23. Josie
Josie
Nobody warns you that a lie you built to last a month can turn around and start keeping you.
I'm on Cynthia Morrow's front porch on a warm June Sunday, holding a bowl of potato salad I made from scratch because I could not walk into this woman's house with a store one.
Through the screen door I can hear three alphas failing to set a table under her supervision.
And I am happy. Stupidly, wholly happy, in a way I've started to think of as a symptom, like a low fever I keep forgetting to be alarmed about.
“Not that drawer, sweetheart, the good forks are in the sideboard.” That's Cynthia, running the room the way she runs her salon, everybody busy, nobody sure when they agreed to it.
“Hudson, honey, you're a guest, sit down.
Logan, you can carry the roast, you've got the arms for it.
Finn, stop hovering, you're making the salad nervous.”
“The salad's fine, Mom.”
“The salad can feel your energy.”
I laugh into the potato salad, alone, where nobody can see me do it.
Last time I stood on this doorstep it was just me and Finn, and I was so scared of Cynthia catching the seam that I nearly threw up in her hydrangeas.
That was two weeks and a whole lifetime ago.
This time there are four of us, and the seam is somewhere I never thought to guard it, and I brought a better potato salad.
I go in.
Logan's the first thing I see, because Logan is holding something out to Cynthia with both hands, ears already red. A cutting board. Walnut, sanded to the point of indecency, the grain doing something gold in the kitchen light.
“I made you this,” he says. “For the roast. So you're not carving on the good counter.”
Cynthia goes still. Then she takes it like it's made of weather, turns it over, runs a thumb along the edge, and looks up at this enormous shy alpha in her kitchen with her whole face open.
“You made this.”
“It's just offcuts.”
“Wait until Marie hears,” Cynthia says, to nobody, to the room, to the universe, because Marie Hartley isn't here and that has never once stopped Cynthia from addressing her.
“He made me a board.” And she sets it in pride of place by the stove and does not use it once all night, because it's already an heirloom, and I have to look at the ceiling for a second and think about baseball.
This is what a real pack dinner looks like, in case you've never wrecked your own life badly enough to find out.
Logan carries the roast to the table with the grave focus of a man defusing it, and Cynthia beams at his forearms like she commissioned them personally. “Careful, honey, it's heavy—”
“Got it.”
“There's a trivet—”
“Got it, Mrs. Morrow.”
“Cynthia. You call me Cynthia, you're carrying my roast.” She's already moving on, snapping a napkin into her lap. “Hudson, you were saying. The bear.”
“The alleged bear.” Hudson leans in, because Hudson has never once in his life left a story unfinished. “Man comes into the shop last week, wants to return a two-hundred-dollar tent. Used. Filthy. Claw marks down one whole side. And he goes, dead serious, 'this tent attracted a bear.'“
“It did not attract a bear,” Finn says.
“That's what I said. I said, sir, the tent is not a picnic basket. Bears do not read the tag and go, ooh, ripstop nylon.”
“Did you take it back,” Gemma says, not looking up.
“I gave him store credit, because he had his kid with him and the kid was crying, and I am, at my core, a soft touch.” Hudson points the roll at Finn. “Unlike some.”
“I'd have kept the tent,” Finn agrees.
“You'd have kept the tent and made the kid write an incident report.”
“They pitched it in bear country with food in the vestibule. That's not the tent's fault. That's a teachable moment.”
“The boy's eight, Finn.”
“Eight's old enough to hang a bear bag. His dad should've shown him.”
Cynthia's laughing her big salon laugh, wiping her eyes with a napkin.
“For what it's worth,” Logan says, thoughtful, to his plate, “the tent did what tents do. Structurally it performed fine.”
The table goes quiet for exactly one beat.
“Oh, this is a thing he does,” Hudson says, lighting up, swinging around in his seat like a man who's just been handed a gift.
“You should've seen him at Earl Cobb's funeral.
Whole town's paying respects, and Logan corners the widow to tell her Earl's porch was going to need new joists inside five years. At the reception.”
“She brought it up,” Logan says, to his plate. “Marlene asked about the porch.”
“Marlene was making conversation, buddy. That's what people do at funerals. Nobody at a funeral wants the joists.”
“...The porch really did need the joists.”
Gemma laughs, but she leans in when she does it, warm, on Logan's side of it. “No, I like it. A man who tells the truth about porches at a funeral. That's a keeper quality.”
