Chapter 34
Jeremiah
Three weeks had passed since Mrs. Chen’s surgery, and what started as a temporary favor had somehow become the best part of my daily routine.
Every morning at seven-fifteen, I pulled up to her house with two cups of coffee—one black for me, one loaded with enough cream and sugar to qualify as dessert for her—and let myself in through the back gate.
Cuddles would bound over with what could generously be called enthusiasm, though she still felt compelled to give my hand a warning nip before allowing me to scratch behind her ears and receive a proper tongue bath.
“Morning, you furry terrorist,” I’d say, and she’d wag her tail as though I’d just offered her a lifetime supply of bacon.
This morning routine was simple: fresh water, a cup of kibble, and whatever leftover treats Mrs. Chen had inevitably saved from her dinner the night before.
Cuddles had trained the old woman well—somehow convincing her that golden retrievers required a varied diet of table scraps and the occasional piece of toast with jam.
“You’re spoiling this dog rotten,” I told Mrs. Chen one morning, finding her on the back porch in her bathrobe, looking significantly stronger than she had a week earlier.
“She’s been through trauma, too,” Mrs. Chen replied with the matter-of-fact tone of someone who’d clearly thought this through. “Being separated from me for surgery and having her routine disrupted was a shock to her system. Besides, a little extra love never killed anybody.”
Cuddles, as if understanding every word we spoke, pressed her nose into my palm and looked up at me with liquid brown eyes that had somehow learned to communicate “I deserve all the treats” with devastating effectiveness.
“Don’t look at me like that,” I told her. “You get plenty of treats. You’re getting fat.”
She responded by gently taking my entire hand in her mouth—not biting, just holding it there like she was making a point about who really ran things around here, and what she could do if I got out of line.
“See?” Mrs. Chen cackled. “She’s got you wrapped around her little paw.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Cuddles had grown beyond a daily chore. She was a friend, someone I looked forward to seeing, even when she bared her teeth and pretended to hate me, just for the fun of it.
But what I hadn’t expected was how much I would grow to look forward to conversations with Mrs. Chen herself. She had a way of cutting through bullshit that I found at once terrifying and refreshing, and she’d taken it upon herself to become my unofficial relationship advisor.
“So,” she said one morning while I refilled Cuddles’s water bowl, “when are you going to make an honest man out of that librarian?”
I nearly dropped the bowl. “Mrs. Chen—”
“Don’t ‘Mrs. Chen’ me, young man. I’ve got eyes. You’ve been floating around here like a man in love for weeks, and every evening you practically skip across the street to see them.”
“I don’t skip.”
“You skip like Dorothy on crack,” she said definitively. “Yesterday you were humming. Humming, Jeremiah. Grown men don’t hum unless they’re either utterly insane or completely smitten.”
Heat crept up my neck. “We’re taking things slow. He has a lot on his plate.”
“Taking things slow is fine when you’re learning to drive or recovering from surgery. When you’re in love with a good man who has a child who already calls you daddy, you missed slow and swerved right over to the fast lane.”
Why had I told her about that? Why?
The word “daddy” still made something flutter in my chest every time Debbie used it, which had become increasingly frequent. Last night she informed me—very seriously—that I needed to learn how to braid hair because “daddies should know how to do braids for their daughters.”
I spent an hour on YouTube after she went to sleep, practicing on one of her dolls.
Theo laughed and teased the entire time, claiming my “worked-out sausage fingers” would never be able to handle anything as delicate as Debbie’s locks. That only made me want to learn it faster, to do it better than he ever could.
Sausage fingers. Fuck that. I was her daddy, too.
The certainty with which that thought rattled around my head froze every part of my body, mid-braid, and I wondered if I would ever be able to move again without fearing the end of everything I’d ever known.
“It’s . . . complicated,” I said weakly.
“No, Jeremiah, love isn’t complicated. People make it complicated.
” Mrs. Chen braced herself with a cane I’d bought her from the local drugstore and stood up with careful movements that reminded me she was still recovering, no matter how much stronger she seemed.
“That man looks at you like you hung the moon, and you look at him like he painted the stars. The only complicated part is you both being too chickenshit to admit it.”
“Mrs. Chen! Language, please,” I said, a toothy grin belying my reprimand.
