Chapter 7
Easton
She was off the second she opened the door.
I'd been off shift since morning. It should have been a free day, but Duke had called me at noon with a problem he framed as a problem and an offer he framed as a favor.
"Ford. I need your truck and your back. Pinball machine."
"No."
"Twin Cities Solid State, 1981. Three hundred bucks. Guy in Coxsackie says it just needs love."
"Duke."
"You got a free day. I got a project. Be at my place in an hour. Wear shoes you can lose."
He'd hung up before I had a word for what he was.
By two, we had a three-hundred-pound steel cabinet on its side in the back of my truck.
By three, we had it on its feet in Duke's basement and discovered the part of the description the seller had skipped, which was that the right flipper didn't lift.
By four, Duke was crouched on the concrete cursing at the cabinet like it had insulted his mother, and I was on his couch, eating his last good orange and watching a grown man fail to fix something he had no business owning.
I checked my phone.
Duke looked up.
"Are you late for something?"
"No."
Duke set the screwdriver down on the concrete with a deliberate clink and wiped his hands on his jeans.
"That's the second time."
"It's a phone, Duke."
"Mhm."
He went back to the flipper. Not for long. A minute, maybe less. Then the wrench stopped moving, and I felt him watching me from the floor before I heard him speak.
"Are you dating somebody?"
"No."
"Brother." He sat back on his heels and looked at me, patiently, head tilted, waiting for the truth and not minding the concrete floor while he waited. "I know what 'no' sounds like when 'no' means 'I'm not telling you yet.' That was 'no' the second way."
I didn't answer right away.
"Alright. I'm not gonna make you. But you don't tell me about her, that means it's serious."
I looked at the ceiling tile for a beat and felt the answer come up before I'd decided to give it.
"Maybe."
His head came up.
He didn't make a thing of it. He nodded once, slowly, and went back to the flipper.
"Alright, brother. I'll wait."
He didn't ask again.
I left his place at seven with sawdust in my hair and grease on the side of my neck, and drove home with the windows down, the radio low, one hand on the wheel.
When I rolled past Maple at the end of the run, I clocked her kitchen light on.
The window was warm and yellow against the dark siding, and I caught myself slowing the truck before I'd registered I was doing it.
I turned around at the next block, doubling back to the diner on Main.
By the time I thanked Doris and got back in the truck with the bag warm on the passenger seat, I'd already decided.
I drove home, parked in my own driveway, let Pen out, clipped her to the leash, and walked her across the street with the bag in my free hand and the Hartsdale Fire shirt still on my back.
Should've showered first.
Didn't.
She opened the door with the smile of a woman who'd been bracing for someone else and had to shift fast when she saw it was me. The shift was tight. The smile didn't sit right at the corners.
I knew the smile. I'd seen it enough on my mother growing up to know what it was for.
I lifted the bag.
"Got takeout for both of us."
She let me in.
Penny went straight through the kitchen to the rug by the back door like she lived there.
Moose came off the rug to meet her at the threshold, and they did the morning sniff at the side of the face like it was eight a.m. and not eight p.m. Astrid watched them.
She watched them a beat too long—long enough that I knew she was using the dogs to put off having to look at me.
"Is something wrong?" I said.
She shook her head. "Nothing."
I set the bag on the counter and let the question lie. I wasn't gonna chase it across the floor.
She'd cleared her permits off the kitchen table while I was on the porch. Stack pushed to the corner, pen on top, cold tea beside it.
I let it go.
I opened the bag. Two diner specials, the meatloaf for me and the chicken pot pie for her, because I'd watched her order it at the diner the Sunday before. Two pieces of pie wrapped in foil—cherry for her, peach for me. I'd been paying attention.
She stood at the counter while I unpacked the containers. She didn't help. She didn't move.
"Plates?" I said.
She blinked and went to the cabinet over the sink, pulling two down.
"Hey."
She looked up.
"You don't have to entertain me. Sit. I'll plate it."
She sat.
I plated.
"Caldwell came by," she said.
She didn't lead with it. We'd eaten for a few minutes without saying much, and I'd let it be quiet on purpose—like you let a scared dog come to you instead of going to it.
She'd forked the crust on her pie back and forth across the plate twice before she ate any of it.
Moose had come over and put his chin on her knee, and she'd dropped her hand to his head without looking.
My fork stopped.
"When?"
"About an hour before you did."
"Here?"
"Front porch. Wouldn't come in. Said he just wanted to welcome me back."
I felt my hand close around the fork before I'd told it to, setting it down.
"And?"
She put the fork down, too, looked at her plate, and took a breath she didn't quite manage to hide.
"And he said the town can't really support two practices. He said he'd hate to see a young woman put everything she has into something that wasn't going to take."
I didn't say anything for a second.
I had three months of bringing my grandmother's dog into that man's office sitting on the back of my tongue, and the longer I sat with what he'd said to her on her front porch, the less the chicken pot pie I'd brought looked like what this kitchen needed.
I kept my voice level.
"Those were his words?"
"His words."
"And you said?"
"I said I was sure there was room."
"Good."
"It wasn't what he said." She was looking at the table, fingertip tracing the rim of her plate without seeming to know it.
"It was how he said it. Like he was being kind to me.
Like he was warning me, but softly." She paused, then huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh.
