Chapter 11
Tessa
Cole was at the kitchen table with the lawyer's paperwork spread in front of him.
I was at the counter, drying the same plate I had already dried twice.
I had been living with Cole for a week, and the not-naming of certain things was becoming a job.
There was, for example, the morning I walked into the kitchen to find him at the coffeemaker in gray sweatpants and no shirt, hair still wet from the shower, his back to me.
He was making coffee like a man who had lived alone for ten years.
Which he had. I had time to look at his back longer than I should have before it registered I was supposed to do something about it.
I told him to put on a shirt. What I didn't tell him, or myself, was what those seconds had done to my breathing for the rest of the morning.
There was, then, the night he told me he had never been with a woman.
I put his arm around my waist because I wanted him to know I was fine with it. I wasn't flirting. I was a woman trying to show a man that what he had inside him was not a thing to be afraid of.
He looked at me like he was going to kiss me.
He didn't. He said, “Right,” went to the sink, and rinsed a cup that didn't need rinsing. But the look was there. And it didn't go anywhere in three days.
What I didn't tell him, or myself, was that I wanted him to.
There was the move, three days after that. Cole paid the early-termination fee on his old lease without making a thing of it. Two guys from the station came to help, loaded up everything he owned, and had it all in the new apartment by Sunday.
There was this apartment—two bedrooms, a kitchen with a window over the sink, fifteen minutes to Noah's school, eight to the bakery. There were the locks Cole replaced the day we got the keys, and the smoke detectors he replaced the morning after that.
There was the bedroom thing. Noah and I had the bigger room. Cole took the smaller one for himself. I told him it should be the other way around, that a man his size should not be sleeping in the smaller bedroom. He told me it was fine, and that was the end of the conversation.
There was, in other words, a lot of thinking I was not doing.
I set the plate down.
"Cole."
He looked up.
"What about the rent?"
"What about it?"
"We haven't talked about how we're splitting any of it."
He set the pen down.
"Don't think about it."
"I'm not letting you carry a two-bedroom by yourself."
"The court wants Noah to have a stable male figure who can provide for him. What does it look like if anybody finds out I'm asking you to pay half the bills when I'm clearly the higher earner?"
He said it the way he said most things. Like he had already worked it through. The reasoning was sound. I could not argue against it.
"I have to do something."
"You already are. You just have to keep being a good mother to Noah."
He went back to the paperwork.
Cole had been picking Noah up from school on his off-shifts.
He’d asked me at the start of the week if it would help. I said yes. He didn't make a thing of it.
A few days back, he'd come home from a shift with a bag from a hobby store.
He set it on the table without ceremony and told Noah it was a beginner kit if Noah wanted to try.
They built it that night, and the next night, and the night after that.
Building with Cole was Noah's favorite part of the day.
At some point in there, Cole told Noah about the house. I walked in one evening to find them at the kitchen table with a pencil and a half-drawn floor plan on the back of an envelope, Noah asking questions about load-bearing walls, Cole answering them like the answers mattered. I didn't interrupt.
Today was a Saturday. Cole didn't ask. He just said, “I want to show you both something and put the truck keys on the counter.”
The house was on Ashford Street. A small two-story with a porch that needed a new floor and a front door that needed paint. The lock on it, I noticed, was new.
Cole let us in with the key from his keychain.
The inside smelled like fresh-cut wood and old plaster.
The front room had been stripped down to the studs on one wall, drywall stacked against the other.
There was a saw on a workhorse and a bin of nails on the floor.
The light came in through windows that didn't have curtains yet.
Noah stopped in the doorway and looked around like he was waiting for permission to step inside.
"Go on," Cole said.
Noah went in.
He moved through the front room slowly. He stopped at the workhorse. He stopped at the saw. He stopped at the bin of nails, not to touch it, just to look at it. Then he went into the kitchen.
I stood with Cole in the doorway and watched my son walk through what was, very obviously, a place that someone was building.
"Why this house?" I asked.
