Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
ELLIE
Getting Grandpa settled took the better part of the afternoon.
The room looked different with the blend of furniture.
Before Daniel, it had been part home office, part guest room with a twin-size bed.
A catch-all for whatever stuff I hadn’t gotten around to dealing with.
I’d cleared out what I could to make room for Daniel, so he wouldn’t feel like he was being shoehorned into a space that didn’t have room for his stuff.
We’d moved my desk into a corner of my bedroom upstairs and shifted Daniel’s chair into the room so Grandpa would have somewhere comfortable to sit.
He’d have to fight Chairman Meow for it, but I figured my cantankerous cat would be fine with Grandpa’s lap while they both napped.
With Daniel’s nightstand and the bookcase, the room actually looked cozy.
The rest of the house was a bit of a disaster.
Daniel had inconveniently been scheduled for work Wednesday night until Thursday night, which had stretched into the wee hours Friday morning when a fire call kept him out late, so I’d been on my own making room for his stuff in my room, stuffing all my out of season clothes that usually lived on the top rod in the closet into bins that fit beneath the bed that was now on risers.
He’d had just enough time to move all his stuff again Friday morning, after he’d caught a few hours of sleep. Then it was time to bring Grandpa home.
Grandpa walked through the front door on his own two feet, which he had apparently decided was non-negotiable and which had required a brief, pointed conversation with both Daniel and the discharge nurse.
He made it to the armchair we’d requisitioned from his house.
Chairman Meow had already claimed it as sovereign territory, but he moved in a hurry when Grandpa sat down with the careful deliberateness of a man who was not going to let anyone see how much the walk from the car had cost him.
“Home.” The word came out with a weight that made my throat close.
“Home,” I agreed, from somewhere I hoped sounded normal.
Daniel had made the pot roast. Like most of his firefighter brethren, he’d learned to cook over the years.
He’d started it in the crock pot this morning, while I’d been checking in on the store.
The whole house smelled of it by the time we got home.
Grandpa inhaled once through the front door and looked at Daniel with the expression of a man receiving confirmation of something he’d always believed.
“Good man,” he said.
“Don’t tell him that,” I said. “He’s already insufferable about the cast iron.”
“She’s not wrong,” Daniel said.
We ate at the kitchen table, the three of us, with the cornbread and the good butter, and it was so much like a Sunday dinner that I had to look at my plate to get myself back under control.
Grandpa ate with appetite, which Sandra had said was a good sign, and he talked, which Sandra had said was inevitable and to just let him, and what he talked about was us.
He didn’t need to run the old campaign anymore. No fork-pointing, no cosmic intention speeches. He just talked about us the way you talked about things that were settled and right, with the easy satisfaction of a man who had been proven correct and was too gracious to say so directly.
“You know what I keep thinking about?” he said, buttering his cornbread with the focus of a man who had been deprived of good butter for weeks and intended to make up for it.
“When Daniel was fifteen, and he came over to help me re-screen the back porch. Didn’t ask, just showed up on a Saturday morning, ready to work.
” He glanced at Daniel. “You remember that?”
“I remember you made me redo the left side twice,” Daniel said.
“Because you rushed it.” But he said it warmly. “I thought then, this one’s going to be around for a long time. Felt like family before he was family.” He set the cornbread down. “Nice to have it official.”
I took a sip of water.
“Your grandmother would have loved this,” he said to me now.
“She always said the best marriages started as friendships. Said that’s what people got wrong, always chasing the fireworks when the foundation was what mattered.
” He smiled at the table, somewhere private.
“She would have been insufferable about being right.”
“She’d have been in good company,” Daniel said, and Grandpa laughed, the real one I’d been afraid I might not hear again.
I pressed my lips together and looked at my plate.
“The house feels different,” Grandpa said after a moment. “Fuller.” He looked around the kitchen with an expression I didn’t have words for. “I’m going to sleep well tonight. First time since all of this started, I think I’m actually going to sleep.”
I ate approximately four bites of pot roast.
