Chapter Twenty #2
“Two hours, if I’m lucky.”
“Nice.” Jojo leaned his elbows on the table, watching me flip through the ledger. “You reconciling?”
“Trying to,” I said, and meant it.
He snorted, a dry little laugh. “They used to say a team was only as good as its books. Back when I interned in the university co-op. Not true, but it’s a nice thought.”
I marked a discrepancy—$65.17, unexplained, from the Billings farm store. “Didn’t know you worked co-op.”
Jojo shrugged, color rising on his cheeks. “It was a lot of cleaning bins and scrubbing floors. Not the fun side of produce. But I liked the ledgers. It was honest work.”
He grinned then, a real grin, like we were sharing a joke that nobody else in the house would ever bother to get.
Ethan gave up on the potatoes and started thumping a wooden spoon against the cabinet door. The sound was irregular but enthusiastic, like a garage band’s first practice.
Jojo looked over at him with the patient, world-weary smile of a parent already defeated by the day. “He’s learning to make music. I’m not sure the kitchen is ready for it.”
“I think he’s more percussion than melody,” I said, which surprised me by how much I meant it.
Jojo burst out laughing. “God, yes. He drums on everything. Arms, legs, the crib, me if I stand still too long.” He took another sip of coffee, grimaced again, but finished it anyway.
There was a stretch where neither of us said anything. Jojo watched Ethan. I watched Jojo watch Ethan. There was a rhythm to it: the way Jojo’s shoulders would rise every time Ethan went quiet, the way he’d relax again when the spoon started up. Like he’d never quite gotten used to the silence.
He looked at me sideways. “How’s the sleep going?”
I shrugged. “Better than last month. Emilio’s still obsessed with the late shift. Wakes up at four, screams until six, passes out for a nap at eight.”
Jojo nodded, as if I was reciting sacred knowledge. “Same here. If I ever meet a baby who sleeps through the night, I’ll assume it’s a government plant.”
That made me laugh—a sharp, sudden bark that bounced off the tile and startled even me. I clapped a hand to my mouth, as if it were a mistake.
Jojo looked at me, eyes soft and surprised, then smiled. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to break the peace.”
I shook my head. “You didn’t. I just—I haven’t heard a joke in a while.”
That was true. The only humor in the house lately had come from Hooper’s staccato one-liners, and most of those were about livestock or the weather or things that, at best, barely counted as jokes.
Jojo’s face went serious, the way it sometimes did. “You doing okay?”
I blinked at him. “Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”
He didn’t press. He just refilled his coffee, sat down, and set about methodically picking dried food out of the sleeve of Ethan’s shirt.
“I wish I could say it gets easier,” he said, “but it just gets different.”
“I’ll take different,” I said.
We were quiet again, but it wasn’t the hard silence I’d known for most of my life. It was just two people in a kitchen, neither one trying to outlast the other.
Ethan finally tired himself out and flopped onto the floor, giggling at something only he could see. Jojo ignored him in the way that all good parents do: not by actually ignoring, but by keeping one ear cocked at all times, just in case.
“I brought a thing,” Jojo said, reaching into his bag and coming out with a plastic-wrapped bundle. “Burke made it, but he’s too proud to hand it over himself.” He peeled the plastic, revealing a small loaf of sourdough, dense and golden, the kind of bread that’s more meal than side dish.
“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll probably devour it before dinner.”
“That’s the hope,” Jojo said. “He thinks he’s Martha Stewart, but I swear half the time he forgets the salt.”
We both laughed at that, me again surprised by the sound and how easily it came.
Jojo looked at the table, then at me, then at the table again. “You ever think about leaving?” he asked, very quietly.
The question was so blunt that it stopped me. I looked at my hands, at the wood grain, at the pile of receipts I’d half-sorted.
“Sometimes,” I said. “But not lately.”
Jojo nodded, not as if he expected an explanation, but as if the answer made all the sense in the world. “I can’t imagine it anymore,” he said. “I keep thinking if I left, I’d just come right back.”
I let that sit for a minute, then said, “Yeah. Same.”
Ethan crawled over and attached himself to Jojo’s ankle, making wet, satisfied noises. Jojo grinned, ruffled the baby’s hair, and started packing up his things.
“Alright,” he said, “I’ve got to go. I swear, Ethan needs a bath twenty times a day.”
I grinned. “He probably does.”
Jojo buttoned up his hoodie, lifted Ethan onto his hip, and turned at the door. “Hey,” he said, like he’d just remembered something important, “if you ever want to sleep in, just let us know. We’ll take Emilio for you for the night.”
“Thanks,” I said. “I mean it.”
He gave me a thumbs up, then was gone, the sound of his boots fading to nothing down the hall.
I sat there for a second, and let the kitchen re-settle into its new quiet.
The tightness across my shoulders—the one I’d carried since the morning of the last threat, since before the courthouse and the standoff and all of it—finally let go.
Just like that.
For a while, I did nothing at all.
In the afternoon, the house took on a quiet that was so complete it almost felt alive. Hooper was out in the barn—there was a rhythmic, metallic clank every so often, like someone was teaching a transmission how to sing the blues, but the noise barely made it past the kitchen walls.
