Chapter 15
DANI
The second morning, I wake to the smell of something burning and the sound of a man who has never once apologized to a kettle apologizing to a kettle.
I lie still and let my eyes adjust to the gray coming through the curtains.
The doctor said light would be a problem for a while, and it is: even this thin farm-town daylight puts a thumb behind my left eye.
My wrist is a dead weight in its splint from the knuckles to the elbow.
My ribs report in when I breathe too deep.
I take inventory of the damage the way I used to take inventory of a room before a gala, counting what would need managing.
In the kitchen, Thoreau is managing nothing.
"It boiled over," he says when I come in, as if I asked.
He is standing at Dot's old stove in yesterday's shirt with the sleeves shoved up, holding the kettle away from his body like it might still have opinions.
There is water on the floor. There is water on him.
His hair is doing something it is not allowed to do at a board meeting.
He doesn't know where I keep the dish towels, and I decide that means nothing.
"Second drawer," I say. "Not that one. The one that sticks."
He finds it. He gets down on the floor, actually down, one knee on the wet boards, and wipes it up, and he does it badly, pushing the water around more than lifting it, and he does not look up at me once to see if I'm watching him be humble.
That's the part I clock. The old Thoreau performed for an audience even when the audience was me. This one is cleaning a floor.
"Sit," he says. "Please. I'll bring it."
"You'll bring it burned."
"Then I'll bring it burned and make another."
I sit. Not because he told me to. Because standing makes the room tilt, and I would rather sit than have him see the room tilt.
He brings the tea. It's too strong and there's a skin of something scorched on top and he has put in the honey without asking, the way I take it, which means he watched me take it yesterday and filed it.
I drink it. I don't thank him. I file the honey too, in the column I'm keeping, the one labeled things that look like change.
I set the mug down on the table, careful of the wrist, and let the warmth of it sit under my good palm.
I have been fooled by charm before. Charm is the first thing the Ainsmeres teach.
He learned it at his mother's knee, in the window chair, with the sparkling water and the lemon on the side.
Dot comes through the back without knocking, the way she's decided she's allowed to now, with bread under a cloth and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair.
"Still here," she says to Thoreau. Not a question. A weather report.
"Still here," he says.
She sets the bread on the counter and looks at the floor, which is clean and wrong-colored where he scrubbed it, and at the kettle, and at the man, and you can see her sizing it up, the kind a woman who's buried a husband does in about a second and a half.
She's read this situation before, both the real version and the fake one, and she's not going to be the one to tell me which this is.
"You sleep on that couch?" she asks him.
"I did."
"It's five foot."
"I'm aware of it now."
Dot makes a sound that isn't quite a laugh. "Huh," she says, which is the entire review. She turns to me. "Your color's better. You eat the eggs I left?"
"I will."
"She won't," Dot tells Thoreau, like I'm not there, like he's staff.
"She'll feed everybody in a four-house radius and forget her own plate.
You want to be useful, you sit on her till she eats.
" And she's gone, screen door clapping, before either of us can answer, and the warm thing that goes loose in my chest doesn't even surprise me this time, which is the part that frightens me — she has known me four days and she has me dead to rights, and nobody at that estate had me at all.
Thoreau is looking at me. "Is that true?"
"Is what true."
"That you forget to eat."
"Don't," I say.
He stops. That's new too. The old Thoreau would have made it a project you have to take care of yourself, Dani, I'll have someone send things, would have solved me with a phone call and a vendor.
This one sets a plate of Dot's eggs in front of me and takes the chair across the table and doesn't watch me eat.
He looks at his hands instead. He has a cut on one knuckle I don't ask about.
After, there's the bottle of pills the hospital sent home, the ones for the headache, with the child-proof cap I can't work one-handed and won't ask for. He sees me turn it against the table edge, twice, getting nowhere, and he doesn't lunge for it. He waits until I set it down.
"May I," he says.
