6. Too Close For Comfort #2
I look at this eight year old sitting on my fence rail telling me about the therapeutic benefits of houseplants and think that Maisie Wilder is going to be an absolutely formidable human being in about fifteen years.
And the world is not remotely ready for her.
"One afternoon," I say. "That's all I'm giving you."
She drops off the fence rail and lands in the dirt and grabs my hand and starts pulling before I've finished the sentence. For someone who weighs about sixty pounds she is surprisingly effective at moving people who are not planning to be moved.
"Maisie. I need to finish the supply order."
"It'll be there later."
"That is not how supply orders work."
"Laney." She stops and looks up at me with those big serious eyes. "The house looks sad. We can fix that. Supply orders don't have feelings."
I stare at her for a moment.
"Fine," I say.
She grins and pulls me toward the ranch house and I tell myself I'm doing this for Maisie and not for any other reason whatsoever and I almost make it three steps before I know that's not entirely true.
The ranch house is exactly as sad as Maisie described.
It's a beautiful space. High ceilings, big windows, warm wood floors that catch the afternoon light and do something genuinely lovely on it.
The bones of the place are wonderful. But Maisie is right about the rest of it. Everything matches in that careful deliberate way that says money was spent, thought was applied and nobody actually lives here yet.
There are boxes half unpacked in the corners.
A bookshelf with books arranged by height rather than any system that suggests someone actually reads them.
A kitchen that looks like it came out of a showroom and hasn't been properly broken in yet.
Photographs still leaning against the wall instead of hanging on it.
Maisie moves through the space with the decisive energy of someone who has already done this in her head and is now just executing the plan.
"Bookshelf first," she says. "They go by what you like, not by how tall they are."
"Does your dad know you feel strongly about this?"
"Dad organizes everything by size. It's a whole thing.
" She starts pulling books off the shelf and making piles on the floor by some system I can't immediately identify.
"These are his favorites. These are ones he bought because he thought he should read them. These are ones he actually read twice."
I look at the piles. "How do you know which is which?"
"The ones he read twice have bent spines." She holds one up. "See?"
I crouch down beside her and look at the pile of twice-read books. They're a mix. Some ranch history, which makes me feel something I'm not ready to look at directly. Some fiction. A few that look like they've been carried in bags and read on planes and lived with rather than just owned.
We work through the bookshelf together and somewhere in the middle of it I stop thinking about it as a task and just do it, the way you do when something becomes unexpectedly absorbing.
Maisie talks while we work, telling me about their old house in San Francisco, about her school and her friends and the way her dad used to come home late and eat dinner alone in the kitchen because she was already asleep.
She says it without sadness. Just as a fact. But it lands somewhere quiet in my chest and stays there.
We've moved on to the photographs when I hear the front door.
Beckett stops in the doorway of the living room and looks at the rearranged bookshelf and the photographs laid out on the floor and Maisie sitting in the middle of it all with a picture frame in each hand and me crouched beside her holding a hammer I found in the kitchen drawer.
He looks at me.
I look at the hammer like I'm surprised to be holding it.
"Surprise," Maisie says cheerfully.
Beckett looks around the room slowly. Something moves across his face that he doesn't try to hide quickly enough.
It's there and gone in a second but I see it.
Something that looks a lot like a man who hasn't had anyone take care of his space in a very long time and doesn't quite know what to do with it.
He clears his throat. "You rearranged my books."
"By preference not height," Maisie says firmly. "It's better."
He looks at the shelf for a long moment. "Yeah," he says quietly. "It is."
He looks at me again and I realize I'm still holding the hammer and I have absolutely no idea what to do with my face right now.
"I was going to start dinner," he says. "You want to stay?"
Maisie answers before I can open my mouth.
"Yes," she says. "She does."
Beckett Wilder should not be allowed to cook.
Not because he's bad at it. That would be easier to deal with. He's actually competent in the kitchen in the same way he's competent at most things he decides to apply himself to. It is carried out with a confidence that is only occasionally warranted.
He moves around the kitchen like he knows where everything is, which he does because he organized it himself, and he cooks with the focused attention of a man who takes even casual things seriously.
It is deeply inconvenient.
Maisie lasts through the salad preparation before announcing she needs to check on Rowdy and disappearing out the back door with the transparent strategy of an eight year old who thinks she's being subtle.
She is not being subtle. She has not been subtle since approximately the moment she dragged me through the front door this afternoon.
Which leaves me sitting at the kitchen island watching Beckett cook and trying to look like a person who is completely comfortable with this situation.
I am not completely comfortable with this situation.
"You don't have to just sit there," he says without turning around. "You can help."
"I'm supervising."
"That's what people say when they don't want to admit they're not sure what to do."
"I know exactly what to do. I'm choosing not to do it."
He looks over his shoulder with that almost smile that has been getting harder to ignore. "Hand me the garlic."
I hand him the garlic.
This is how it starts. One thing leads to another and ten minutes later I'm at the stove beside him doing something with butter and herbs that he talks me through in a low unhurried voice.
The kitchen smells extraordinary and the evening light is coming through the window.
At exactly that angle that makes everything look warmer than it is.
We are standing very close together.
This is a practical necessity. The kitchen island is behind us and the stove is in front of us and there is simply not a lot of room at the stove. That is the only reason. I am aware of exactly how much space exists between his shoulder and mine and I am not thinking about it.
He reaches past me for the pepper and his arm brushes mine and neither of us moves away and neither of us mentions it and the kitchen suddenly feels approximately half the size it did a minute ago.
"Laney."
His voice is quieter than it needs to be for the distance between us.
I look up.
He's looking down at me with an expression I haven't seen from him before.
Unguarded in a way that his face usually isn't. The controlled composure he carries everywhere has slipped somewhere between the garlic and the butter and what's underneath it is something that does serious damage to every argument I've been making to myself for two weeks.
The kitchen is very quiet.
He's close enough that I can see the detail in his eyes and I'm not thinking about the food anymore and I don't think he is either.
He starts to say something. His face inches from mine.
I don't get to find out what it is.
Because Rowdy comes through the back door at full speed, skids on the kitchen floor, takes out a bar stool, bounces off the island, and lands directly between us with a rope toy in his mouth and mud on every surface of his body including several I wouldn't have thought possible.
We jump apart.
Maisie appears in the doorway half a second later with the expression of someone who has made a terrible miscalculation.
"He got out of my hands," she says.
Rowdy drops the rope toy at my feet and looks up at me with his tail going and his tongue out and the complete shameless satisfaction of an animal who has no idea what he just interrupted.
I look at Beckett.
He looks at me.
We both look at Rowdy.
"I'll get the mop," Beckett says.
I crouch down and scratch Rowdy behind the ears because I need something to do with my hands and something to focus on for the next thirty seconds of my life.
"Good boy," I tell him quietly.
I'm not sure if I mean it.