Chapter 50
REID
Blake's been on that roof since seven this morning.
I know because I watched him climb the ladder with a cup of coffee in one hand and a pry bar in the other, and David said something in really broken Spanish to Carlos that made Carlos laugh, and Blake just started working.
No preamble. No small talk. Just boots on the scaffolding and hands on the wood like he'd been doing it his whole life.
Which, honestly, he kind of has.
I'm sitting in the shade outside the community kitchen watching Mary try to make rice. Try is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. She's got the pot on too high and she's stirring it, which — even I know you don't stir rice. You just don't. It's the one rule.
"Mary. Hey. You're stirring."
"It sticks if I don't stir."
"It sticks because the heat's too high."
She gives me a look. The same look Laine gives me when I tell her something she already knows but doesn't want to hear. There it is. The genetic proof.
"Reid, I have been cooking rice for thirty years—"
"And it's been sticking for thirty years."
She swats my arm with the wooden spoon. There's a grain of rice on my sleeve now. I leave it.
"Laine didn't learn to cook from you," I say. "Did she."
"Laine learned from every family we ever stayed with. Filipino women, Honduran grandmothers, a ninety-year-old woman in Haiti who made the best beans I've ever tasted." Mary smiles, but there's something wistful in it. "She learned from everyone except me."
"My mom couldn't cook either. She once made spaghetti with ketchup."
"That's not the same."
"You're right. Yours is worse. You have good intentions though. That counts for something."
She laughs. Full, surprised, the kind that makes her cover her mouth. And for a second I see exactly where Laine comes from — not the cooking, not the competence, but the way joy moves through her whole body when she lets it.
"You're terrible," she says. "I see why she likes you."
"It's the only reason."
She swats me again. I steal a piece of mango from the cutting board and dodge out of the kitchen before she can get me a third time. I'm off to find some trouble.
The circle of women is set up under a massive tree on the east side of the village.
Eight, maybe ten women sitting on low stools and overturned buckets, working on what I'm pretty sure is a loom type situation.
Bright threads — red, yellow, deep blue — stretched between wooden bars, fingers moving in patterns I can't even begin to track.
Laine's already there. Cross-legged on the ground next to an older woman who's showing her something with the thread, their heads bent together, speaking in a mix of Spanish and Kaqchikel that Laine navigates like she was born into it.
She wasn't. But she grew up in places like this — different country, different language, same rhythm.
She looks up when I walk over. Smiles. It's almost the real one. Almost.
"Hey. Want to try?"
"Absolutely."
The women make room. Someone hands me a set of threads and a wooden doohickey - a shuttle- and starts explaining in rapid Spanish that I catch about forty percent of. Something about tension. Something about pattern. Something that might be don't mess this up.
I mess it up.
Within three minutes I've tangled two colors together and created what looks like a very small, very ugly knot.
Good. Perfect.
This is exactly the kind of low-stakes disaster I needed. Something I can fail at that doesn't matter. Something that isn't Blake on a roof or Laine's hands shaking or the conversation that's coming tonight like a freight train.
The woman next to me — Rosa, I think — takes it from my hands, untangles it in about four seconds, and hands it back with a look that says try again, gringo.
It's not my fault. As soon as I learned it was called a shuttle, all I've been able to picture is a little car driving through the threads and I forget what I'm supposed to be doing.
"Wow," Laine says. "That's impressively bad."
"It's abstract. I'm making abstract art."
"You're making a mess."
"Why are you always so mean to me," I whine dramatically, batting my eyes at the lady next to me.
The women are laughing. Not at me — with me, mostly, though Rosa's definitely laughing at me and I respect that. I try again. Get about six passes before the thread slips and I lose the pattern completely.
A girl — maybe seven, eight — slides off her mother's lap and comes to stand next to me. She watches my hands with enormous brown eyes, then reaches over and corrects my grip on the shuttle without saying a word.
"Thank you," I say in Spanish. "You're better than me."
She nods. Very serious. Obviously.
Laine's watching us. That look on her face — soft, open, the one she gets when something lands exactly right. Then it flickers. Goes somewhere else. She glances past me toward the job site, and the softness tightens into something else.