I push the bottle across. He thumbs the cap, shakes one out, and sets it in my palm without letting his fingers touch mine, which is a thing he has decided about, I can tell — the not-touching, held to on purpose.
"Water," he says, already up, and brings it, and it's the wrong glass, the jam jar I use for the windowsill cuttings, but it holds water and he doesn't apologize for it being wrong, just sets it down and sits back down and lets me take my own pill in my own time.
The box comes at eleven, from the children's ward: the comfort kits I've been putting together for the pediatric floor for years, the ones the foundation's name went on and mine never did.
Someone there found the rental address. There's a note in a nurse's round handwriting hoping I'm all right, and the supplies, loose: the soft socks, the little flashlights, the activity books, the cards the older kids decorate for the ones coming out of surgery scared.
I can't assemble them. Not with one wrist. I look at the box and feel the specific helplessness of a thing I am good at made impossible, and before I can decide whether to ask, Thoreau has the box on the floor and himself down beside it.
"Show me how they go," he says.
"You don't have to do that."
"Show me how they go."
So I tell him, from the chair, and I watch a man worth more than this whole county sit cross-legged on a rented kitchen floor in a shirt he's now worn two days and build comfort kits for sick children he will never meet.
He gets the order wrong. He puts the flashlight in before the socks and the socks won't fit and he takes the flashlight back out, patient, starting over, and he does not say one word about who the foundation belongs to or what his name did or did not do.
He doesn't make it about the building with the family's name on it.
He doesn't make it about anything but the socks.
He folds them, badly, into the bags, and asks me which color card goes with which age, and when his phone lights up on the counter he doesn't even turn his head to see whose name it is.
That's the one that gets under. Not the floor, not the tea, not the couch. The phone going off and him not looking. For six years, a phone lighting up meant I'd already lost him to it.
I keep my face still. I am very good at keeping my face still; I had a master class in it. But something must move, because he glances up from the kit in his lap and then back down, fast, like he caught me the way you catch a deer and you both pretend it didn't happen so it won't bolt.
"You used to do these on the dining table," he says quietly, to the socks. "I thought it was — I don't know what I thought it was. Something you liked. A hobby." He doesn't finish. He doesn't say I never asked. He doesn't have to. He sets the finished kit on the stack and reaches for the next bag.
I almost say it. I almost tell him there were two hundred of them last December and I did every one alone at midnight while the house slept and that the card on the front of every kit was signed with love from the Ainsmere family and not one Ainsmere had ever folded a sock.
I almost let him have it, the whole inventory, the way I never let myself.
I don't. I won't relive it twice. I tell him the green cards go with the little ones and I drink my burned tea.
By afternoon there are thirty kits stacked by the door and the man who made them is asleep sitting up against the cabinets, head tipped back, mouth slightly open, one hand still resting on the box.
The five-foot couch did its work. He looks younger like this, and undefended, and so tired that the careful thing he does with his face all day has finally quit.
I get up, carefully, hand flat on the table, letting the room settle, and I cross the kitchen, and I stand over him, and I think about the blanket on the back of the couch.
That's all. I think about the blanket. About getting it and putting it over him so his neck doesn't seize against the cabinet door.
My good hand is already reaching for it.
I have the corner of it in my fingers, soft and worn, and I'm turning to spread it over a sleeping man because some part of me, the conditioned part, the part six years deep, has not gotten the news yet that I am done warming cold men in cold rooms — and I stop.
I put the blanket back. I fold it the way it was, exact, and I set it on the arm of the couch where it lives, and I go back to my chair and I sit, and my heart is doing something I refuse to name out loud even to the inside of my own head.
He can sleep against the cabinet.
I watch him breathe and I keep my hands in my lap where they can't betray me, and I tell myself the thing I have to keep telling myself, the only true sentence I trust in this kitchen: a man can fold a thousand socks and still be the man who turned away.
I just have to remember which man I'm watching for.