Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
To my credit, the smoke alarm goes off a lot later than I thought it would.
The chicken is unsalvageable, and Lovie is having a meltdown. I say this with all the love in the world, because I am also about to have a meltdown.
“Lovie, it’s okay,” I say, fumbling the broom tucked by the fridge. I jab it at the smoke detector, unsuccessful as my grandmother clutches at her ears and rocks back and forth.
I took it upon myself to handle dinner tonight, and I felt confident I could keep an eye on both the oven and my grandmother.
That was when the first thing went wrong: a package deliveryman knocked on the door. A few weeks ago, I’d ordered a NIGHT SHIFT WORKER LIVES HERE, PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK sign to hang by the doorbell. There was a surprising lack of UNEXPECTED VISITORS WILL SEND MY GRANDMOTHER INTO A TAILSPIN options. It’s worked well.
Until today.
I have half a mind to return the air fryer on principle.
Lovie was already agitated at having her puzzle time interrupted. I thought she might be hangry; she hadn’t eaten many carrots during her afternoon snack. I knew hanger. I could fix hanger.
I chopped vegetables for a thick leafy salad, prepped chicken to bake in the oven, diced potatoes to boil and mash. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as delicious as the soup Adam made on Halloween, but it would still be good, dammit.
Then Lovie had an accident. She was too embarrassed to tell me, but I noticed the wet spot when she got up from the couch. Her briefs were soaking, too much to have been from just one use.
So I stuck her in the shower, made a mental note to flick off the oven on my way to the laundry room for stain remover. But then I heard a crash, and all was forgotten. It wasn’t a bad fall—the shower chair caught her—but she was still upset, visibly shaking and naked and wet.
She slapped me across the face when I reached for her with a fresh towel. “Go away .”
It still stings now, in so many more ways than one. The most heartbreaking part was I could see where her emotions were coming from. Lovie had never been one to need assistance; she was usually the one to offer it.
And I wouldn’t want an audience for my worst days either.
All of Lovie’s days are her worst ones now, and I have a front-row seat.
“Make it stop,” Lovie whimpers, clutching her head. “It hurts.”
I know. I know it hurts. It hurts everywhere, in all the places that matter.
I keep missing the hush button, my vision cloudy with unshed tears. Growling, head ringing and heart breaking, I stretch up—I mean, what good is being five foot ten if you can’t even reach the tall things?
I’m still a few inches shy, so I climb onto a dining chair. But I forget the leg wobbles. My balance wavers, and my chest squeezes. Lovie is openly crying now, and I’m falling, and I am going to smash my face into the hot oven and die to the soundtrack of a smoke detector.
It’s been a good life.
Strong hands catch me on the hips, stopping my descent with a firm grip and the faint scent of sunshine.
Adam.
It’s the first time he’s touched me since our kiss. We’re in the same spot. He’s wearing the same scrubs. My breath hitches like it did then, feet find the floor in the same way, a foal on new legs. He sets me to rights.
When his eyes lock on mine, I’m steadied, even though the kitchen could very well be burning around me. His chin dips as his eyebrows rise. You okay? he says with no words.
I lift one heavy shoulder. I don’t know.
His hands tighten on my hips marginally. A squeeze, maybe. Or a muscle spasm. Adam’s eyes flash to Lovie, cradling her head and devolving with every second that ticks by on the ancient clock near the patio door.
He lets go of my hips. Reaches up and hits the silence button on the smoke detector.
My eardrums echo with sirens and Lovie’s cries. She’s sniffling now, which I’ll take over wailing any day of the week.
“What are you doing home?” I flash my teeth in a grimace, taking care to run my tongue along the sharpest ones. “ Honey .”
His grin, on the other hand, is sheepish. “I … I thought I would come home early and help with dinner.”
“Did you get fired?”
“ What? ” He chokes on air, and I use his distraction to step away. “No, I didn’t get fired.”