Cole was watching Noah. "Cheaper to fix up myself."
"That's the whole reason?"
He was quiet for a beat. "It's the answer that makes sense out loud."
I didn't ask what the rest of it was.
We went into the kitchen. Cole had taken the cabinets down and hadn't put new ones up yet. The counter was a sheet of plywood on workhorses. The sink was plumbed. The stove was not.
Noah was crouched by a wall with a long pencil mark on it.
"What's this for?"
"That's where the new island goes," Cole said. "Once I get the floor down."
"Can I help?"
It came out small. The kind of asking Noah did when he was not sure what answer he was going to get.
Cole put down what he was carrying. He went over to where Noah was crouched, and he crouched down, too, so he was at Noah's level.
"Yeah," he said. "Come over here."
He took Noah to the corner where his toolbag sat, pulled out a small pair of work goggles and a pair of canvas gloves, and held them out.
The goggles were Noah's size.
Noah took them in both hands and looked up at Cole.
"You got these for me?"
"Yeah."
Noah put them on. The goggles slid down his nose. He pushed them back up. The gloves were a little big in the fingers, but only just.
Cole nodded once. "Now you're set."
He took Noah to a piece of trim that was clamped to the workhorse. He pulled a sanding block out of his back pocket and put it in Noah's hand.
"You go with the grain," Cole said. "Long strokes. Like this." He moved Noah's hand along the wood once. "Try."
Noah tried.
The first stroke was tentative. The second was steadier. The third was right.
Noah looked at Cole.
"Like that?"
"Just like that."
Noah went back to it. He pushed too hard on the next stroke, and the block dug a small mark into the wood. He froze.
"Sorry," he said. The word came out fast. "Sorry, I didn't mean to, I'm sorry—"
I knew that voice. I had the same one in my own throat sometimes.
"Hey." Cole's voice was even. He put a hand on the workhorse, not on Noah. "It's wood. It's fixable."
Noah didn't move.
"You hear me?" Cole said. "We sand it down a bit more, the mark's gone. You're fine."
Noah looked at the wood. He looked at Cole.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
Noah went back to it. His shoulders dropped. His face changed.
I watched it from the doorway between the kitchen and the front room.
After a minute, Noah said, without looking up: "Can I come back? And help with more?"
"Yeah," Cole said. "You can come back any time."
Something passed over his face. It was small. It was old. It was not something I was meant to see.
Something in my chest loosened and tightened at the same time.
I turned and walked through the doorway into the next room.
The hallway had the same plaster smell as the front. There were three doors off it. One led to a small bathroom that had not been touched yet. The other two led to bedrooms.
Both bedrooms were empty. Stripped floors. New paint on the walls. No furniture. No boxes.
I stood in the doorway of the bigger one. The window faced the back of the house. The afternoon sun came in across the floor in a long stripe.
I went back to the kitchen.
Noah and Cole were still at the sanding block. Cole had moved to a second piece of trim. They were working in something close to silence.
"You have three bedrooms here," I said.
Cole looked up. "Yeah."
"What were you going to do with them?"
He looked at me. He took a second.
"I didn't have a plan for them. I figured they were going to be empty for a while."
Then he looked back at Noah and said something quiet about the next pass.
I stayed in the doorway.
A piece of pipe slipped off the counter and dropped into the bucket on the floor. The clatter of metal on metal cracked through the empty house. My body snapped tight before my brain caught up. I held the doorframe and waited for the sound to be over. It took longer than the sound did.
When I looked up, Cole was looking at me.
He didn't say anything. After a second, he turned back to the wood.
I watched him crouched there next to my son. Thirty-four years old. A job he was good at. A crew that would have walked through fire for him. A house going up around him, room by room. He was not bad to look at, either.
A man like that should have had a wife by now. He should have had a kid of his own running through these rooms, somebody waiting at the door at the end of a shift, a life that explained why he had built the place with three bedrooms in it. He had everything a man needed to ask somebody to stay.
He hadn't.
What was he waiting for?