25. Josie
JOSIE
The strange thing about a war is that most of it is just days.
That’s what nobody tells you. Monday he comes by after the shop to fix the porch step that’s been loose since April, and I don’t invite him in, and he doesn’t ask, and we stand in the yard for ten minutes talking about nothing—the step, the weather turning, Dot’s new girl burning the pie crusts—and it’s stiff and strange and then for about forty-five seconds it isn’t, it’s just us, and then we both notice and it goes stiff again.
Tuesday, nothing. Wednesday he texts me a photo of a dog that wandered into the shop, some lost-looking shepherd mix sitting in his empty bay like it’s applying for work, caption: told him the position’s filled. And I laugh alone at my kitchen counter before I remember I’m not doing that yet.
That’s the strangest part of this stretch, honestly—the bookkeeping of joy.
Some committee in me is still deciding what I’m allowed to enjoy and on what schedule, like laughing at his dumb dog caption three weeks after the party is a policy question.
Dot would say—Dot did say, refilling my coffee Tuesday, apropos of a face I didn’t know I was making—“Honey, you can be furious at a man and still laugh at his jokes. Being married’s mostly learning to do both before lunch.
” And I’m not married, and I said so, and she said, “Mm,” in that way she has, like a woman correcting a ledger without a pencil.
Thursday I let him come for dinner.
I don’t make a thing of it—leftovers, the little table, and he shows up on time with his hands visibly empty, no flowers, no fixing-it props, which I notice and he watches me notice.
We eat. And it doesn’t feel like a performance—that’s the thing I keep testing for, the customer-ticket feeling, the show—and I can’t find it.
He’s quiet, careful, a little clumsy with the new rules, keeps almost-touching things and stopping—my chair when he passes behind it, the small of my back at the sink, three years of a man’s hands knowing their routes home and every route roadblocked now. He puts them in his pockets.
Halfway through the meal he sets his fork down and says, “Can I ask how you’re doing? Is that—I don’t know what I’m allowed to ask.”
And it’s so absurd—this enormous man asking permission to ask a question at a table he ate at for three years—that I almost laugh, and then almost cry, both in the same breath, and what comes out instead is the true thing: “Tired. Mad. Sometimes I’m fine for three hours and then I’m not.
Tuesday I cried at a commercial about fabric softener and then I got mad about crying.
” I look at him across the leftovers. “You?”
“About the same. Minus the commercial.” A beat. “It was a dog food one for me.”
And there it is—a joke, a small dumb true one, the first one we’ve built together out of the wreckage instead of around it, and neither of us laughs big but the table warms one degree, and one degree is one degree.
He does the dishes badly. He leaves when the evening’s done without being told, and at the door he says, “This was—thanks. For letting me,” and doesn’t reach for me, and rides back to Tucker’s—I hear the Dyna fire in the drive and hold its idle a few seconds longer than it needs to, like even the bike’s reluctant, and then the engine note runs down the county road and fades out where the valley swallows everything.
Friday evening we sit on the porch with iced tea like elderly neighbors and talk—actually talk, not about the wreckage, just talk, the county fair coming, Wyatt’s cholesterol, whether the shepherd mix is officially the shop’s dog now (it is; Rusty named it Gasket)—and twice, twice in one hour, I get right up to the edge of telling him.
The first time it’s because he laughs. Real one, head back, at some dumb thing I said—first real laugh between us since the party—and the sound of it opens something in my chest so fast and so wide that the words are just there, queued up, warm in my mouth: Levi, I’m pregnant.
Say it. Watch his whole life change on his face right here on this porch.
My heart slams up into my throat with the readiness of it?—
—and I put it down. Not yet. One good laugh isn’t proof of anything except that I’m starving.
Because that’s the thing I have to keep both hands on: I’m not choosing between telling him and not telling him.
I’m choosing between clean data and cooked data.
Right now, tonight, every kindness he does is about me—has to be, there’s nothing else it can be about—and it’s the only clean read I’m ever going to get of him.
The second the poppy seed’s on the table, the experiment’s over forever.
Every good morning after that could be for the baby.
Every staying could be for the baby. I’d spend the next forty years squinting at the man I married trying to subtract the kid from the arithmetic, and I already spent three years squinting at whether he loved me enough.
I’m not signing up for forty more. So the secret stays one more week, and I hate it a little more every day, this thing I’m doing that’s starting to feel less like caution and more like the exact crime I convicted him of.
I don’t look at that last part too hard. There’s a lot of that going around this house.
The second time is at the end, when he’s standing on the step he fixed, keys in hand, making himself leave—doing the work of leaving, visibly, when everything in him is asking to stay, and doing it anyway because that’s the rule—and something about the exact set of his shoulders under the porch light, the obedience of it, this big stubborn creature keeping every fence I built like the fences are holy, nearly breaks me clean open.
Tell him. He’s paying. Anyone can see he’s paying—and I hold it.
Both times I hold it, and I stand at the door and watch the Dyna’s single taillight shrink down the county road, one red spark instead of two now, and I’m getting so tired of being the only one keeping this watch.
Cataloguing every good thing he does like a case file.
Half of me wanting so bad to believe it that I can’t trust the half doing the believing. Braced, still, always, for the shoe.
And the poppy seed’s no help, by the way.
Ten weeks along and already taking sides—because every time he’s near now, some hormonal committee floods the floor with chemistry that has zero interest in my case file.
He fixed the step; the committee purrs. He laughed; the committee wants him to stay the night.
I’m trying to run a rigorous evidentiary process in here and my own body keeps leaking amicus briefs for the defense.
Saturday night he stays late enough that we’re both yawning and neither one moving to end it.
We play gin rummy at the kitchen table, of all things, because the TV felt like too much couch and the porch had gotten cold, and Levi Ford plays cards the way he does everything—patient, quiet, then suddenly ruthless—and he catches me with a hand full of deadwood three games running and doesn’t gloat, just writes the score down in pencil like a gentleman undertaker, and I accuse him of counting cards and he says, “It’s gin rummy, Jo, there’s ten of them, everybody’s counting,” and it’s eleven o’clock and then it’s midnight and we’re playing cards in the kitchen where everything happened, both of us keeping the table between us like furniture’s a chaperone, and it’s the closest thing to easy we’ve manufactured since the string lights.
And getting ready for bed after he’s gone—brushing my teeth, worn-thin, wrung soft by the whole gentle ordinary week of it—I catch him in my head one more time: earlier tonight, across the living room, when he thought I was reading.
Just watching me. Not hungry, not guilty, not asking.
Some third look I don’t have a name for, older than all this, and something in my own chest lifted and answered it before I could stop it, quick as a struck match.
That’s what scares me, standing at the sink with my toothbrush going still.
Not him. Me. The answering.