Instead, it arrived in the living room as a faint vibration, just enough to set the window glass humming on its own wavelength.
Emilio and I were on the floor, the old wool blanket spread out over the hardwood in a vain attempt to keep the cold from leeching up into our bones.
Emilio was absorbed in the rings on his play gym, batting at them with the kind of intense, all-consuming purpose I hadn’t seen since my own finals week.
Every few seconds he’d make a fist, swing for the lowest ring, miss, then try again. I could see the logic in it—the repetition, the insistence—but also the gentleness in how he never seemed to get angry when he missed.
I watched him for a long time, knees folded, arms around my own shins, just breathing in the small, greenhouse-warm air of the living room.
The snow outside had stopped, or nearly; what drifted down now was so fine it might as well have been dust. Through the window, everything was blank and white and flat, the only sign of life a single magpie picking at the seed feeder under the porch.
From where I sat, I could see the entire downstairs: the kitchen table with the ledger open and a pencil still rolling in a slow circle, the half-empty casserole dish on the counter, the backpack I’d used as a diaper bag hanging from the back of a chair.
In the hallway, a row of hooks held three jackets—mine, Hooper’s, and a little down vest Rawley had bought for Emilio when it became clear the kid would outgrow all his clothes twice as fast as advertised.
Down the hall, the nursery door was ajar.
I could see the edge of the crib, the rag quilt Jojo had stitched in a fit of optimism, and, tucked onto the windowsill, a photograph in a cheap silver frame.
The picture was of me, holding Emilio in one arm and a bottle in the other, both of us asleep on the couch.
I had no memory of the moment, but it was exactly the kind of memory I wanted to keep.
The reckoning hit me just after two, a slow, tidal thing that started in the chest and radiated out through the rest of my body.
There was no warning, no soundtrack, no dramatic shift in the lighting.
Just a sudden, full-bodied awareness of the last year: the gas station bathroom in Billings, the way my hands had shaken so badly I’d cut my own chin while trying to shave; the motels, each one a new variation on the same theme of beige walls and the faint smell of mildew; four hours straight of checking my rearview, the road coiling behind me like a live wire.
The tree line in December, the porch light, the promise to myself that I’d leave as soon as I was sure Emilio was safe.
What I hadn’t realized, not until that moment, was that I’d done every one of those things alone.
Not because I wanted to, but because I’d been told, for so long and so often, that my judgment didn’t count.
That every decision required a second, third, or fourth opinion.
That safety was something handed down from above, not something you could build yourself.
I let myself sit in it for a while. I didn’t try to push the feeling away, or drown it with busy work, or mute it with a joke about the weather. I just watched Emilio, and let the year run through me like weather.
Jasper had told me once that the only way to get over a hard thing was to let it move through you, to treat it like an animal that wanted to be noticed, not locked away in the basement.
Eventually, Emilio got a grip on the lowest ring. He held on with both hands, his whole body going still and rigid with the effort. His face was pure concentration, eyes blue as sky and jaw set in a line I recognized from the mirror.
He looked at me, then at the ring, then back at me, as if to say: See? I got it.
I grinned and reached out, let him wrap his fingers around mine. He squeezed, hard, and then laughed—one of those baby giggles that starts deep in the gut and doesn’t know when to quit.
I laughed, too. The sound surprised me, but it felt good, like the first drink of water after a long run.
When Hooper came in from the barn, he tracked snow halfway down the hall, then stopped at the living room doorway, hands on his hips, breathing steam in short, sharp huffs.
He looked at us, at the mess of toys and the baby on my lap, and just shook his head. “Wrecking the joint already,” he said, his voice a gravelly mutter.
I shrugged. “We had a good run.”
He dropped onto the floor beside me, sitting with his back against the couch, legs stretched out in front of him. His jeans were stained with grease, his shirt untucked and missing a button, but he looked more comfortable than anyone I’d ever known.
Emilio immediately abandoned the rings and went straight for Hooper’s hand, grabbing at the thick wrist and the hair that ran down the back of it. Hooper let him, just watching, not saying anything, as the baby tried to stuff half his fist into his mouth.
We sat like that for a long while. Not talking, not watching the clock, not even worrying about what was next. Just being there, the three of us, on the living room floor, with the light going flat and grey through the window and the rest of the world receding to a dull, safe hum.
After a while, I said, “I’m glad I drove four hours north on an empty stomach.”
Hooper looked at me, sideways, and his mouth did that lopsided thing where it almost smiled but didn’t want anyone to notice. “Me too,” he said.
Emilio, as if to underline the point, made a sound halfway between a burp and a war cry and finally managed to get Hooper’s thumb all the way into his fist.
I watched them both, and then looked out the window, and then back at the two of them again.
For the first time in longer than I could remember, I didn’t feel the urge to check the clock, or the road, or the horizon.
I didn’t feel like I had to measure the moment by what I owed to it, or what I was supposed to fix next.
I just sat there, and let it be what it was.
A life.
Ours.