3. Josie
JOSIE
Levi cooked.
Not heated-up cooked, actually cooked—spaghetti with the jarred sauce doctored the way Dot showed him once, and garlic bread he made himself out of hamburger buns because we were out of real bread, and he burned the first tray.
And here’s the thing: he laughed about it.
Stood there waving a dish towel at the smoke detector, laughing, and made a second tray.
That’s not nothing. Levi doesn’t laugh at himself when he screws up, not usually. Usually he goes quiet and short, mad at his own hands, this thundercloud thing he does where you have to leave him alone with it for twenty minutes.
Tonight he just laughed and said, “Second tray’s the tray of champions, Jo,” and something in my chest went so warm and so soft I had to turn around and get the parmesan out of the fridge so he wouldn’t see my face.
This is it, I keep thinking, watching him across the little kitchen table.
This right here is the version of him I get to keep.
He’s been like this for weeks now—home early, easy, sweet in this steady way, like some gear in him finally seated right.
Whatever it is, I’ll take it. I’ll take a lifetime of it.
“So Tucker,” he says, pointing his fork at me like the story requires my full attendance, “genius that he is, decides he’s gonna pull the baffles out of his pipes. For the sound. You following?”
“Loud pipes save lives, Levi.”
“That’s—okay, first of all, don’t quote him, it encourages him.” He’s grinning around a mouthful of garlic bread. “So he does it on his lunch break, no plan, just a man and a dream and a sawzall. Fires it up inside the bay.”
“No.”
“Inside the bay. Cinderblock building, garage doors down ’cause it was raining.
” He starts laughing before he even gets there, that low rolling thing that starts in his chest, and I’m already laughing too, at him laughing.
“Jo, I swear on the club, Rusty was under the Road King and came out from under it like a gopher out of a flooded hole. Straight up. Cracked his head on the frame. And that stray shepherd that’s been hanging around the lot?
Dog took off so hard it left a dust shape of itself, cartoon-style. We didn’t see him till Thursday.”
“And Tucker?”
“Tucker’s standing there in the middle of it, deaf as a post, going”—he does the voice, big dumb delighted—“‘sounds MEAN, right?’”
And I lose it, both hands over my face, laughing the way you can only laugh in your own kitchen with your own person, and he watches me do it with this look on his face like he’d tell the story nine more times to keep it going.
That look. That’s the one. Three years and I’d still crawl across broken glass for that look.
And the words are right there. They’re at the back of my throat the whole meal, pushing.
He’s got sauce at the corner of his mouth and he’s mopping up the last of it with the champion tray of garlic bread, and I’ve got a spoon halfway to my mouth and I almost just—say it.
Right there. I’m pregnant. Two words, and the whole world goes new.
He’d freeze with the bread halfway to his mouth.
I’d get to watch it hit him in real time in the kitchen light?—
Saturday, I remind myself, hard. Three more days. String lights. The plan.
I put the spoon down. Drink some water. Not like this.
Not because the garlic bread smells good and he laughed at himself and I got soft.
Saturday. The plan is Saturday, and it’s a good plan, and I can hold a secret for three more days.
Probably. I held one about his birthday present for a week once and only cracked because he guessed.
After, we do the dishes the way we always do—me washing, him drying badly, putting things away wet, and I’ve given up retraining him, it’s a lost cause, he dries a plate like it owes him money.
“You’re doing it again,” I tell him.
“Doing what?”
“The plate’s dry, baby. It’s been dry. You’re just menacing it now.”
“This is technique.” He stacks it, visibly damp, on top of the others. “You wash, I dry. Division of labor. It’s what makes this country great.”
“You’re going to make some woman very miserable someday.”
“Already did. Three years ago. She’s stuck with me now.
” And he flicks the towel at my hip, easy, grinning, and I bump him with my shoulder—he doesn’t move an inch, bumping Levi is bumping a parked truck, it’s purely symbolic—and go back to the suds, and the window over the sink is that deep blue it gets right before full dark, the Absarokas gone to cutout shapes against it, and I’m humming, actually humming, when my phone buzzes on the counter.
Dot: heard Marley Quinn’s back in Paradise Valley for good this time. you believe that?? small world
I dry my hands on my jeans and read it twice, because I need a second to even place the name.
Marley Quinn. Levi’s high-school girlfriend, a hundred years ago, back before I ever set foot in this town.
I’ve heard the name maybe five times total in three years, always in that tone people use for harmless ancient history—like hearing your husband once had a paper route.
I type back: small towns gonna small town. she the one that left some guy at the altar??
Dot: THAT’S THE ONE. down in Denver. walked out in the DRESS is what Carol heard
me: carol hears a lot of things
Dot: carol is a gift and a curse. anyway she’s doing photos now, Nell got her for your party!! fancy
Huh. Small world getting smaller.
“Hey—“ I pick the phone back up and hold it out so he can see the thread, half-grinning, ready to give him grief about it, because that’s what you do, that’s the whole marriage-adjacent sport of it. “Guess your old flame’s back. Dot says she’s shooting our party.”
And something crosses his face.
Fast. So fast. If I weren’t reaching into the drain for the stopper at the exact same second, if my eyes weren’t half on the water going down, maybe I’d have caught it clean instead of just—the tail end of it. Like a fish flicking under the surface of a lake. There and gone.
“Huh,” is all he says. And takes the phone out of my hand, and looks at it maybe a half-second longer than a text that boring deserves, and hands it back, and turns back to the counter to menace another dry plate.
“That’s it? ’Huh’?”
“What do you want, a speech? I dated her when I had a skateboard, Jo.”
“I’m just saying, it’s gossip. Participate. Dot says she left a guy at the altar. In the dress.”
“Sounds like Carol.” His voice is easy. Normal. His shoulders are normal. Everything is exactly, precisely normal, and he reaches over and tugs the end of my hair. “You done, or you gonna wash that pot till it’s a colander?”
We finish up and he wanders off to the couch with the last of the garlic bread, and I wipe down the counter and put the flowers in water—the blue carnations from Tuesday finally gave up, so these are the new ones, yellow this time, the Gas-N-Go’s entire remaining inventory of romance—and I stand there a second arranging them in the mason jar I kept back from Dot’s forty, and I think about how full this kitchen is.
That’s the only way I know how to put it.
Three years ago it was his kitchen, bachelor-bare, one pan and a bottle opener, and now there’s my grandmother’s dish towels and his boot dryer and our calendar with both our handwriting on it, Dot’s pie plate that needs returning, a wedding invitation from one of Casey’s cousins stuck to the fridge under a magnet shaped like Montana.
A whole life, accumulated one Tuesday at a time. And starting Saturday it gets fuller.
“Jo!” From the couch. “Your show’s on. The one with the bakers you yell at.”
“I don’t yell at them.”
“You absolutely yell at them. It’s my favorite thing all week. C’mere.”
And I go, and I fold into my spot under his arm that’s been my spot since the first month, and he pulls the blanket over my feet without being asked because he knows my feet run cold by nine.
And I don’t think anything of it. That’s the truth, that’s the stupid, sweet, unforgivable truth of that Tuesday night: I don’t think one single thing of it.
I tuck the phone in my back pocket and pick up the next plate and go back to humming, happier than I’ve been in weeks, four days out from the best moment of our lives.