“I won’t pay you more to compensate,” I warn. The exposed skin of my waist grazes the oven, and I jump back toward him. I can’t tell which is worse.
“I didn’t get fired, Elle.” His jaw is hardening again. Good. “I just wanted to … be here . I thought I could help with dinner.”
“I don’t need your help.” My sharpness now comes from many exposed wounds. The two biggest are how he kissed me with an ulterior motive, and how he could reach the smoke detector when I couldn’t. I don’t want to need his help.
He’s quiet for a few seconds, but with the way my head pounds, it could be hours instead. Days. “No, you don’t,” he admits. Almost like he’s heard what I didn’t say and is answering that too. “But I still want to give it.”
Lovie whimpers again, and I see it, then, in the tightening of Adam’s eyes. Her hurt causes his own. Phantom pain.
We stare at each other long enough that someone’s stomach growls, and since I can’t tell if it’s mine, it’s a good indication I’m losing the fight.
Scrubbing a hand over my face, I sigh, defeated. “Fine. Whatever. But see if you can fix …” I grab a knitted potholder and throw open the oven, smoke billowing out. I drop the pan of burnt chicken on the stove. “This.”
He blinks down at it. “Yeah, no.” He pulls his phone from his back pocket.
I peek at his screen. “Are you calling the health department?”
“I,” he says, biting his lip to stop the ever-present smirk there, “am calling the Italian restaurant down the street to see if they deliver.”
Adam gets Lovie cleaned up properly after my rushed job from earlier, and I do my best to air the smoke from the house, throwing open the windows (no rain in the forecast, thank God). The chicken goes in the garbage, and the vegetables and salad ingredients go back in the fridge to try again tomorrow.
With Adam’s help, we’ve almost salvaged the night.
Until, in the commercial break between Wheel and Jeopardy! my grandmother looks me square in the face and says, “Lovie, will you tell me how you and Bobby met?”
When I was little, my grandparents’ love was my favorite bedtime story. It would calm me after nightmares, ease me to sleep after too much sugar. Today must have been harder on her than I realized if she needs that same comfort now.
On my other side, Adam’s body presses into mine, leaning into the words I haven’t yet spoken. His arm is around my shoulder, and though it’s hard to tell through the fabric of my Cubs sweatshirt, it feels like he squeezes me—an encouragement. It sends shock waves into my chest, which is why my arms are tucked tight across it. Another pulse of awareness, a reminder that he’s here with me.
As if I could forget.
“I met Bobby when I was eighteen,” I say, slipping into Lovie’s perspective. “Fresh out of high school. He’d been taking a day trip to the beach with some of his military friends. I was working at the ice cream shack. He must have bought ten cones that day. Kept passing them off to his buddies. One of them got sick from eating all that dairy in the sun.”
Adam chuckles.
Lovie’s smile is soft, her eyes far away. I hope for her sake she can picture it, even if she doesn’t have access to these parts of her memories anymore. Tentatively, I take my hand in hers, hold my breath to see if she’ll snatch it away. Or lash out again, maybe get my other cheek to make things symmetrical.
“Bobby stays the whole weekend,” I continue. “He doesn’t have money for a motel in the area, so he drives an hour each way just to see me. Helps me put out chairs and umbrellas in the morning, walks me to the bus stop after my shift is over.” I laugh. “He forgot to wear sunscreen. Got sun poisoning.”
The Jeopardy! theme song plays, but she stays locked into my words. I’ve always told my podcast guests that if I’m the only person who ever hears their story, they still deserve to tell it. I didn’t realize exactly how much power that held until now.
I raise my voice to be heard over the music, and it belies the tremor there.
“He makes that hour drive once a weekend for the next four months, until I tell him to save his money for a ring instead of spending it all on gas. ‘What makes you think I don’t already have one of those?’ he said. The way we acted, it was … I always told people we’d met already, in a previous life. He was that familiar to me.”
