Chapter 11
The kitchen smelled like dish soap and the last of the beef stew when Grace came back from putting Lily to bed.
Reno was at the sink. He had his sleeves pushed up to his elbows, a dish towel slung over his shoulder, and most of the plates already on the drying rack.
The brace creaked softly every time he shifted his weight.
He was humming something under his breath that did not, as best she could tell, have a tune.
"I told you to put your leg up after supper," she said from the doorway. “And you agreed.”
"I did not, in fact, agree. I made a noncommittal sound that you interpreted as agreement."
Rats. He was right. "Still. I should be doing the dishes," she said.
"Maybe. But," he said, rinsing out the stew pot and turning it upside down on the drying rack, “They’re all done, so the point is moot.”
She spotted two mugs already on the counter beside the coffee pot, waiting for tomorrow morning. The teakettle was starting to steam on the stove, and there was nothing left for her to do except make tea and drink it on the back porch.
She felt something soft come loose inside her that she didn’t know what to do with.
"Go sit," he said, without turning around. "I'll make the tea and bring it to you."
"But . . ."
"Go sit, Grace."
She went out to the screened-in porch. The frogs were in full chorus tonight along with the crickets and a few night birds.
The one drawback to all the tall shade trees around the house was she didn’t get a good view of the stars from here.
But she could see the moon shining off the lake, an elongated disk of white stretching toward her.
She turned on the small space heater beside the sofa and sat down beside it, enjoying the quiet sound of its soft heat blowing toward her and taking the edge off the night’s encroaching chill. The porch was lit only by the small lamp on the side table beside her.
She tucked her feet up under her on the couch. From the kitchen came the click of the kettle on porcelain and the small sounds of Reno making tea and stirring in sugar.
He came outside carrying two mugs. He handed her one and lowered himself carefully onto the other end of the couch.
“You can prop your leg up on the coffee table,” she murmured. “It’s old and beat up already.”
He did so with a small sigh of relief. The cat, Marshmallow, appeared from wherever she went between dinner and bedtime, and sat down on the rug beyond the coffee table staring at Reno.
Grace said. "That stare from her means she's deciding whether to murder you or not."
"Bulls have the same stare and it means the exact same thing," he replied, not looking away from the cat.
"I've never seen her do it. But I'd hate for you to be the first."
He took a sip of his tea and said nothing as he continued to look back calmly at the cat.
All at once, Marshmallow walked to the end of the coffee table, and sat down again to keep staring.
He seemed content that the cat was no longer a threat for he looked down the sofa at her and asked, "How are you doing? "
"I'm fine."
She looked at him over the rim of her mug. He was watching the cat again, but she realized with a start that this time he was making it easy for her to lie if she wanted to, and easy for her to tell the truth if she wanted to do that instead.
She wasn’t fine and they both knew it.
"What put that worried look in your eyes at supper?" he asked.
"Was there one?"
"There were several."
She set her mug down on the side table. "It was nothing."
He didn't argue. He just took another sip of his tea and waited.
The cat climbed up between them onto the sofa in her usual spot and folded herself into a loaf.
Grace lasted maybe ten more seconds before blurting, "It was a biscuit.”
"A biscuit worried you?"
"You buttered Lily's biscuit without her asking. And . . ." She stopped. "It's silly."
"Try me."
"You buttered her biscuit. And you fixed my dock. And did the dishes." She picked at a thread coming loose at the cuff of her sweater. "And there was a man at my table, and it was nice. It was, for one second, easy."
"And?"
"And that's when I felt like . . ." She kept picking at the thread. ". . . like I was sneaking around behind someone’s back."
"Whose back?"
"Liam’s."
Embarrassed, she stared at the moonlight on the lake. Blessedly, Reno said nothing.
"He'd want me to be okay," she said. "I know that. He told me so. Before he deployed the first time as a SEAL, he sat me down and told me that, if anything happened to him, I was not to waste a single day mourning him longer than I had to. He used those words. Not a single day."
"Do you still feel that you have to mourn him?"
Her voice came out a whisper. “I don’t know.
” She took a deep breath and said at a more normal volume, “It's been almost five years. My life has moved on. This life, me and Lily and the bakery without him feels . . . normal.” She paused for a moment, then said all at once, “But I still feel like I'm sneaking around behind his back for noticing that another man buttered my daughter's biscuit. "
She took a deep breath and released it slowly.
"I haven't said any of that to anyone before," she admitted. "Not even the WoWS. They’ve already done this part, most of them a while ago. They’ve all moved on to new relationships. New lives. The last thing I want to do is drag them down or drag them into old feelings of grief and loneliness and sadness they’ve finally gotten past. I don't know why I said any of it to you. I shouldn’t have.
"Yes, you should’ve. Because I'm easier to talk with than they are."
"But they’re my best friends. We’re all like sisters. I ought to be able to tell them anything."
“Yes, but I don't carry your shared history. You and most of the other women have known one another most of your lives. Anything you tell them about Liam will get weighed against everything they know about him. But I never had the privilege of meeting him. Anything you tell me about him I’ll take at face value however you present it to me.
