Sophia #2
Owen looked up from the head of the table, said “Soph,” and went back to the bread he was tearing. From Owen, that was a standing ovation.
Maisie came at me low and fast. She’d got tall since spring, which was a thing I refused to examine too closely, and she had Horsey clamped under one arm and a heel of bread in the other fist like she’d been told repeatedly to put it back and had decided to absorb the consequences.
“Aunty Soph, Horsey bit Daddy.”
“Did he?”
“On the nose.”
“Probably deserved it,” I said, and somewhere behind me Clay huffed without looking up.
Louisa pressed a glass of something cold and pink and ferocious into my hand and steered me to the chair between Liam and Stephy with the firmness of a tugboat.
I sat. Stephy’s shoulder came up against mine on one side, Liam’s elbow knocked mine on the other, and across the table Owen found my eyes and held them a beat.
I dipped my chin: fine. He went back to his plate.
The whole thing closed in around me, loud and certain, eighteen years deep.
Maisie climbed me like a piece of furniture and set Horsey on the table beside my plate.
“He’s hungry too.”
“He’s a horse,” I said. “He gets the salad.”
Hunter laughed into his beer. Owen reached for the platter. Louisa said grace. We ate.
Aunt Lou sent me home with a foil-wrapped brick of leftovers heavy enough to qualify as personal protection.
Stephy had hugged me at the back porch, both arms, the bump between us like a third party to the negotiation, and told me to come up Thursday — the only piece of housekeeping she’d done at me all night.
Liam had walked me to Doris and tapped the roof once before he closed my door.
“Drive safe,” he said, as if I might forget how the road worked between here and there.
I sat with my hands on the wheel and let the engine tick down, and I did not look across the road.
The cottage windows were dark behind the pickets. The path was the path. I would walk it, I would put the brick in the fridge, I would brush my teeth and lie down.
I got out, took the leftovers off the passenger seat, grabbed my bag from the backseat, walked my path, and let myself in.
Monday came up grey and reasonable. I made coffee in the COUNTY HOSPITAL — STAFF mug and I drank the first one standing at the sink — quick, hot, professional — and I was out the door in scrubs at twenty past six with my second cup in a travel mug, ten minutes ahead of when I needed to be in Doris.
I got two steps off the porch and stopped.
The taillight. The taillight that had been out since the second Tuesday in September — out long enough that I’d developed a small choreography around it, a habit of parking nose-out so the dead side faced the wall, an apology I’d been carrying around about getting to the auto place — was on.
A new bulb seated clean in a housing somebody had taken the trouble to clear of grit first.
I walked around the car carefully, half-expecting it to do something on its own.
The front passenger tire — spongy at the curb since the cold snap, topped up weekly at the gas station like an interest payment I’d never finish — was at pressure.
Full, even, sitting up under the wheel arch the way it should.
The cap was screwed back on. Whoever had done it had even wiped the rim.
There was a piece of paper folded under the windshield wiper.
I picked it up.
Block capitals, in pencil, pressed hard into the back of a receipt for a tube of grease. Careful, square letters, a little too careful — from a hand that plainly preferred metal to words.
FRONT PASSENGER CV IS GOING. brING IT OVER WHEN YOU CAN. — C.
I stood in my own driveway in scrubs in the grey of a Monday and looked at the C, and what happened in my throat had no name yet.
It wasn’t gratitude. Gratitude I could have handled — gratitude was something a grown woman did with her face on the way to her car.
This sat further north, up nearer the sternum, a small clean place coming open that hadn’t come open for anyone in a long time.
It wasn’t that no one cared; plenty did.
But the people who cared asked, and asked again, and let me wave them off and went home, because that was the kindness, and I was the one who’d taught them it was.
He hadn’t asked, and he hadn’t made it a thing.
No knock at eight with the bulb in his palm so I could thank him for it.
He’d come out in the dark sometime between when I’d pulled in last night and when I’d walked out this morning, fixed two things he had no business knowing were broken, and left it on a grease receipt that there was a third I’d have to bring to him — because he wasn’t going to bring it to me.
The wave-off I’d already had warmed up in my mouth had nothing to fix.
I folded the note along its crease and put it in the chest pocket of my scrubs, because there was nowhere else for it to go that didn’t feel wrong.
I looked across the road.
His garage door was up — the big one, rolled all the way, the bay open to the road with the light on inside it.
A half-built motorcycle frame stood on a low stand in the middle of the floor, and Caleb stood over it, head down, one hand flat on the top bar like a man taking a pulse, a rag in the other.
He didn’t lift his head. As far as I could tell from across the road in the grey, he had no idea I was out there at all.
But, a man who’d worked on a neighbor’s car in the dark would have a fairly precise sense of when she came out her own front door.
I owed him a thank-you. Not oh, you didn’t have to — he’d gone around that one already. A real one, in person, on his side of the road, with no foil over the top of it.
Not now. I had a shift at seven and I liked to be in the locker room by six-forty with time for the second coffee.
I told myself I would thank him tomorrow with the easy conviction of a person who says tomorrow on a regular basis about other things. I got into Doris and drove to work.
The next morning I had off, which meant I had no excuse, and I knew it.
I put it off until quarter past eight. I drank two coffees I didn’t need.
I put on jeans and told myself it didn’t matter what I put on, and then I caught myself doing it, which was its own small humiliation to file away.
I found a blank card in the drawer — left over from a stack I’d bought for a reason I could no longer remember — and wrote thank you inside it, and then sat looking at the two words as if they might reorganize themselves into something less insufficient.
They didn’t. Thank you was what he was getting.
Then I put my boots on at the bottom of my own porch steps, and I went down my path, through my gate, and across the road.