20. Rafe
RAFE
Nobody hands you a manual when you become the boyfriend.
There's no orientation packet explaining the actual scope of the job.
I find that out the hard way over about two weeks, one small unglamorous task at a time, until I look up one afternoon and realize these two kids have quietly come to depend on me, and I never agreed to any of it out loud.
It starts with math.
"I don't get fractions," Eli announces, dropping his backpack on the taproom floor with the particular despair of a third grader who's decided the entire subject is a personal enemy. "Mom's on the phone with the compressor guy. Can you help?"
"I can try."
"That's not very reassuring."
"It's honest, which is better." I pull a stool up to his table, and he slides the worksheet over like he's handing off evidence in a trial. Six problems, all fractions, all currently making him look personally betrayed by the concept of denominators. "Show me one you got wrong."
He points to the third one, and I walk him through it the way Gunny once walked me through inventory math when I couldn't tell a ratio from a hole in the ground, slow, concrete, nothing abstract until the concrete part sticks.
I use pizza slices, the same pizza cut different ways, still the same amount of pizza no matter how you slice it.
Eli's face does something complicated somewhere around problem four, confusion cracking into something closer to understanding.
"Wait." He stares at the worksheet like it personally insulted him a minute ago and now owes him an apology. "That's it? That's the whole thing?"
"That's the whole thing."
"Why didn't my teacher just say pizza?"
"No idea. I'd have listened a lot harder in school if more of it involved pizza."
He tears through the last two problems at a speed that suggests the pizza metaphor did more work than either of us expected, and somewhere in the middle of problem six he glances up at me with a look I recognize, calculating, weighing something before he says it out loud.
"You're better at this than my teacher."
"I doubt that."
"You explained it in one try. She's explained it like four times and I still didn't get it until now." He says it simply, no flattery in it, just an observation delivered with the blunt honesty only kids seem to manage. "Are you good at all math, or just fractions?"
"Depends on the math. I was decent at the kind that keeps a brewery running. I mostly relearned fractions explaining them to you just now."
"That's a good trick. Pretending you already knew it."
"It's not really a trick if it works."
By the time Jenna gets off the phone, he's finished the whole worksheet without help, checking his own answers twice with the same grim focus his mother brings to payroll, and the look she gives me over his head, something warm and slightly stunned, sits with me longer than it probably should.
"You're good at that," she says later, once the twins are absorbed in something on the other side of the taproom.
"I'm good at explaining things slowly to people who don't want to hear them. Spent a career doing exactly that."
"It's different when it works."
"It really is."
The fishing trip happens the following weekend, Eli's idea entirely, delivered with the gravity of a formal proposal over breakfast. I take him out to the bend in the creek past the property line, the same spot my grandfather used to take me, and for the first hour it goes about how I expect, tangled lines, a lure lost to a submerged branch, Eli narrating his own frustration in real time like a man doing color commentary on his own failure.
"This is impossible."
"It's not impossible. It's just slow."
"Same thing."
"It's really not, but I understand why it feels that way." I help him untangle the line for the third time, patient in a way I didn't know I had in me for anything that wasn't equipment maintenance. "Fishing rewards people who can sit still and be bored on purpose. Most people can't. It's a skill."
"Being bored is a skill?"
"Being bored without giving up is. Different thing entirely."
He goes quiet after that, more from stubbornness than actual patience, and somewhere around the second hour, long after I've stopped expecting anything to happen, his line goes taut and he nearly falls backward off the bank in surprise.
What follows isn't graceful. It involves a lot of shouting, some genuinely impressive cursing for an eight-year-old that I decide not to correct in the moment, and eventually a trout about the length of my forearm flopping on the bank while Eli stares at it like he personally invented fishing.
"I caught it. I actually caught it."
"You did."
"Can we keep it? Can Mom cook it? Can I tell Josie I caught it bigger than it actually is?"
"Yes, probably, and I won't stop you."
He talks about that fish for the entire drive home, the whole story growing by roughly six inches with each retelling, and I let it grow because some things are more true in the telling than they were in the actual moment, and this is one of them.
"Did you use to fish with your dad?" he asks, somewhere around the last stretch of gravel road, out of nowhere the way kids ask the questions that actually matter.
"My grandfather, mostly. Same spot, actually. Same bend in the creek."
"Was he good at it?"
"Better than me. He could read water like most people read a room." I glance over at him, windburned and grinning and holding a cooler with one very proud trout in it like it's a trophy. "He'd have liked you. You've got the patience for it, even if it took you an hour to find it."
"I found it eventually."
"You did. That's the part that counts."
