Chapter 12 #2
He didn’t know what to do with six more bedrooms and two more bathrooms on the third floor, but they were ready for someone to fill them.
Somewhere in the past few weeks, it had quit being just a house he owned and started being a place he was a part of.
He was just the latest in a long line of people who’d lived here and become part of its history.
It felt good to be part of this home. To know it was alive and bustling with people the way it always should have been.
He couldn’t picture it empty and quiet without Sunny’s brood and Madison and whatever neighbor kids happened to be here running in and out the slamming screen doors, laughing and yelling and living in this space.
He supposed that ought to frighten him more than it did.
Chloe had annexed the dining room’s window seat as her throne, her bed, and her court of law.
The twins had been appropriated the entire fourth floor attic with its slanted ceilings as their playroom on the condition they quit using the laundry chute as a slide, a treaty they honored at a rate of roughly sixty percent.
Presley had set her drawing things in the dining-room corner where the morning light fell best. And Madison, who’d come to him locked up tight as a bank vault, had taken to doing her summer reading on the floor in a heap of other people’s children.
Twice this week he’d heard her laugh, really laugh, at something a seven-year-old said.
The only person in the house who never sat down was the one who’d brought it back to life.
Sunny worked hard and constant as if something were gaining on her.
She’d carved up a grown man in front of three hundred people on Tuesday night and been back on her knees at a baseboard by seven Wednesday morning.
Hank watched her cross the office a third time in ten minutes moving things that didn’t need moving and recognized the condition the way he would recognize his own face in a dark mirror.
Like him she’d learned that the moment she stopped moving, the thing she was outrunning would catch her. He knew that walk. He’d been doing it for the past five years.
He wanted to take some of the load off her but didn’t know how to do it for a woman who flinched at being helped. He’d worked out that it couldn’t be done head-on, so he did it sideways, the way he doctored patients too proud to admit they were hurting.
He lifted Chloe off Sunny’s hip without asking because Chloe lived on that hip and nobody could rest with thirty pounds of tyrant attached.
He carried the heavy end of everything Sunny moved before she could reach for it.
When she skipped lunch he didn’t tell her to eat.
He simply set a plate down at Presley’s drawing table, said the light was best over there, and mentioned that somebody ought to keep Presley company while she worked.
Sunny was halfway through the sandwich before she noticed she’d been outflanked.
And at the end of the day, when the kids went home for the evening and she came back to finish one last thing because she could no sooner leave a job half-done than stop breathing, he beat her to the kitchen and put the kettle on himself.
This evening, she stopped in the kitchen doorway, looked at the kettle, and then at him. Bewilderment crossed her face. “You don’t have to make me tea.”
“I know.” He got down two mugs. “That’s generally how I can tell something’s worth doing.”
She came in and leaned against the counter while the water heated. “I’m not used to this,” she said, more to the kettle than to him. “Somebody having my back. Catching things before I drop them. I keep waiting to find out what it’s going to cost me.”
“Nothing.” He measured out the tea and dipped the tea ball in the water several times before leaving it alone in the mug to steep. He set a timer on the stove for three minutes, the way she did it, which he’d learned without being told.
“That’s the part that’s hard to credit, I know. But there’s no invoice coming.”
“There’s always an invoice.”
“Not here,” he said it bluntly. “You’ve spent so long looking for the string attached to every kindness that you forgot some folks actually help others because they like helping others and do it naturally, without thinking.
For better or worse, I’m one of those. Look for strings from me as long as you need to.
I’ll still be here when you figure out why I do things for you. ”
The timer on the stove buzzed, and they drank the standing in the half-dark. He’d drank something hot in the evening alone for more years than he cared to count, but in the past few weeks that had changed. And he liked it.
He wanted this. Not the way he wanted something he could talk himself out of by morning.
He wanted it the way this house wanted to be lived in, its purpose for being built in the first place.
He wanted to make this woman tea at the end of a hard day for the rest of the days and years he had.
He wanted the loud, cluttered, multi-kid future he’d spent a decade telling himself—lying to himself—that he was better off without.
He’d built his whole life on the understanding that wanting something for himself was how the people he loved got hurt.
But standing with her in his kitchen with her shoulder a foot away from his, he found himself questioning that belief.
Hard. Sometime in the past week or two, it had gone quiet in his head.
Stopped insisting it was the truth. And he was in no hurry to go looking for where that voice had gone off to.
He didn’t say a word of what he was thinking. It wasn’t a night for words, and he’d never had much use for them regardless. He made them tea and stood close to her to drink it. And he let the wanting settle inside him instead of turning it into a fight with himself.
When Sunny rinsed her mug and said she ought to go, he walked her out to the porch and the two ugly aluminum chairs that lived there, now. He didn’t reach for her. As always, he let her be the one to rise up on her toes in the dark and kiss him goodnight before she went down the steps.
Ruth Sanger’s counter-campaign showed up first at the diner, the way weather around here showed up first in the cottonwood leaves. They moved differently, or whole branches of them bent a certain way. They even changed color when certain kinds of storms blew in.
Hank stopped in at the diner for a piece of pie and found Ruth holding her usual court, only the court had changed its docket.
She was telling the Petersen girl who hadn’t been born when it happened about the time a fireman named Del had gotten the bright idea to go down the church chimney in a Santa suit and surprise everyone by popping out of the big fireplace behind the pulpit during the Christmas Eve service.
However, he got stuck partway down, right at the part of the sermon where the preacher was describing the angel Gabriel telling Mary she was going to give birth to the son of God.
Just then, Del shouted from inside the chimney in a booming voice, “Hey, I’m trying to come out down there! A little help?”
The whole diner started to laugh as Ruth described the entire congregation jumping a foot in the air and the pastor nearly fainting.
The pastor called out, “My Lord. Is that you?”
Del yelled back, “Yeah, and I’m stuck up in here. You gotta grab my feet and give me a good yank so I can come down to you!”
Walter Meeks, a retired rancher and diner regular chimed in, cackling, “Pastor Dave darned near fainted dead away.”
The Petersen girl asked breathlessly, “What happened then?”
Pastor Dave went over to the fireplace and started praying like I never saw that man pray before.
He blubbered about all his sins and asking for forgiveness, and how he wasn’t worthy to birth the Lord reborn.
And the whole time Del was yelling down at him, ‘Stop being afraid. It’s just me, You Idiot!
’ Of course the more Del yelled at him, the more hysterical Pastor Dave got. ”
“What did the congregation do?” the Petersen girl demanded.
“Well,” Ruth replied, her eyes glinting with just slightly malicious humor, “The folks in the pews were all praying like their everlasting souls depended on it. That is, until Jesus started cussing up a blue storm in the chimney and yelling for the fire chief to get his sorry . . . umm, posterior . . . up front and get him unstuck from the chimney.”
Gales of laughter filled the diner. It was the first time in weeks that Hank had heard anything like it in here. Even better, folks on both sides of the great fire investigation debate were laughing together.
Ruth mopped her eyes with a napkin and finished with, “At that point, the fire chief at the time recognized Del’s voice doing all the cussing.
He stood up and called for the other volunteer firefighters in the church to come help him rescue the dumbest firefighter this side of the Rocky Mountains.
And the whole town sat there watching from the pews while covered dishes for the midnight potluck went cold in every lap. “
Hank looked around the diner. The folks in here had spent the past month arguing over accelerants, motives, and insurance payouts.
But today, they listened to her droll story, the gray heads nodding along and adding hilarious details Ruth left out.
The woman in the end booth pressed her hand to her mouth, laughing and crying at the same time, because Del had been her brother and it was exactly the sort of stunt he would’ve pulled.