Adam clears his throat. “He goes overseas. The picture’s on the dresser.” His thumb continues its ministrations on my shoulder, traveling toward my neck and sliding along the stretched-tight tendon.
I relax into him, tucking my curves against his planes and angles. “He does go overseas. We get married before he leaves, a full white-gown affair our mothers rush to accomplish in a month. It’s the best day of our lives.”
A tear slides down my cheek, and I slip my hand out from Lovie’s to wipe it away.
Strong fingers slide up the base of my skull and into my hair, kneading away the tension. “But he comes back.”
“He comes back. We … celebrate . Nine months later, we have our first and only child. A boy. We name him Robert, after his dad. He’s the light of our life. We want more kids, but it never happens. It’s okay, though, because we’re happy. We have love in abundance, a little house on a quiet street in a sleepy town. Room for Robert to grow. Bobby lets me tile the bathroom pink. It will never change.
“Robert grows up, goes to state school for college. Meets a girl of his own there. Her name is Carolyn.” I pull a foot up underneath me, let my knee rest atop Adam’s thigh.
“Your mother.” Adam isn’t asking a question, but I nod anyway, his fingers still cradling the base of my skull. Lovie’s eyes are trained on the TV, but she hasn’t moved a muscle. Maybe more telling, she hasn’t blurted any answers.
“Keep going,” Adam murmurs. When I glance at him, the blue in his eyes is dancing with emotion. “What happens next?”
The tears are coming too fast to wipe away, and my wry smile makes some of them dip into my mouth. “Robert and Carolyn take things slower, which is fine. Times are changing. They get married after graduation. A few years after that, along comes baby. They name her after her mother, but they call her Elle.”
His mouth twists into a diagonal, one corner down, the other up. “I bet she was an absolute menace.”
A racking laugh flies from my mouth, and I wet my lips. “A pure terror,” I whisper, “and the light of my life.”
He hears what I don’t say. “She raised you.” He’s asking me as Elle.
I nod.
His teeth sink into his lip, toying with saying something he knows he shouldn’t. “Where are your parents now?”
If this goes any further, it will tear me open. I’ll be left raw and bleeding all over this ugly upholstered couch.
This time, I shake my head.
He opens his mouth, but the lines of his face shift into marble, his eyes blue steel. He catches my chin with two fingers and a thumb, the way he did on Halloween, and turns me tenderly so he can see the other side of my face. “What happened here?”
I jerk away from his touch, my pulse humming in that spot. “I think I just got a little overzealous in child’s pose today. No big deal.”
“You don’t do yoga.”
“You don’t know what I do when you’re not here.”
“Elle.” His tone is firmer now, like his jaw. “Look at me, please.”
My reserves are depleted after such a long stroll down memory lane, and I just—I don’t have any fight left. I turn back to him.
His thumb grazes the sensitive skin of my jaw where Lovie smacked me. I want it to hurt. I want a reason to be mad at him. I can’t find one. Adam is gentle as he probes the welt in the shape of my grandmother’s fingers.
“What happened?” he asks me again, still holding my chin. His eyes are like his touch—soft enough that it shouldn’t hurt.
It hurts all the more for how gentle it is.
The concern in his gaze is a spark to my already frayed nerves. My electric fence is short-circuiting today, and if I give him more chances, he’ll disarm it all together. And then what defense would I have against his eyes, his hands, his attention?
“I told you.” It’s hardly above a whisper, because I have nothing left to give. “It’s carpet burn.”
With one final graze of his thumb along my jawbone, he drops his hand. But he knows. I know he does, because he tugs me into his side, a hug. It is the exact thing I need. The perfect press of softness against all my jagged edges.
Because when my ear slots itself near the hollow of his throat, I hear his thick swallow as he works to hide the labor of his breathing. Because for a split second, his lips, tight and closed, rest on my hair.
Because for the rest of the evening, Adam doesn’t let Lovie come anywhere near me.