Chapter 13
Easton
I woke up the next morning, and the breath was still down.
It had a place now.
I didn't move.
Astrid was on her side, facing me, her hand where it had been when I went under.
The green dress was still on her. Her hair had come out of the knot at some point in the night.
The light was coming in low through the east window, hitting a hole in the curtain where my grandmother had snagged it on a hanger a long time ago.
The light came through the hole onto Astrid's hand on my chest.
She had freckles on the bridge of her nose. I'd seen them in daylight. I hadn't seen them like this. She had a small mark at the base of her throat I hadn't registered last night. Her mouth was slightly open. Her breathing was slow and even, going into me through the place where her hand was.
I let myself look at her until she opened her eyes.
She blinked at me, slowly.
The remembering happened in two beats. Where am I? Then. Oh.
She didn't decide on embarrassed.
"Hi."
"Hey."
Her voice came out rough at the edges, half-pillow. "Did you sleep?"
"Yeah."
"All night?"
"All night."
"Good." She closed her eyes and let her cheek go back onto the pillow. The freckles on her nose were the closest thing to me in the room.
I let my hand come up over hers on my chest. She turned her palm up and laced her fingers through mine without opening her eyes.
We lay there.
After a while, she said into the pillow, "I have to feed Moose."
"Yeah. Coffee first."
She made a small sound into the pillow that I took for agreement.
She sat up a minute later. The green dress was a wreck. She looked down at it and made a face.
"You got a shirt I can put on?"
"Top drawer."
She slid out of bed, padded across the floor barefoot, and came back with one of my Hartsdale Fire T-shirts. She pulled it on over the dress, unzipped the dress underneath, and stepped out of it. The dress went on the chair. The shirt hit her at the knees.
She caught me looking.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"What, Easton?"
"That's how my shirt looks on you."
"I've noticed."
I held her eye a beat longer than I needed to. She rolled her eyes and went past me into the hall.
I lay there a second longer.
Then I got up and went into the kitchen.
Penny's water bowl was still by the back door.
I stood at the counter for a beat. The radiator was clicking on somewhere down the hall.
The light came in flat across the floorboards where she used to lie.
I crossed the kitchen, crouched, and picked the bowl up.
I washed it at the sink, dried it on the dish towel, and set it on the second shelf of the cupboard over the stove.
I closed the cupboard door. I stood there.
It didn't take the floor out from under me.
I could stand in this kitchen this morning and look at the empty rug. Yesterday, we'd buried her under the rose. This morning, I could look at the place she'd been and stand upright at the counter.
I put coffee on.
Astrid came down the hall in the gray shirt with her hair tied up in a small knot at the back of her head.
"I'm making you breakfast."
"You don't have to."
"I am though."
"Astrid."
"Easton."
"You don't have to feed me."
"I know I don't have to."
She got eggs out of my refrigerator without asking where they were. She found the flour in the cupboard above the stove without asking. She found the bowl my grandmother used to mix biscuits in for fifty years and pulled it down. She didn't make a thing of any of it.
"You can make pancakes?"
She glanced at me over her shoulder, one eyebrow up. "I can make pancakes. I'm not promising they'll be good."
"Astrid."
"I'm warning you in advance."
"What do you mean?"
"I haven't made pancakes since college."
She got the milk. She measured the flour with a coffee mug. She didn't measure the baking soda. She cracked two eggs into the bowl. One of them went mostly in and partly down the side. She scooped that piece back up with a piece of the shell and gave me a look that said don't.
I didn't.
She heated the pan and poured the first one too thick. It set up before she could flip it, the edges going black before the middle was set. She tried to flip it anyway, and it folded over on itself. She stared at it.
I started laughing.
It came up out of me in a way nothing had in two days. It wasn't a polite laugh. It was the real one, the Queens one. I hadn't heard myself make it since before Penny had gone bad.
Astrid stared at me with the spatula in her hand.
"I'm glad my failure is amusing to you."
"Astrid. I'm so sorry. Truly."
"Are you?"
"I'll eat it."
"You absolutely will not."
"I will."
I came over, lifted the burned folded pancake out of the pan with my fingers, and put it on a plate. I ate the corner of it standing at the counter.
It tasted like a pancake somebody had set on fire on purpose.
"It's good."
"Liar."
"It's good, Astrid."
She started laughing then, too. It had a little water in it. I ate half of the bad one. She made me a second one that wasn't black on the bottom. We sat at the kitchen table and ate off the same plate.
She drank her coffee with her elbows on the table and her hair coming loose from its knot.
She told me she was going to need to pick up the cat ointment from the pharmacy on Main Tuesday.
She told me Moose had probably gotten into the trash, and she was already prepared to find it on the floor when she walked in.
She told me she had a contractor coming Tuesday for a punch list item.
I sat across the table from her in my grandmother's kitchen at seven in the morning and listened to her tell me the small ordinary shape of her week.
I'd never sat across this table from a person who did that. My grandmother had been the only one before. The women I'd known hadn't sat at this table. None of them. Astrid was here, and she wasn't family, and she wasn't crew. Those were the only two kinds of staying I'd ever known.
She'd chosen me.
Astrid noticed me looking.
"What?"
"Nothing."
"Easton."
"Nothing, Astrid."
She didn't push. She finished her coffee. She stood up.
"I have to go feed Moose."
"Yeah."
"And the cat. He gets the wet food twice a day until I have him at a better weight."
"Did you name him yet?"
"Not yet."
She put her plate in the sink.
I walked her to the front door.
She got her boots from the room and put them on in the entryway. She still had my gray shirt on under her coat. She hadn't bothered with the dress. She'd bunched it up under her arm.
I opened the front door for her. The October air was cold. The porch boards were wet with frost.
She turned in the doorway.
I lifted my hand and tucked a piece of hair behind her ear. She let me.
I didn't kiss her.
It surprised me a little. I'd kissed her last night. I'd spent half of last night with my mouth somewhere on her face or her hand. The not-kissing this morning wasn't restraint. It was quieter than that. I didn't have a word for it. The kissing had been last night. This morning was something else.
She seemed to know.
She put her hand against my chest, where her hand had been when I went under, and rested it there for a beat. Then she turned and went down the porch steps in my shirt with her dress under her arm.
I stayed in the doorway.
She crossed Maple in the cold.
She turned at her own porch and lifted a hand. Not a wave. The smallest possible version of one.
I lifted mine.
She went inside.
I stayed in the doorway after the deadbolt.
I had a person. It was the simplest sentence I'd ever been able to form about my own life. I had a grandmother who raised me in the summers. I had a mother who loved me when she had the time. I had crews who ran into buildings beside me. But none of them had chosen me, not the way she had.
Astrid had chosen me.
I stood on my own porch in the cold and felt grateful. The kind of gratefulness a man feels when he's been hungry a long time, and somebody sets a plate down in front of him, and he understands, in the moment before he picks up the fork, that he hadn't known how hungry he'd been.
Across the street, her kitchen light came on.
I didn't want this to be the last morning I watched her cross Maple in my shirt.