Chapter 5 #2
Madison froze as soon as she turned the corner and spied the mantel. “That’s it,” she said softly.
“I do believe you have the instincts of a good historical decorator,” Sunny told her.
“Did the original mantel in our house look like this?” Madison murmured as she stepped forward and laid her hand exactly where Hank had laid his.
“The first one was probably plainer,” Sunny answered. She crouched to check the joinery and tilted it to look at the back. “This came out of a beautiful home. Somebody let a fine house die.”
Hank went down on one knee, working a loose return board with his thumb, testing the give of an old glue joint. “This corner’s let go,” he said. “And there’s a check running up the left column. Hairline. It’ll open if you hang it wet.”
She blinked at him. “You know joinery?”
“Our granddad taught all us boys how to work with wood. Dillon’s the really talented woodworker of the three of us. I find that wood’s not so different from people. You learn where a thing wants to come apart, and you don’t ask it to do a thing it can’t.”
It occurred to Sunny that he could be talking about a good many things that weren’t mantels.
“I can fix this corner. Clamp it, let it set, re-glue the return. The check I’ll fill and leave be.” He added in a rather intimate murmur to her, “If you don’t mind it having a scar.”
“Not at all. Gives it character,” she murmured back, her heart inexplicably fluttering.
Madison found the perfect light in a dim corner. It was a brass pan light with five arms and milk-glass shades, every one of them intact, gone the soft brown of an old penny.
“This one,” she said with absolute certainty. Just a few days ago, she would’ve phrased it as a question and watched Sunny’s face for permission. Now she just stated it as a fact.
“Why that one?” Sunny asked, even though she privately agreed.
Madison considered the fixture. “It’s not trying to be fancy.
But it’s a good shape. More rounded and graceful than the mantel or the coffered ceiling.
It’ll soften the room. Plus the glass all matches.
” She cast a sidelong glance at Sunny. “And it’s old enough that it could’ve been there when the ceiling was new. ”
Sunny had to turn and pretend to inspect a stack of shutters for a moment because the back of her throat had gone tight at how exactly right Madison had gotten it.
A chest of drawers joined their haul for Madison’s bedroom.
Hank asked Madi if he bought it for her, would she unpack her clothes into it.
Madi’s gaze snapped up to Hank’s and they stared at each other for a long moment.
Then Madi nodded solemnly and Hank look away hastily with a convulsive swallow.
Sunny turned away and stopped Chloe from climbing into an armoire so the two of them could have a moment to collect themselves.
The chest and mantel rode home under a tarp in the truck bed, the light fixture carefully packed in a box beside Madison.
Chloe fell asleep again before they hit the highway with a brass drawer handle clutched in one fist that the store owner hadn’t had the heart to pry loose.
Sunny promised she would return it the next time she came back, and the guy hadn’t charged her for it.
As the highway curved through the western pass into the Stillwater Valley, she watched the green fields unfold before them, stretching down to the glittering lake.
Quiet satisfaction filled the cab. They were all dusty and tired but pleased, hauling old, broken, beautiful things home to make them whole again.
It felt right. More right than anything in her life had felt for a very long time.
The following week the backyard filled up the way a dry creek fills in a thunderstorm, a trickle at first and then all at once.
It started with Sunny breaking down the moving boxes from Madison’s room. Then they hauled out the acoustic ceiling tiles and stacked them by the fence. Harris and Jenson took one look and recognized, with the unerring instinct of seven-year-old boys, raw materials for building.
By lunchtime there was a fort. By suppertime there were two forts and a declared war.
Makayla got dropped off by Tessa “for an hour” that everyone understood to mean all afternoon and probably supper.
Presley led one army and appointed Makayla general in charge of the other.
They drew up a whole battle plan on the back step, which fell apart the moment the girls yelled for a charge.
Hank came out onto the porch as the light turned gold with two glasses of iced tea and handed Sunny one without asking, the way he kept her coffee filled without asking.
She’d learned he ran a quiet inventory of what everyone in his orbit needed and never let on that he did it.
He stood watching the war with casual interest beside her.
“East fort’s going to come down on somebody soon,” he commented.
“Probably.” Sunny took a sip of her tea and started a mental clock of how long he would last without fixing the fort.
He made it ninety seconds.
Then he set his glass on the rail and headed for the offending fort.
Sunny watched the town doctor explain load-bearing walls to two seven-year-olds with the same grave courtesy he’d give a colleague.
He folded a flap, weighted a corner with a chunk of firewood, and showed Jenson how a triangle holds where a square folds.
“How does he know that?” Madison asked, dropping onto the step beside Sunny with the boneless heaviness of a kid who’d been having more fun than she would admit to under torture.
“Everything’s the same thing, if you look at it long enough.” Sunny answered. “You just have to learn where things need bracing and where they need leaving alone.”
Madison absorbed that. “Are we still talking about forts?”
“Mostly.”
The June air was thick with humidity and far too warm. Jenson’s voice drifted across the yard. Sunny heard the word hot in a martyred whine that meant a meltdown was inbound. She started to take a step to go intervene, but Hank was already moving and waved her back to the porch.
Frowning, she held her position and watched him walk to the side of the house, grab the hose, and drag an oscillating sprinkler into the middle of the yard. He went back to the wall and twisted the spigot wide open.
Four Carter children, one Steele, and one Lawrence shrieked and flung themselves through the water. Even Madison, after a stiff, who-me hesitation that broke Sunny’s heart a little, was towed in by Presley and surrendered, laughing, to getting soaked in her clothes.
She hadn’t seen her children so happy in, well, maybe ever. She laughed too, filled with gratitude she had no words to express. She was grateful Hank had thought of setting up the sprinkler. And for this town and the people in it who’d embraced her and her family so warmly.
Sunny sat down on the top porch step, leaning against the post and enjoying the sound of children’s laughter. Hank retreated to the porch as well to keep an eye on the carnage. He sat down beside her in the companionable silence she was learning to appreciate.
Chloe lasted about fifteen minutes before the cold water and the sheer outrage of it sent her, dripping and betrayed, up the porch steps and Hank’s lap.
Sunny watched in disbelief as she burrowed against his chest, soaking his shirt.
She took a proprietary grip on his collar, and glared out at her siblings as though the temperature of the water was their fault.
Hank looked down at the wet, furious child commandeering his shirtfront. Then he settled one big hand against her back so she couldn’t pitch off his knee, and let her stay.
He didn’t make a thing of it. That was what undid Sunny.
He wasn’t performing for her benefit, didn’t catch her eye to be admired for it, didn’t turn a soaked toddler into a story about what a good man he was.
He just held the child because the child needed holding, the same way he kept her coffee filled and fixed gutters he complained to and braced forts.
She studied him surreptitiously. She’d married the exact opposite of him, a man who only took, and it had taught her to read a giver the way a burned hand reads a stove.
Winston’s kindness had always come with a price attached, and she kept waiting for Hank to present her with a bill for his.
But the desk in his office had never lied to her. She was slowly coming to believe he was honest through and through. He took payment from patients in fence posts, fresh baked bread, and even grocery bags of zucchini, for crying out loud.
Out in the middle of the yard, caught in the sweep of the sprinkler, the aluminum porch chair the boys had hauled out there earlier sat getting thoroughly soaked, and the man who’d sworn up and down he’d never move it for anybody didn’t get up to save it.
She figured that was about the most hopeful thing she’d seen in a while. A wet lawn chair.