroni, apparently satisfied.
I picked my fork back up. The air in the kitchen felt a little lighter, like a storm had just rolled through and left the sky clear. Two minutes passed. Maybe three.
Then: "Do you have a girlfriend?"
I looked at her. I’d survived the "Dad" question and the "Heaven" question, but this one felt like a different kind of ambush. She was looking back at me with complete innocence, spoon halfway to her mouth.
"No," I said.
"Why not?"
"Just don't." It was the most honest answer I had. I hadn't stayed in one place long enough to keep a houseplant alive, let alone a relationship.
She seemed to find this unsatisfactory. "Gerald thinks you should get one," she said.
"Gerald the rabbit."
"He's very wise," she said seriously.
"I'll keep that in mind."
She ate another spoonful. I could see her thinking, which with Lily was always slightly alarming because you never knew what direction it was going to come from.
"What about that doctor lady?" she said.
I looked at her.
"From the funeral," she said. "She had nice hair.
Gerald liked her." A pause. "She came here too.
When I was sick. In the night." She said it matter-of-factly, like she'd been sitting on it for a while.
"I was mostly asleep but I remember. She had cold hands.
" She tilted her head, considering the memory. "I didn't mind."
I looked at her. I hadn't known she'd clocked that—that she’d been conscious enough to register the temperature of Maddie’s skin, or the fact that she’d been in the room at all.
"Gerald thinks you should invite her for dinner," Lily said.
"I could."
"Gerald thinks you should."
"Gerald should mind his own business."
Lily looked at the rabbit with an expression of great solemnity. "He says that's not possible," she said. "He cares about people."
I looked at her across the table—this small serious person with her mother's eyes and her rabbit and her absolute conviction that a stuffed animal had opinions about my love life—and something happened that I hadn't planned for.
I laughed.
It wasn't a polite laugh, or the careful half-smile I’d been managing for two weeks. It was a real one, the kind that came from somewhere low in the chest and didn’t ask for permission. It broke out of me before I could do a damn thing to stop it.
Lily stared at me, her eyes wide with a momentary shock.
Then, slowly, the corners of her mouth began to twitch.
And then she was laughing too, bright and sudden and completely unguarded.
It was the kind of laugh that had nowhere to hide.
It was loud, genuinely loud. It was the Henley laugh, the one Cassie had carried like a spark her whole life and apparently hadn't kept to herself.
It filled the kitchen. It bounced off the linoleum and the cupboards, chasing away the quiet that had lived there since the funeral.
We laughed until it wound down into nothing. We sat there grinning at each other across the cooling macaroni and cheese like two people who’d just discovered they spoke the same language and hadn't known it until now.
Gerald observed all of this from beside the salt shaker. His button eyes was fixed on us with what I could only describe as smug satisfaction.
I looked at him for a moment. Then I looked away.
Lily's grin widened. "I'll tell him you said so."
Later, after she was in bed, I stood at the kitchen sink and looked out at the dark garden and thought about twelve years of moving from one place to the next, of packing in eight minutes and leaving without looking back.
I had always chosen the next rig or the next town over any version of a life that might actually ask something of me.
I'd always been a bit lost. I knew that. Had known it for a long time, had just gotten good at moving fast enough that it didn't show.
But this.
This made it worth it.
All of it—the rigs, the years, the cold, and the noise. Every long, flat horizon going nowhere was just a road I had to take to stand in this kitchen. I was here with a five-year-old asleep upstairs who had her mother's laugh and a rabbit with opinions.
And it was worth it.