Eli goes quiet after that, turning the compliment over like he's checking it for a catch, and doesn't find one, and settles back against the seat looking pleased for reasons that stopped being about the fish a while ago.
Josie's turn comes with considerably less glory attached.
School picture day looms, and Jenna's stuck at the brewery handling an emergency with a delivery truck that decided the driveway was optional, which leaves me alone in the loft bathroom with an eight-year-old, a hairbrush, and a set of instructions from a video Jenna sent me that I watch four separate times and still don't fully understand.
"You're doing it wrong," Josie informs me, watching my reflection in the mirror with the patient disappointment of a supervisor observing a new hire.
"I'm doing my best."
"Your best is wrong. The pieces are supposed to go under, not over."
"I genuinely don't understand how that changes anything structurally.
" I attempt the maneuver again, produce something that looks less like a braid and more like a small, sad bird's nest, and stand there staring at it in the mirror with the specific defeat of a man who has faced down actual combat and been bested by hair elastics. "This isn't working."
"Not even close."
We're still stuck there fifteen minutes later, three failed attempts deep, Josie increasingly convinced she's going to show up to picture day looking, in her words, "like a haystack," when Dot appears in the doorway like she's been summoned by the sheer volume of our combined distress.
"Oh, honey, no," Dot says, taking one look at my handiwork and physically wincing. "Give me the brush."
"You're a lifesaver."
"I'm a hairdresser. It's the same thing on a day like today.
" She has Josie rebraided, sleek and even, in under two minutes flat, hands moving with an efficiency I respect on a professional level even as it makes my own attempt look worse in retrospect.
"There. Now you look like a person instead of a cautionary tale. "
Josie inspects herself in the mirror, visibly relieved, already forgiving me the trauma of the last twenty minutes. "It's so much better."
"I know, sweetheart."
"Thank you, Rafe, for trying," Josie adds, with the diplomatic generosity of someone who's decided effort still counts for something, even catastrophic effort.
"I appreciate the mercy."
Dot pats my arm on her way out, entirely too delighted with the whole situation. "You get points for trying, honey. Not many, but some."
By the time Jenna gets back that evening, exhausted and smelling like diesel from wrestling with the delivery truck, both kids are fed, Josie's hair survived the school day intact according to a very detailed report, and I've settled into the particular tired satisfaction of a day spent doing things I never trained for and somehow didn't ruin completely.
"How was the truck?"
"Resolved. How was babysitting duty?"
"Educational. I learned I'm better at fractions than hair." I pull her in against my side on the couch, and she goes easily, tucking herself into the spot that's started to feel less like an accident and more like a permanent arrangement. "Dot had to rescue us. Josie's very forgiving about it."
"She's forgiving about most things. It's Eli who holds a grudge."
"Eli caught a fish the size of his own arm and told approximately everyone in a four-block radius. I don't think he's holding a grudge about anything right now."
She laughs, easy and warm, and for a minute the whole day settles into something simple and good, the kind of ordinary evening I never expected to want this badly.
I check my phone out of habit, more reflex than curiosity, scrolling past a supplier email I'll deal with tomorrow, and my thumb catches the calendar app before I mean it to.
The reminder's been sitting there since the start of the year, the same one I set every year without fail and never once needed the alert for, because some dates don't require reminding: the third of the month, one week out.
Something in my chest drops fast and total, all the warmth of the afternoon draining out at once, like somebody just pulled the plug.
"And I think Eli's going to want to frame that fish photo, honestly, which means we're going to need to find an actual frame, because right now it's just taped to the..."
I stop mid-sentence, phone still in my hand, staring at a date on a screen that doesn't look like much of anything to anyone else in the world.
"Rafe?"
I don't answer right away. I can't, not yet. This quiet isn't really about her at all. It belongs to a part of myself I keep locked down most days and only let out once a year, whether I want to or not.
"Rafe. Hey." Jenna's voice is careful now, the same careful I recognize from the loft the night of the storm, from every time she's decided a shut door is better left alone. "You okay?"
I look up, and I know my face isn't giving her much to work with, and for the first time since this whole thing started, I watch her clock it, really clock it, the shift in me she's never seen before and doesn't have a name for yet.
"Yeah," I say, and even I can hear how little that word is carrying. "Yeah, I'm fine."
She doesn't believe me. I can see that much clearly enough. But she doesn't push, not tonight, and I sit there with her hand still in mine and a date on a screen I can't stop looking at, counting down the only week of the year I never learned how to get through easily.
Seven days, and I've survived worse countdowns than this one, plenty of them.
I tell myself that the way I tell myself the same thing every year around this time, quiet and automatic, a line I keep in reserve for exactly this purpose.
It never quite lands the way I need it to. It doesn't land tonight either.