Chapter 17 #2
He walked Brett off the porch. Down the steps.
Down the walk. I stood in the doorway and watched the back of Easton's coat, the cuffs at his wrists, the set of his shoulders, the steadiness of a man who was not letting go.
He had Brett by the neck and was walking him the way you walk a dog who has lost the privilege of walking on his own.
Brett said something at the curb. Easton said something back.
Brett got into a car that had been idling at the end of the block, and the car pulled away with the measured turn of a driver who'd been told not to come back.
Easton stood at the curb a moment longer.
He watched the car all the way down Maple.
Then he turned around and came back up my walk.
He stopped at the threshold and looked at me. He waited.
"Astrid." His voice was lower than I'd ever heard it.
"Easton."
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Did he touch you?"
"No."
He nodded once. His hand came up halfway to my face and stopped.
I tried to say something and discovered I didn't have anything to say. The shaking started at my knees and went up, the same shaking my body had done on the bank of the lake after the boy.
My knees went.
He caught me under the arms before I was the rest of the way down.
"Hey. I got you," he said, his voice softer now.
He got me back upright, then he got me down again, slower, the way you get a person down who can't get herself there.
We ended up on the floor of my front hall with my back against one side of the doorframe and his against the other, my legs across his lap.
The front door was still open. The cold from the November porch was coming in around us.
He pulled me closer against his coat. Smoke and him underneath the smoke.
I put my face against the front of his coat.
I didn't cry. I just put my face against the coat while he kept one hand on the back of my neck and one at the small of my back. Moose came down the hall, lay down across both of us, set his chin on Easton's thigh, and his tail across my knee.
After a while, Easton reached up and shut the front door.
"Don't get up yet," he said. "I got us."
He pulled the deadbolt across without looking at it.
I lifted my face off his coat.
"The sauce."
"What sauce?"
"On the stove. It'll burn."
He let a breath out against the top of my head that was almost a laugh.
"I'll get it."
"In a minute."
"In a minute."
He kissed me on the top of the head.
"You're alright. You're alright."
He said it twice on purpose.
"I'm alright."
He got up carefully, sliding out from under Moose and from under me with the patience of a man who had moved a sleeping old dog more than once. He set me back against the doorframe with the hall rug pulled across my lap. He stood up.
"Three minutes."
He went down the hall to the kitchen. I heard him turn the burner off.
I heard him move the pot, rinse the wooden spoon, stir the sauce twice with a clean one, and put a lid on it.
I sat in the hall with my back against the doorframe and listened to a man in my kitchen take over a pot of my mother's tomato sauce on a Saturday evening in November, and I let myself listen.
He came back with a glass of water and a kitchen towel.
"Drink."
"I'm okay."
"I know you're okay. Drink."
I drank.
He handed me the towel for my face. He held out a hand and pulled me up.
He walked me to the living room, sat me on the couch, pulled the blanket over my lap, and finished dinner.
The sauce. The water for the pasta. Setting the table.
Feeding Moose. He rinsed off in the shower and moved through rooms that weren't his with the forward motion of a man who'd decided they were going to be alright tonight, whether the woman on the couch was up to making them alright or not.
He brought me dinner on a tray.
I ate. I didn't think I was going to be able to.
The sauce was my mother's, and I'd made it a hundred times in Boston for a man who'd stopped tasting it by year three.
Tonight, I sat on a couch in Hartsdale with a tray on my lap and a firefighter on the cushion next to me, and the sauce tasted different in a bowl he'd carried out with both hands.
He didn't ask me to talk.
I talked anyway.
I told him what Brett said on the porch. About the text on the night of the water tower, which I'd already told him. About the lamp in March. About his mother, the dinners, and the voice she used on me. I told him I'd thought the silence meant it was over, and I'd been wrong.
He listened for the whole of it. His hand stayed flat on the table.
"Astrid."
"Yes."
"He's not coming back."
"You don't know that."
"He's not coming back to this porch. Not tonight, not next week. I told him at the curb." He set his fork down. "I told him I had his license plate, his address, and a friend of mine on the desk at Hartsdale Police. I told him he had a choice. He made the choice."
"Easton."
"Yeah."
"You can't fight him for me."
"I'm not fighting him for you. I'm not letting him on your porch. There's a difference."
I let that sit.
He was right. Eight months ago, I would have meant the first sentence and stopped there. The woman on the couch in Hartsdale in November heard the second sentence and let it stay where it landed.
I picked up my fork.
"Stay tonight."
"I'm staying."
"At my house. Not at yours."
He smiled softly. "I figured."
"I don't want to leave my own house."
"Astrid. I'm not going to make you leave your own house."
He picked up his fork.
We went to bed in my room at half past ten.
He knew where the towels were and which side of the bed I slept on—the side away from the door.
I'd slept on that side since I was twenty-six in a brownstone in Boston, because it was the side a woman picked when her husband let himself in late and she didn't want to be the first thing he found in the dark.
I'd never examined that habit until tonight.
He got in on the side toward the door without saying anything about it.
I put my hand on his chest.
He put his hand on mine.
Two hours ago, that hand had been on the back of a man's neck on my porch. After that, it had held a wooden spoon over a pot of my mother's tomato sauce. Now, it was under mine, warm and still, in a room where the reading lamp threw the same soft yellow it had thrown my whole childhood.
Brett said mine for six years. When he said it, the word carried a softness on the front that hid a closing-down on the back, and by year three, I'd learned to flinch when I heard it.
Easton said it on my porch two hours ago, and the word didn't close anything down. It put a man between me and the world for the length of a Saturday evening and asked nothing in return for the standing.
I didn't know, until tonight, that the word could mean that.
Easton breathed out against the top of my head. His hand on mine tightened a quarter of an inch.
I closed my eyes.
The door was deadbolted. The man on the side toward the door had said the word mine in a voice I'd heard for the first time tonight.
I wasn't going to be on the side of the bed away from the door for very much longer.