The rest of it sat on my plate while I smiled and responded and passed the cornbread and tried to locate the moisture that had apparently evacuated my mouth entirely.
Every sentence was completely true, offered without agenda, from a man who had no idea that the two people across the table from him were sitting on a legal document and a kiss and a bed situation they hadn’t had time to discuss.
At one point he reached across the table and put his hand over mine and said, “I just want you to know that this is all I wanted. For both of you to be happy and taken care of. That’s all I ever wanted.”
I said, “I know, Grandpa,” in a steady voice I was very proud of.
Under the table, Daniel’s knee pressed briefly against mine. There was nothing romantic in the gesture, just contact that said I know, I’ve got you, we’re doing this together. I pressed back and reached for my water glass and carefully didn’t look at him.
After dinner Daniel did the dishes, because he always did the dishes when he cooked, and I got Grandpa settled into the new room configuration with his medications and his sudoku book and the small television I’d positioned where he could see it from the bed.
He was more tired than he wanted to show, and he was asleep before I’d finished arranging his things.
I stood in the doorway and watched him sleep for a moment, the way I’d watched him in the hospital. The rise and fall of his chest. The peace of a man in his own bed.
Then I turned off the light and went upstairs.
Daniel was already there, sitting on the edge of the bed with his elbows on his knees, looking at the floor. He’d changed out of his good shirt into a station t-shirt, and he looked up when I came in, and we looked at each other across the room in the quiet of the house.
“He asleep?” Daniel asked.
“Out,” I said. “He’s exhausted.”
Daniel nodded.
I closed the door, which felt significant in a way I didn’t examine, and leaned against it and looked at the bed and then at Daniel and then at the bed again.
“So,” I said.
“So,” he said.
The bed was not small. This was worth noting.
It was a queen, which on any given night seemed like plenty of room for two adults who had decided they were going to be sensible about this, and the whole thing was completely manageable if both parties were reasonable grown adults who had known each other for twenty-three years and were capable of sharing a mattress without making it into something it wasn’t.
But it wasn’t any given night. And Daniel was not a small man.
“I can take the floor,” he said.
“You’re not sleeping on the floor.”
“Ellie—“
“Daniel. It’s a queen bed. You’re not sleeping on the floor like we’re at a middle school sleepover.
” I pushed off the door and pulled a clean shirt out of the dresser with the focus of a woman concertedly not thinking about the fact that she was about to change in a room that Daniel was also in. “We’re adults. We can share a bed.”
“Right,” he said. “Yeah. Absolutely.”
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
“I’ll stay on my side,” he said.
“I know you will.”
“You’re a blanket thief.”
“I am not a blanket thief.”
“Ellie. You once pulled a blanket off a sleeping person at a New Year’s Eve party and didn’t notice until morning.”
“That was one time, and the room was cold.” I turned around with the sleep shirt in my hand and pointed at him. “You’re not sleeping on the floor.”
He held up his hands. “Okay.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“It’ll be fine,” he agreed.
He said it the way he always did, easy and certain, the way that had always made things seem more manageable than they were. I held onto that and changed in the bathroom, trying not to think about the fact that when I came back he would be in my bed.
He was in my bed.
On his side, covers pulled up, already turned slightly away in the careful way of a man who had decided on an arrangement and was committed to it. Chairman Meow was a warm weight at the foot of the bed, which was either a comfort or a complication, and I didn’t have the bandwidth to decide which.
I turned off the light and got in on my side and lay there in the dark looking at the ceiling while the house settled around us, old and familiar, doing what old houses did.
“Ellie,” Daniel said from his side of the bed.
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to be okay.”
I closed my eyes. “I know.”
He didn’t say anything else. I didn’t say anything else. The cat shifted at the foot of the bed, resettling himself with the complete indifference of a creature unbothered by any of this.
I lay there in the dark listening to Daniel breathe, and I thought about Grandpa’s hand over mine at the dinner table, and about the pot roast, and about all I ever wanted, and I thought that the most complicated thing about this whole situation was that it was getting harder and harder to remember which parts of it were supposed to be pretend.