Chapter 16 Daisy
DAISY
Thursday comes with a sky the color of bruises.
I've spent the last four days avoiding the internet, which means I've also spent the last four days avoiding approximately seventy percent of human interaction.
Nell has been fielding calls at the store.
Ruth has been threatening to "give that Kendra girl a piece of her mind.
" Bev made a casserole, because Bev's solution to everything is carbohydrates.
But it's book club night, and I refuse to let a viral photo and a thousand strangers' opinions take that away from me.
The club filters in the way it always does: Bev with a thermos, Priya with her camera already blinking, Ruth claiming the good chair by the window before anyone else can.
Adam comes in last, in a dark blue sweater over a button-down instead of a suit, and folds himself into the too-small corner chair without being told.
Outside, the sky keeps doing something ominous that makes my weather app nervous.
Before I can open the book, he stands.
"Can everyone film this?" he says. "Priya especially. I want it on the record."
The room goes still. He turns to me before Priya raises her phone.
"One statement, to tell them to leave you alone.
You can hear it first and decide whether it goes anywhere.
" I study him, then nod. "Say it. I approve the clip before anyone posts.
" Priya lowers the camera until I tell her I'm ready.
"Most of you have seen what's online," he says.
"People telling my wife what she owes me.
Telling her to forgive me, to try, to be grateful a man finally showed up.
So I want to say this where all of it can hear me.
" He turns his head toward Priya's camera.
"Daisy doesn't owe me anything. I hurt her, not through some circumstance beyond my control.
I made choices. I chose work over our marriage until there was nothing left to choose. "
My chest twists. I keep breathing on purpose.
"Trying to be better now doesn't entitle me to a single thing," he goes on.
"The internet doesn't get a vote in someone else's healing.
Reading a few novels doesn't earn me one either.
She's not obligated to forgive me. She's not obligated to try.
That's her choice, not mine, and definitely not yours.
" His voice drops. "So leave her alone. Leave our relationship alone.
If you need to be angry at someone, be angry at me. I earned every bit of it."
He sits back down in the chair that's too small for him, ears slightly red, and picks up his annotated paperback while Priya brings me the recording. I watch it once, then give her permission to share that statement and nothing else.
It lands warm in my chest: that he finally has my back, out loud, in front of everyone, where it costs him something. A little too late to matter the way it would have mattered years ago. But warm anyway. I hate how warm.
"Right," I manage, and my voice only wobbles a little. "Chapter eight. Let's talk about the part where the hero finally figures out the difference between providing and paying attention."
The storm hits forty-five minutes into discussion.
One minute Ruth is mid-sentence about the hero's emotional unavailability ("He reminds me of my second husband, God rest his useless soul") and the next, the lights flicker and die and someone screams, and then there's a crack of thunder so loud it rattles the windows.
"Everyone stay calm," Nell says, already reaching for her phone's flashlight. "I have candles in the back."
"The basement," Priya says, and her voice has that particular pitch of someone delivering very bad news. "I can hear water."
We all can, now that she's said it. A rushing sound, like a faucet left running, getting louder by the second.
I grab my own phone and head for the basement stairs, and what I see makes my stomach drop.
Water is pouring in through the window wells, pooling at the bottom of the steps, already ankle-deep and rising.
The boxes of stock we keep down there, including the storage box of Annie's books I moved there for safekeeping during the shelf repairs, are starting to float.
"Shit," I breathe. "Shit, shit, shit."
"Bucket brigade," Ruth announces from behind me, already rolling up her sleeves. "I survived the floods of '84, I can survive this. Someone get me a mop and a prayer."
The next two hours are chaos.
Good chaos, though. The kind where everyone has a job and nobody's thinking about anything except the task in front of them.
Bev finds every bucket and trash can in the building.
Priya coordinates a human chain to pass salvageable boxes up from the basement.
Adam pulls off his soaked sweater, pushes his shirt sleeves past his elbows and starts hauling waterlogged crates like they weigh nothing, which maybe to him they don't.
Ruth sings while she mops: hymns, mostly, but she doesn't know all the words, so it comes out as something like "Amazing Grace how sweet the SOMETHING, that saved a MUMBLE like me" on repeat until Bev threatens to stuff a dish towel in her mouth.
