Chapter 11
ELEVEN
ELLIE
The logistics of moving Daniel Costello into my house took the better part of a Saturday and two trucks.
His own truck, which did most of the heavy lifting, and Cord’s, which was recruited for the second run when it became apparent that Daniel’s definition of traveling light was relative and had more to do with not being sentimental about things than with actually not owning much.
He brought furniture. Not a lot, but some.
The pieces that were his that he’d accumulated over years of living alone with the practical selectiveness of a man who only kept what worked.
A good armchair. A solid bookshelf. The ancient and apparently sacred cast-iron skillet that he carried into my kitchen with the careful reverence of a man installing something load-bearing.
“I need a drawer,” he said.
“You have a drawer. You have three.” The little dresser in his room wasn’t huge, but it was something.
“For my coffee situation.”
I looked at the burr grinder and the pour-over equipment he was unpacking onto my counter. “Daniel. That’s not a drawer situation. That’s a counter situation.”
“I can work with counter.”
Cord, who’d been ferrying boxes from the truck with smirk that told me he found the entire enterprise deeply entertaining, set a box down on the kitchen table and looked around with an air of satisfaction. “This is very domestic,” he said.
“Thank you, Cord,” I said.
“Very married.”
“Cord.”
“I’m just saying it looks right is all.” He held up both hands in innocence and went back out for another box.
It took until early afternoon to get everything inside and distributed.
The guest bedroom—the tiny one downstairs that I’d cleared out and put fresh sheets on and tried hard not to overthink—absorbed Daniel’s clothes and his nightstand and the bookshelf, which fit against the far wall like it had always been there.
We put his armchair in the living room, angled toward the television, and within twenty minutes Chairman Meow claimed it, which Daniel seemed to take as a compliment.
Cord left with a generous slice of the coffee cake I’d made that morning. Then it was just the two of us in the house, which was hardly an unusual occurrence. And yet, it felt entirely different now.
We spent the rest of the afternoon doing ordinary things, which was its own kind of disorienting.
I did inventory paperwork at the kitchen table while Daniel finished setting up his coffee station with the focused attention of a man calibrating something important.
Grandpa called at two, sounding more like himself than he had since before the hospital.
Full of opinions about the weather, a documentary he’d watched, and a running update on his ongoing rummy war with Sandra, which had escalated to a best-of-seven series.
“He sounds good,” Daniel said after I’d hung up.
“He sounds like Grandpa,” I said, which wasn’t quite the same thing but was close enough to be hopeful.
We made dinner together without discussing it, which was perhaps the most telling thing of all.
Nothing complicated, just pasta. The kind of meal that assembled itself almost on autopilot when two people cooked together often enough to know each other’s rhythms without asking.
Daniel did the sauce. I did the salad. He handed me things without being asked and I handed him things without being asked, and Chairman Meow, who had been conducting a thorough judicial evaluation of the new human in his domain from the safety of the top of the refrigerator, reached a provisional verdict somewhere around the time the garlic hit the pan and descended to investigate.
“He’s judging me,” Daniel said.
“He judges everyone.”
“How am I doing?”
Chairman Meow sniffed Daniel’s sleeve with the gravity of a sommelier, then walked the full length of the counter with his tail raised and his opinion withheld. I stifled a laugh.
“He usually leaves faster,” Daniel observed. “I think I’m growing on him.”
“You’ve been saying that for five years.”
After dinner, we settled into the comfortable, familiar rhythm of television on a weeknight, the kind of easy, boneless arrangement we’d fallen into a thousand times before.
Chairman Meow, having concluded his judicial proceedings with a grudging verdict of tolerable, condescended to occupy Daniel’s armchair with the air of a monarch accepting tribute, tucking himself into a precise loaf and closing his eyes with sovereign indifference.
It was fine. It was easy and warm and fine, right up until Daniel stood and stretched the full, unselfconscious stretch of a man in a space he’d already decided belonged to him—arms overhead, spine arching, the hem of his shirt lifting just enough to reveal a strip of stomach and washboard abs that made my mouth go dry in a way I should definitely not entertain.
“I’m gonna go shower.”
I produced some kind of noise of assent—something vaguely human and hopefully not as strangled as it felt—and he disappeared down the hall without a backward glance, the way a man does when he has no idea he’s just detonated something.
I sat in the quiet of my living room and listened to the old pipes knock and groan their way to compliance, the way they always did.
I started a documentary about deep-sea fish with the focused, almost aggressive attention of a woman who was absolutely not thinking about the trail of dark hair that bisected those washboard abs, and was certainly not constructing any kind of mental image of what he might look like in that shower down the hall, with the water running over every ridge and plane and trailing down to —
The water stopped. The bathroom door opened. Footsteps moved down the hall, unhurried, and then his voice drifted from the entry to the living room, easy and conversational, “Hey, do you have an extra…”
I looked up.
He was standing there in a towel.
Just a towel. Slung low at his hips, hair damp and disheveled, water still beaded on his shoulders in a way that the warm light spilling from the hallway behind him was doing nothing to soften or obscure.
He was holding something in one hand—a razor, maybe, or his toothbrush—and he’d stopped mid-sentence because I’d looked up, and now we were looking at each other across the length of the room, and neither of us was saying a single word.
Daniel had been around me shirtless before.
In twenty-three years, there’d been summers and swimming holes and that one memorable beach trip where Moose got sunburned so badly it got immortalized as station legend.
The existence of Daniel Costello’s torso was not new information.
I’d filed it away long ago under acknowledged and irrelevant.
It felt, with considerable inconvenience, like brand new information.
“Toothpaste,” he said at last. “I forgot toothpaste.”
“Cabinet,” I said. “Under the sink.”
“Right,” he said. “Thanks.”
He disappeared back down the hallway with the same easy nonchalance he’d arrived with, and I turned back to the television, where something luminescent and many-tentacled was drifting through the lightless deep, and I sat very still and had a brief, pointed conversation with myself.
I lived with Daniel Costello now. This was a thing that was going to happen—the towels and the pipes and the stretch of bare skin in unexpected moments—and I needed to be a functioning adult about it. A sensible, composed, unbothered adult.
The conversation was not entirely convincing. The devil on my shoulder leaned in to note that he was my literal husband now, and there were plenty of ways to be a grown adult that were considerably more interesting than staring at deep-sea fish.
I told her to shut up.
Daniel came back twenty minutes later in sweatpants and an old station t-shirt, dropped back onto the couch, and picked up the thread of the television like nothing had happened, because for him, nothing had.
“Deep-sea fish?” he said.
“It was on,” I said.
He reached over and stole the throw blanket off the back of the couch, the one he always stole, and pulled it over his lap, and Chairman Meow abandoned the armchair and stepped onto his legs with the delicate precision of a cat pretending this was his own idea.
“Huh,” Daniel said, looking down at him.
“Don’t make a big deal of it,” I said. “He’ll leave.”
He didn’t leave.
We sat like that until the documentary ended and the next one started and neither of us moved to turn it off, the house quiet around us, the cat a warm weight across Daniel’s knees, and I thought about the towel and the light and the water on his chest and made myself think about something else.
Tomorrow, I told myself, this would all feel normal.
I was almost certain that was true.