"I had a mother-in-law for six years who used that exact voice on me.
Polite. Hands clasped at the waist. She'd stand in my kitchen with a glass of wine in her hand and tell me, softly, every single thing I wasn't going to be good enough at for her son.
Caldwell did it for a few minutes, and it took me thirty seconds to forget I was a grown woman with a license. "
My hand tightened on the fork again, and this time, I noticed it before I set it down.
"You're not a grown woman with a license," I said.
Her head came up. Eyes a little wide.
"You're the best vet this town has had in thirty years."
She huffed out a breath that was half a laugh.
"You don't know that."
"I know what Caldwell did with my dog for three months. I know what you did in ten minutes. I'm not gonna let him make either one of those things a question for you."
She looked at me for a long beat. Her eyes went a little glassy at the edges, but she didn't let them tip.
"Astrid."
I reached across the table, put my hand over hers, and felt her palm turn up to meet me without her looking down to find it.
"He's not gonna do this to you," I said.
"You can't promise that."
"I'm not promising you a result. I'm promising you, you're not gonna do this part alone. You don't have to call me. You don't have to ask. I'm a hundred and twenty feet from your front door. Whatever the next move is, you've got somebody on this side of it."
She looked down at our hands. She didn't move hers.
"Okay," she said.
She ate after that. So did I.
Some of the air came back into the kitchen. Pen had fallen asleep on her side on the rug with all four feet pointed at the refrigerator. Moose stretched out alongside her, his chin on her shoulder. They breathed in time without trying.
I asked her about the contractor. She talked about the surgical light she was going back and forth on and the used autoclave she'd found outside Albany.
I listened. I asked a couple of questions she answered easily, and a couple I could see her thinking through as she went.
By the time she finished her chicken pot pie, she looked like a woman again instead of a woman who'd answered her door an hour ago.
I told her about the pinball machine. She laughed at the right parts, wanted to know if the flipper coil was original. She'd played pinball in college. Of course, she had. We split the cherry pie because she said I was going to want some of it, whether I knew it yet or not. She was right.
I got up and did her dishes at the sink. She came over and dried.
That was the first time we'd done that.
I clocked it, not looking up from the plate to confirm because I didn't want to make her notice it, too. Her shoulder bumped mine once when she reached past me for the dish towel. She left it there for a second. So did I. Then she stepped back.
"Easton."
"Yeah."
She'd turned her body fully toward me at the sink.
"Thank you."
"For dishes?"
"For the dishes. For dinner. For not making me say any of this twice."
I set the last plate on the rack and dried my hands on the towel she handed me.
"You don't have to thank me, Astrid."
"I wanted to."
"Alright."
She walked me to the door. Pen got up off the rug with the slow, careful unfolding she did now. Moose got up beside her and pressed his shoulder against her shoulder until she had her legs under her. He'd been doing it for a week. I hadn't taught him.
At the door, Astrid put her hand on the frame—same place I'd seen her put it the first time I'd been in her house.
"Are you good to make it home?" she said.
"It's a hundred and twenty feet, Astrid."
"Some men have trouble with stairs after dark."
A small smile. The real version of it, this time. Slower to arrive. Easier in the corners.
I let myself look at her for a beat. She let me.
I lifted my hand and put it on the back of her neck—her hair was cool from the night air coming through the screen—and let it sit there for a count of one.
"Lock this behind me," I said.
"I will."
"All the way."
I went down her front steps with Pen at my hip.
I heard the deadbolt slide before I'd made the front walk.
Crossing Maple at night was a thing I'd done six hundred times in eighteen months and never noticed. I noticed it that night. On her side, the porch light was on. On my side, the light was off, the windows were dark, and the boxes sat in the hallway where I'd set them down a year and a half ago.
I unlocked the front door. Pen went past me to the kitchen for water.
I'd told Shane I'd be back in February.
I hadn't bought a single piece of packing tape.
I hadn't called the realtor in three weeks.
I hadn't made a list of what was going in the truck.
I had not, in fact, done a single thing about leaving Hartsdale since the Thursday I drove a vet I barely knew south on Route 23 with my grandmother's dog in the back seat and let her put her hand on Penny's flank for forty minutes.
I went into the kitchen. Penny was at her water bowl. I got a glass down, filled it at the tap, and stood at the sink, looking out at the dark yard where the roses were, and where my grandmother was, under them.
I pulled my phone out of my back pocket.
I scrolled to Shane.
My thumb hovered over the call button for a long time.
I put the phone on the counter face down.
I put my hands on the edge of the sink and let my head drop between my shoulders.
"Pen," I said to the dog who'd settled her chin on my bare foot like she did every night, "I think we've got a problem."
She huffed.
I thought about Astrid's palm turning up to meet mine at the kitchen table. About the fact that I'd told Shane I was coming back in the new year, and I meant it when I said it, and in eighteen months of telling myself I was leaving, I hadn't packed a single box of dishes.
The math had been the same for a year. It just stopped being math I could lie about.
I picked the phone back up and turned it over.
I didn't call Shane.
I opened a new text and typed her name.
Easton
Locked?
Three dots came back almost immediately. Then:
Astrid
Locked.
A beat. Then another text:
Astrid
Go to bed, Easton.
I almost smiled.
I set the phone face up on the counter.
I knew what I was doing.
I just hadn't said it out loud yet.