Chapter Twenty-four – Lila.172 #3
“Hey, peanut,” I said.
My voice came out low and slightly rough, the voice of a person who had not used it much since yesterday. I felt Hope register the sound of it, some small shift in her expression, a slight easing of the frown, the turn of her attention more fully toward my face.
“Your daddy Ethan would have loved you so much.” The words arrived plain and direct, no management applied to them, the way I had learned to say true things in this house.
“He named you, did you know that? Peanut first, and then Hope.” My thumb found her cheek, the soft, warm curve of it. “He would have made you so proud.”
I looked at her and the grief was there, it was always there, it was going to be always there, I had come to understand that in the last four months in the way you understood weather: not as something to be solved but as something to be lived alongside.
I had stopped trying to put it somewhere smaller than it was.
“And you are going to have so many people love you.”
Outside, Cole was at the barn again. Rhett’s fire had caught under the overhang, a small bright thing, visible even in the morning light. Wade straightened at the fence line and pulled his glove back on, and moved to the next post.
“We both are,” I said.
The words sat in the quiet kitchen in the smell of woodsmoke and coffee and the patchwork weight of the blanket and Hope’s milky warmth against my shoulder.
I let them sit. I did not add anything further, did not qualify or explain or work through the implication of them, because they did not need working through.
They were simply true, the same way the men in the yard were simply true, not because I had needed them, though I had, not because I had been lonely, though I had been, but because somewhere between November and now I had stopped being afraid of what it meant to love people who had decided to stay.
The mug was warm in my palm.
Hope’s fist uncurled against my shoulder and her eyes drifted to the window, to the light, to the pale gold morning filling the glass above the frost-white yard. She considered it for a moment with her habitual solemn thoroughness, then returned to my face.
I stayed at the window and drank my coffee and held my daughter and let the morning be exactly what it was: ordinary and extraordinary and entirely, improbably mine.
***
I found Hope’s warmest layer at the bottom of the stack on the nursery shelf, the fleece-lined one with the snaps at the cuffs that I had not used yet, still folded in the precise, overlapping way it had been folded by whoever had put it there.
I worked the snaps with one hand while she submitted to the process with the particular resigned patience of someone who had been dressed without consent before and had decided it was not worth fighting.
Her chin disappeared into the collar. I smoothed it down.
Ethan’s coat was on the hook by the back door. I put it on one arm at a time, Hope propped against my hip.
I opened the back door. The cold came through in a clean, immediate wall, the specific cold of a Montana morning after a clear night, the kind that made the air feel freshly arrived, sharp at the edge of every breath.
It hit my face and my ears and the bridge of my nose and I stood in the doorway for a moment and took it, because there was no useful alternative and because it was, genuinely, the kind of cold that woke things up rather than dulled them.
The yard spread below the porch steps in the early winter light: frost-stiffened grass, the barn’s dark wood against a sky that had gone from pale gold to the clean, pale blue of a morning that had decided to commit.
The fence rails carried their thin crust of snow, the shadow of it sharp and distinct in the low-angled light.
A crow sat on the peak of the barn roof and considered its options.
Cole was the first to notice me. He had come around from the supply shed with a length of rope that needed coiling, his hands moving through the familiar task with the automatic, unhurried ease of something done enough times to require no thought.
He looked up in the casual way he looked up when he was tracking the yard’s general state of affairs, and his eyes found me on the porch step with Hope bundled against my chest. He stopped.
He looked at me and then at Hope, taking her in the way he always took her in, with the slightly too-focused attention of a man who had not yet gotten accustomed to her existence and was not sure he wanted to, because he did not want to become accustomed to it, because being accustomed to things was not the same as appreciating them, and he understood that distinction.
The corner of his mouth pulled up. Then he walked over, slow and direct, and stopped at the foot of the porch steps without being asked.
He didn’t say anything. He stood with the rope coiled in his hands and his eyes moving between my face and Hope’s face with the patient, contained expression of a man who was content to let the moment be what it was.
“There she is.”
Rhett called it from across the yard, his voice carrying through the cold air with the cheerful certainty of someone who had been waiting for this particular arrival.
He was heading toward the porch from the woodpile side with his hands shoved into his jacket pockets and his hat at the angle it always found on mornings when he’d pulled it on without looking, and his grin when he got close enough for me to see it properly was the unguarded one, the one without any architecture behind it, no joke being constructed, no angle being held in reserve.
He reserved that expression for one person only, and he was not looking at me when he wore it. He was looking at Hope.
Wade came last.