Logan looks up, startled and pleased, and she gives him a small nod, welcome-to-it. Then she swings the whole thing around on the actual target. “Finn does the opposite, by the way. Finn once went to a wedding and didn't speak for four hours. Mom thought he'd had a stroke.”
“I spoke,” Finn says.
“You said 'good cake' to the groom and left.”
“It was good cake.”
The whole table's going under now, Cynthia dabbing at her mascara and declaring Logan the most honest thing to ever sit in that chair, and beside me the maple-and-cedar of him is warm and close, and without a word, without even looking, he moves the olives off my plate to the edge of his.
Finn's arm is along the back of my chair.
Here's the part that should scare me and doesn't. There's exactly one person at this table we're supposed to be performing for, and she's at the head of it in her good earrings, and Finn's arm isn't doing a single thing for her benefit.
It's just where his arm lives now.
Woodsmoke and clove settle over me like a hand on the back of my neck, three scents I could pick blind in a crowd now tangled up in Cynthia's kitchen, and I lean into all of it before I remember I've got a reason not to.
It lands harder than it should. A month ago Finn's arm on the back of a chair would've been a nice warmth, easy to ignore. Today it goes through me a half-degree too hot, somewhere low, and I take a slow sip of water and decide, firmly, to deal with that later.
“So,” Gemma says, spearing a potato, watching all of this with the flat unbothered attention of a woman who spends her days reading animals that can't lie to her and eleven goats that wouldn't know how. “All three.”
“Language,” Cynthia says, on reflex, to a sentence that had none.
“I didn't say anything, Mom. I'm admiring the pack.
It's a nice pack.” Gemma's mouth does the Morrow thing, the quarter-inch twitch that runs in the family like the eyes.
“Very coordinated. They pass her things before she asks. Watch.” She nods at my plate.
“No olives. Full water. And she hasn't touched either one to make it happen.”
“Gemma.”
“I'm complimenting you, Finn. It's rare. Enjoy it.”
Logan goes faintly pink over his roll. Hudson looks delighted. Finn looks like an alpha who'd very much like the roof to come down.
“They're well-trained,” I say, because the joke is the only load-bearing wall I've got.
“Mm,” Gemma says, and lets me have it, and doesn't believe it for a second.
Under the table, Finn's knee is against mine. Not doing anything. Just there.
And I press back into it half a millimeter. The smallest tell there is, an omega leaning into the one thing that's felt safe in a month.
I feel him go still beside me the way he does, the whole big quiet weight of him registering it. And Cynthia rolls straight on to the Huckleberry Festival, like the floor isn't quietly on fire.
“The potato salad's really good,” Logan says, quiet, to the table, in the first gap Cynthia leaves. He's on his second helping. He looks at me when he says it, ears going faintly pink. “Really good.”
“Isn't it just,” Cynthia says, and pats my hand, then leans in like she's letting me in on something.
“But you know what, next time you come, I'll teach you mine.
My mother's recipe, her mother's before that, the one I made for Finn's father the first Sunday he ever sat at this table. It goes to family.” She says it simply, like she's already decided, like it's already settled.
“It's about time somebody young had it.”
And that's the one that gets me. Not the family by itself, though that's bad enough on its own.
It's the handing-down of it. A recipe older than she is, that came the whole way to this table through women who meant it. Held out to me like I'm the next link in a chain, the omega who finally gets to sit in the empty chair.
A chain I've got a demolition date stapled to.
“I'd love that,” I hear myself say, and I mean it, and that's the worst part, I mean every word.
“Mom,” Gemma says, quiet.
“What? I'm allowed. I waited fifteen years for that boy to want a pack, and now he's got one and a girl who makes potato salad from scratch, and I'm going to say the word family as many times as I please.” She reaches for the gravy. “Now. Gemma. Your turn.”
Gemma goes very still. “No.”
“Marie's nephew's back from Bozeman. Alpha. Dentist. Owns his practice.”
“I have a full waiting room and eleven goats, Mom. I don't have a gap in my life shaped like a dentist.”
“That's because you spoil them.” Cynthia turns to me, undeterred, radar swinging clean off Finn now that Finn's got his pack and the last unmatched Morrow at the table is the omega with the goats. “Josie, you tell her. She'd rather live with goats than let me set up one nice dinner.”
“The goats have never once tried to introduce me to a dentist,” Gemma says.
And there it is. The whole Morrow machine swinging its full weight onto Gemma now that her brother's off the market.
She takes it with the flat unbothered patience of a woman who's clearly been taking it her entire life. But for one second I catch something behind her eyes. Quick, gone. A thing she's not saying that has nothing to do with any dentist.