"I was in the choir for thirty years," Bev says primly, "and I can assure you that is not how that song goes."
"Then sing the right words, Beverly."
"I'm not singing in a flooded basement." Bev crosses her arms.
"Why not? The acoustics are excellent."
"The acoustics are MOLD."
"They're starting to close roads," Nell says, checking her phone between bucket passes. "The north route home is still open."
"Go home," I tell her. "Your kids—"
"My mother has them, they're fine—"
"Go HOME, Nell." I grab the bucket from her hands. "I'll watch the store. Adam can help me move the rest of the boxes, and I'll text you updates."
She hesitates. "Are you sure?"
"I'm sure. The storm will pass, and we'll have the worst of it cleared by morning."
She looks between me and Adam, who is currently wrestling a completely waterlogged box of paperback returns up the stairs with sheer stubborn determination. Her mouth twitches (amusement, maybe, or satisfaction), but she doesn't say anything about it.
"Don't do anything I wouldn't do," she says, grabbing her coat.
"That leaves a lot of options."
"I know." She grins and disappears into the rain.
By midnight, the cleared window-well drains are holding and we've bailed the standing water down to a slick film.
We've moved everything salvageable to higher ground, and the basement is a sad, soggy mess of cardboard pulp and lost causes, but the books that matter, including the storage box with Annie's collection, are safe upstairs.
The power is still out. The rain is still hammering against the windows. And Adam is standing in the middle of the store, soaking wet from the waist down, looking more disheveled than I've ever seen him in five years of marriage.
"The roads are still closed," he says. "I checked."
"I heard."
"I can try to walk home, if you want. It's only about two miles—"
"Don't be stupid." The words come out before I think about them. "You'll catch pneumonia and die, and then I'll have to explain to your mother how I let her only son drown in a thunderstorm."
"So I can stay?"
I grab a stack of towels from the supply closet, the ones we use for spilled coffee and wet dogs who wander in with their owners, and throw one at his chest. "You can stay downstairs. On the couch. And if you snore, I'll smother you with a pillow."
"I don't snore."
"You absolutely snore." I say it with great authority.
"That's slander."
"It's not slander if it's true."
He's smiling now, that slow, crooked smile I used to love, and I hate that it still hits me square in the chest.
"I need to check the basement storage room," I say abruptly. "Make sure nothing's leaking."
"I'll come with you."
"You don't have to—"
"The floor's wet. Let me help."
The back storage room at the foot of the stairs is clear of standing water now, but there's a puddle near the window that needs mopping, and the bottom shelf of the poetry section has taken some damage.
We work in silence for a while, him blotting wet covers with towels while I inspect spines for water damage, and it's almost companionable. Almost normal.
And then I step wrong on the wet floor and my foot goes out from under me, and I'm falling, and Adam catches me so fast I barely register the motion before I'm pressed against his chest with his arms around my waist. We both freeze.
He's warm despite the wet clothes. His heart is pounding, I can feel it through his shirt, and he's looking at me with an expression I can't place, cautious and hopeful in equal measure.
"Careful," he says, and his voice is rougher than usual.
"I'm always careful."
"You just slipped on a wet floor."
"That was the floor's fault."
Neither of us moves. His hands are still on my waist, steadying me even though I'm perfectly stable now, and I should step back. I should put distance between us. I should remember all the reasons this is a terrible idea.
"Daisy." His thumb brushes across my hip, just once, barely a touch. "Tell me to let go."
"Let go," I say, but I don't move away.
He lets go.
"I might mean that." My hands have somehow ended up on his chest, flattened against the damp fabric of his shirt, and I can feel the heat of his skin underneath. "I haven't decided yet."
"Take your time."
"Stop being reasonable."
"I'm not being reasonable." He keeps his hands at his sides, though his gaze drops to my mouth. "If I were being reasonable, I'd already be on the couch."
"You could go to the couch."
"I could."
"Kiss me," I say instead, and his mouth is on mine before I finish the second word.
It's not soft. It's not careful. It's nearly ten weeks of separation and eight weeks of watching him try and all the years before that when I wanted him and he was never there, all of it crashing together in a kiss that tastes like rain and desperation.