That makes me a low-stakes person to talk with about things involving him. For tonight, anyway."
"That’s just convoluted enough while still making sense to sound like a lawyer answer."
He smiled faintly. “I prefer to call having a fair amount of practice with people who don't want to tell anyone what they think."
"Well, you're good at getting people to talk," she said.
He stared sightlessly into his tea, and she didn’t ask what he was thinking. The silence sat between them and was, she realized with some surprise, the most comfortable silence she had sat in for months.
Then he said quietly, "Grace. Liam gets to sit at the head of your table forever. That's how it works for the dead. The rest of us can only ever be invited in to sit further down the table. And that's all right."
She did not know what to do with that. She picked up her mug because her hands needed something to do, drank all her tea, and set it down again. Her eyes were starting to fill up with wetness, and when she put her hand to her cheek, she felt the heat of her embarrassment under her palm.
"I'm sorry," she mumbled.
"For what?"
"I'm about to cry in front of you."
"You're allowed."
"I'm so tired of being allowed."
It came out sharper than she meant it to. Her own tone surprised her. She heard it the way another person would have heard it, as the voice of a woman who had been very, very polite for a very, very long time.
He didn't flinch. He just looked at her in that quiet way of his, not pitying, not careful, and reached into his pocket. He held out another handkerchief.
She took it.
His fingers brushed her knuckles in the hand-off, and it felt intentional.
His fingers touched the back of her hand and stayed for one beat longer than they had to, and she didn’t look up for one beat longer than she had to.
The dim, golden light from the lamp fell across both of their hands, and there was a small electric stillness on the porch that hadn’t been there a second before.
The cat woke up and stretched lazily. Then she walked across the cushion deliberately, and put one front paw on Reno's good knee. Then the other. She climbed into his lap, kneaded the pocket of his jeans a few times, and lay down across his lap as if she’d been doing it for years.
"Wow," Grace murmured "She doesn’t do that with anybody."
"I'm flattered."
"You should be. I once bled for twenty minutes because I tried to scratch her ears at the wrong time."
"Noted. No ear scratching."
He laid his free hand on her back very lightly, being careful not to startle Marshmallow. To Grace's astonishment, the cat began to purr.
Grace pressed the handkerchief to her eyes and breathed out. When she lowered it, Reno was watching her.
Her stomach did a strange thing where it felt as if it rolled over in her belly. She said a shade nervously, "It's late. And I have to be up early tomorrow. I think I’m going to call it a night. Stay up as late as you’d like.”
He picked up the cat gently and set her back in her usual spot on the sofa. “It’s been a long day and I haven’t gotten much sleep myself for the past week. I think I’ll call it a night, too. He stood up slowly, and she saw the grimace that momentarily distorted his mouth.
She walked into the house with Reno following her. She stopped in front of her bedroom door and turned to face him.
"Thank you, for not telling me how to feel about Liam."
"Anytime, Grace."
She nodded once and went into her room.
The cottage was small enough that she could hear, faintly, the springs of the guest bed when he lay down, and the sound of him talking very softly to the cat who must’ve decided Reno’s presence in her usual nighttime bed wasn’t going to stop her from sleeping there.
Grace couldn’t make out Reno’s low murmur to the cat, but it was kind in tone.
She crossed to the dresser.
Liam was twenty-five in the photograph, grinning at the camera.
His arm was around her shoulders as they stood on a beach, both of them in cutoffs, sunburned pink, and laughing at something.
They had been married six months in that picture.
She wouldn’t get pregnant with Lily for almost another year. He wouldn’t be alive in a year.
She picked the frame up and held it the way she had every night for almost five years, and spoke to Liam.
Sometimes she did it out loud, but mostly did it in her head these days.
She told him about Lily, about the bakery, and about the little stuff that made up her daily life, the cracked floor tile in the kitchen, and what Mrs. Hennessey had ordered that morning by mistake.
Tonight she didn’t know what to say to him. She stood there staring at her husband's face, and for the first time a third person was also in the picture of her life.
I'm not asking you to move out of my heart, she told Liam silently. I want you to know that. There’s a man in my house tonight, and I think he’ll be here for a while. I don’t know yet what that means. But I'm not replacing you. I’ll never replace you.
The picture didn't answer.
You told me not to waste a single day of my life. I’m afraid I’ve wasted a lot of days. I would like, if it's all right with you, to stop wasting them. And I don’t know what that means, either.
The picture didn't answer.
It occurred to her as she carefully set the photo back on the dresser how young she looked in that picture. Death had frozen him in time, and he would never be much older that that laughing young man. But she was no longer the carefree girl in the photo.
For the first time in her life, she felt a distance between herself and Liam, as if he was standing still in the middle of a road and she was in a car driving away from him slowly. Looking at the picture of him tonight felt like looking back at him in the road through her rearview mirror.
He was becoming a memory. And the longer she drove that car forward through life, the smaller he was going to become in the mirror.
Tears rolled silently down her face as she got ready for bed. She turned out the lamp and lay in the dark, listening for the small, soft sounds of a man and a cat settling in for the night across the hall.
I'm trying to keep living, Liam, she said silently in her head. I'm really trying.