“Fuck that,” she said, waving the cane. “You are chickenshit—both of you.”
Foul mouth or no, she had a point, though I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of admitting it.
My evening routine became even more precious to me than the mornings.
After finishing my delivery route, I’d stop by Mrs. Chen’s house, usually with dinner from whatever restaurant had caught my attention during the day.
She claimed she was perfectly capable of cooking for herself now, but I’d learned that “perfectly capable” and “actually doing it” were two very different things where wounded warriors were concerned.
“Thai food again?” she asked one evening, eyeing the containers I’d brought with obvious approval.
“You said you liked the pad Thai from that place on Ponce.”
“You listened. That’s a hell of a lot more than I can say for most men I’ve known,” she snarked as she settled into her kitchen chair with far more agility than she’d shown the week before. “You know, you don’t have to keep doing this. I’m not an invalid.”
“I know,” I said, dividing the food between two plates. “But . . . I like eating with you. Plus, Cuddles gives better table conversation than most humans.”
As if summoned, Cuddles appeared at my elbow, tail wagging hopefully as she assessed the potential for dropped food. She liked pad Thai even more than Mrs. Chen, though I was careful to keep the onions away from her greedy mouth.
“Don’t even think about it,” I told her.
She gave me a look that clearly communicated her opinion of this injustice, then settled at my feet with the resigned air of someone who knew she would win the day . . . eventually.
We ate in comfortable silence for a few minutes before Mrs. Chen spoke again.
“You know, I was married for forty-three years.”
This was uncharted territory.
Mrs. Chen rarely talked about her late husband beyond the occasional reference to Harold and his various quirks.
“Harold was a good man, but he was also stubborn as a mule and twice as ornery,” she continued, twirling noodles around her fork with the precision of someone who’d clearly mastered the technique.
“Took us three years to admit we loved each other, and another two to actually get married. After four decades together and too many dinners without him, you know what I regret most?”
I shook my head.
“All that wasted time being scared. Love isn’t guaranteed, Jeremiah. Neither is time. When you find something good, you grab it and hold it and savor it and . . .”
She looked away, set her fork down, and wiped her cheek. It was a long moment before she turned to face me again.
The weight of her words settled between us, and I found myself thinking about Theo’s smile, about the way Debbie’s face lit up when she saw me, about how the three of us had somehow become something that felt like family without me quite realizing when it had actually happened.
“I should get going,” I said eventually, though I made no move to leave.
This had become part of our routine, too—me claiming I needed to leave while Mrs. Chen finished her dinner, both of us knowing I’d sit there for another twenty minutes listening to her stories about Harold or her theories about neighborhood drama.
“That Stevens woman is up to something,” Mrs. Chen said, right on cue. “I saw her sneaking around the Patels’ backyard yesterday with a measuring tape.”
“Maybe she’s planting a garden?”
“In October? Please. Mark my words, there’s going to be trouble.”
After helping her clean up and making sure she had everything she needed for the night, I crossed the street to Theo’s house where the porch light was always on and the living room windows glowed with warm yellow light.
Most nights, I found them in the kitchen—Theo cleaning up from dinner while Debbie sat at the table drawing elaborate pictures of dragons and unicorns engaged in various adventures. The domestic scene never failed to make something warm unfurl in my chest.
“Willie Wee!” Debbie would shriek the moment the front door creaked open, abandoning whatever she was doing to launch herself at my legs.
“Hey there, princess,” I’d say, scooping her up for a hug that she’d tolerate for exactly thirty seconds before demanding to be put down so she could show me her latest artistic masterpiece or explain the complex plotline of whatever book Theo had read to her the night before.
For his part, Theo would look up from whatever he was doing—usually dishes or the next day’s lunch prep—with that soft smile that made my knees wobble every single time.
“How’s our patient?” he would ask. The casual way he said “our” made my heart do things that should probably have required medical attention.
“Ornery as ever. She thinks Mrs. Stevens is plotting something involving the Patels’ backyard.”
“Mrs. Henderson is definitely plotting something,” Theo would add seriously. “I saw her at the hardware store buying zip ties last week. Zip ties, Jeremiah. No one needs that many zip ties for innocent purposes.”
Simple conversations had become the highlight of my day.