Worry.
"He's fine," I say quietly.
My hands are busy with the thread. That's good. Keeps them from doing what they want to do, which is walk over there and plant myself next to him like a fucking guard dog.
He's fine. He worked ten hours. He's talking to David. That's good. That's progress.
I've been telling myself that all day. Hasn't made it true yet.
"I know."
"He's been up there all morning. Your dad's with him."
"I know, Reid."
She doesn't know. She's checking. The same way I've been checking — walking past the site every half hour, finding reasons to loop back. Making sure Blake's still there. Still present. Still holding together.
"I'm going to go see if Dad needs anything," she says, standing up, brushing off her shorts.
"Laine."
She looks at me.
"He chased you off the ladder this morning." Blake did not like her anywhere near the sharp tin. He sure as hell didn't want her on the roof. Yeah, he's pissed, but that love, that protection is a part of who he is.
Doesn't matter how angry he is.
"He didn't chase me—"
"He physically blocked the ladder and told you to get down."
"I was helping."
"You were three rungs up and he looked like he was going to have a cardiac event. The man doesn't want you on the ladder."
She crosses her arms. "That's not his decision."
"No. But it is his blood pressure. Go easy."
She makes a face at me — the scrunched nose thing — and heads toward the site. I watch her go. Track her across the open ground until she's close enough that I can see Blake clock her from the scaffolding. His head turns. Just slightly. Then back to the beam he's working on.
He knows where she is. He always knows.
I go back to the weaving. Make four more terrible passes. The little girl corrects me twice. Rosa takes pity and basically does my row for me while I hold the shuttle and pretend to contribute.
The afternoon stretches out the way afternoons do in places like this — unhurried, warm, filled with small events that feel big when there's nowhere else to be.
A chicken gets loose and three kids chase it between buildings.
Someone's radio plays music from an open window.
Carlos appears with a wheelbarrow full of something and whistles his way across the village like he's got the best job in the world.
Maybe he does.
I end up on the ground near the community center with a kid on each side of me and a third sitting in my lap.
The one in my lap — maybe four, with a mop of black hair and a runny nose — fell off a low wall about twenty minutes ago and scraped his knee.
Nothing serious. Didn't even break the skin, really.
But he cried like the world was ending, and I was right there, and—
This is what I do. Not the medical part.
The scrape barely needed attention. It's the other thing.
The hey, buddy, let me see, you're okay, I've got you thing.
The thing where a scared kid stops crying because someone's voice is calm and their hands are steady and they act like everything is going to be fine.
I do that at work. Dozens of times a shift. Strangers. Their worst day. I show up, I stabilize, I transport, I hand them off.
But this is different. These aren't strangers.
This whole village — Laine's parents, Carlos, Rosa, the gap-toothed girl, this kid with the runny nose — they matter because Laine matters.
And Blake matters. And taking care of the people they care about is something I can do that doesn't require a rig or a uniform or a protocol.
Emotional caretaking. Laine's phrase, not mine. She said it a few weeks ago when I brought her tea without her asking. I thought she was being dramatic.
Maybe she wasn't.
The kid in my lap has stopped crying and is now systematically pulling fistfuls of grass and placing them on my knee. One clump at a time. Very deliberate. I let him. The kid clearly has a plan, and who am I to interfere with that kind of vision?
From here I can see the job site. Blake's on the ground now, crouched next to a beam he pulled down, running his hand along the grain. David's next to him. David's pointing at something. Blake's nodding. Then Blake says something and David leans back on his heels and laughs.
David Mitchell just laughed.
I've been pulling out my best material around the guy and I've gotten exactly one almost-smile from the man.
Blake gets a laugh by talking about wood.
They have their own little manly wood club going.
And maybe I'm a little butthurt. But only a little because Blake looks more settled than he did yesterday. More like himself.
Laine's nearby, sitting on an overturned bucket, watching them. She's got that look again — the one that's half joy, half pain. She's watching Blake earn her father's respect in real time and she can't even tell her father why it matters so much.
Two days. She said two days.
We're at the end of day two. Yeah, yesterday was a travel day, but in my book, that counts.