Bonus Epilogue
ELLIE
Some things didn’t change.
Sunday dinner was still Sunday dinner. The table was still set the same way, with the good placemats that came out for company and my grandmother’s serving dishes.
The kitchen still smelled like whatever I’d had going in the crock pot since noon, which today was pot roast because it was October and some things were right for the season.
Some things had changed considerably.
“No!” Auggie spouted this with the conviction only a two-year-old who’d recently discovered a new favorite word could.
She sat in her high chair at the end of the table, regarding the green beans on her tray with a gimlet eye and pouty lip that definitely said she hadn’t agreed to this and she refused to pretend otherwise.
Auggie had been Daniel’s idea for a name, floated with so much care and sincerity that I couldn’t say no.
Which was how we had two variations of the same name at every family gathering.
Jury was still out about whether that was twice the chaos or twice the joy.
Depended on who you asked. The original Gus, seated at his customary place at the table, found the little scamp’s obstinance delightful.
“She doesn’t want the beans,” he said. Because he’d been taking her side in every dispute since her arrival and had no intention of stopping.
“She needs to eat the beans,” I said.
“She’s two.”
“She’s two, and she needs vegetables.”
“She had a cracker earlier.” He announced this as if it were nutritionally equivalent, and reached over to remove the offending beans from her tray.
Auggie beamed at him with the devastating smile she reserved for great-grandfathers who did exactly what she wanted.
Gus beamed back with the helpless adoration of a man completely undone by a two-year-old in pigtails.
“Grandpa,” I said.
“She’s fine,” he said serenely. “She’s perfect. Aren’t you perfect?”
“Yes,” Auggie agreed, which was a new word, and she was using it correctly, which was both impressive and terrifying.
Daniel materialized from the kitchen with the gravy boat.
He set it on the table and took in the lack of beans on the tray, Gus wearing the expression of a man innocent of all charges, and Auggie now reaching for his fork with both hands.
Clearly deciding it wasn’t worth the battle, he sat down beside me.
“The beans,” I said to him.
“Mm,” he said, and kissed the side of my head, which was not a position on the beans but was very Daniel.
“You’re not helping.”
“I’m staying out of it,” he said. “Strategically.”
“Coward.”
“Survivor,” he said, and helped himself to the pot roast.
Dinner was the controlled chaos that dinner had become since Auggie arrived and became the center of all things.
She ate some of her pot roast, which she liked, and none of her beans, which she continued to express strong opinions about, and a piece of cornbread that she consumed with a focus and dedication that reminded me of someone but I couldn’t place who.
She narrated portions of the meal in the running commentary of a toddler who had recently discovered language and was making up for lost time.
Gus responded to everything she said with the gravity of a man taking it seriously, which she clearly appreciated.
At one point she held out a piece of cornbread to Chairman Meow, who had been sitting on the chair next to Gus’s with the patience of a cat who knew where the handouts came from.
“No,” I said.
“Yes,” Auggie said.
Chairman Meow ate the cornbread.
“She’s going to be trouble,” Daniel said next to my ear, his tone warm and admiring of the prospect.
“She already is trouble,” I said. “She’s just charming enough to get away with it.”
“Wonder where she gets that.”
I turned to glare at him. He watched Auggie and Gus, his face unguarded and full of the kind of happiness that didn’t perform itself. I was no less susceptible to that expression after three years of marriage. If anything, I was worse.
“Hey,” he said, catching me looking.
“Hey,” I said.
He reached under the table and found my hand.
Across the table, Gus was showing Auggie some trick he’d been practicing with a spoon, and she watched, utterly riveted, her pigtails lopsided from the afternoon and a smear of gravy on her chin that she was unaware of and would be insulted to have pointed out.
Something moved through me at the sight of them.
Gus bent over the table with the careful focus he usually reserved for explaining a difficult repair, Auggie mirroring his posture exactly, her little face screwed up in concentration.
Something that wasn’t quite contentment, or wasn’t only contentment.
Something with a forward lean to it, a reaching quality, like standing at the edge of something good and feeling the pull of what lay beyond it.
The feeling of having something right and wanting more of it, not because what you had wasn’t enough but because it was so thoroughly, completely enough that the idea of adding to it seemed not greedy but inevitable.
Daniel’s thumb moved across my knuckles, slow and unhurried.
I glanced at him.
“You’ve got a look,” he said.
“Do I?”
“You do. The one where you’re thinking something you haven’t decided to say yet.”
Twenty-six years of friendship and three years of marriage, and he still read me like this.
Still caught the things I thought I was keeping tucked away behind my expression, identifying them with the quiet accuracy of someone who’d spent most of his life paying attention to me.
And he still waited without pushing, without prodding, without filling the silence with anything except the steady presence of himself, until I was ready to arrive at whatever it was on my own terms. This had stopped being irritating somewhere around year two of the marriage and had landed at something closer to deep, helpless gratitude, which was the kind of thing Gus had probably been right about from the beginning and would never let me forget if I gave him the opportunity.
“I was just thinking.” I watched Auggie tilt her head at exactly the same angle Gus was tilting his, “that Auggie is going to need someone to boss around, eventually.”
Daniel went quiet for a moment. The sounds of the kitchen filled the space. The tick of the old clock on the wall. Auggie asked Gus a question in her tone of serious inquiry. The distant last warmth of the afternoon pressing gold through the windows.
Then his hand tightened around mine under the table.
“Yeah.” The low, certain voice, the one he only used when he meant something all the way down to the foundation of it. “She really is.”
“That whole project was a lot of fun the first go round,” I murmured.
Daniel’s lips curved, and his eyes warmed in a way that warmed other things low in my belly. We’d have to get a lot more creative in carving out the time and privacy with a toddler in a house, but I knew my husband could be extremely motivated.
I couldn’t wait.
Across the table, Auggie managed to replicated whatever Gus had shown her with the spoon and was holding it up with a triumphant expression.
“Yes!” she announced.
“Yes,” Gus agreed with enormous satisfaction, and looked up and caught my eye across the table, and smiled the smile that had been directing traffic between me and Daniel Costello for the better part of a decade.
I shook my head at him.
He was entirely unrepentant.
Some things didn’t change.
Under the table, my husband held my hand, and the kitchen smelled like pot roast. Outside, the October light was doing the thing it did in Alabama in the fall, going gold and long through the windows, and I thought that Gus had been right about all of it.
Every last insufferable, meddling, thoroughly loving bit of it.