15. Eli
— ? —
Eli
The instructions are definitely upside down.
I flip the paper over, squint at it, flip it back. Nope. Still makes no sense. There’s a diagram that looks like a drunk person tried to draw a ladder, and step four appears to involve a part I’m pretty sure isn’t in the box.
The farmhouse porch is small and hot, late afternoon sun slanting through the overhang, and I’ve got hardware spread across every available surface like I’m defusing a bomb. Which, emotionally speaking, I might be.
“Okay,” I mutter to myself, because apparently I talk to myself now. “Slot A into Panel B. What the hell is Panel B.”
I’ve assembled our furniture before. There was an IKEA bookshelf that took six hours and three beers and still wobbles when you look at it wrong.
This crib is not IKEA. This crib is handcrafted maple with clean simple lines, convertible to a toddler bed, and the hardware alone looks expensive.
Az picked it out months ago. She sent me the link this week.
I should have been there when she chose it.
Then Brynn switched it for that white Victorian nightmare with the canopy, and Az had to deal with that betrayal on top of everything else, and I…
I press the heel of my hand against my eye socket until I see stars.
Not helpful. Focus on the crib.
The maple is smooth under my palms, good grain, the kind of wood that’ll look better with age. I line up the headboard with the side rail and realize I’m missing a bolt. Dig through the hardware bag. Find six identical bolts and no idea which size I need.
“Great,” I say. “Fantastic. Love this for me.”
The thing is, I’m actually good with my hands.
Always have been. Helped my dad rebuild the engine on his truck when I was sixteen, rewired half my apartment in Silver Lake because the landlord was useless, spent three summers framing houses for cash before the music thing took off.
But assembling furniture hits different.
The precision of it. The way everything has to go in exactly the right order or you end up with a death trap.
I grab the Allen wrench and start on what I think is step two.
Twenty minutes later, I’ve got one side attached and a decent sense of the rhythm. Slot, align, tighten. Slot, align, tighten. The repetition is almost meditative, my brain going quiet for the first time in days, and I’m starting to think maybe I’ve got this when the wrench slips.
The maple edge catches my palm, and I jerk back too slow, and there’s a bright hot line of pain across the meat below my thumb.
“Shit-”
I stop and check it. A shallow cut, but enough to sting. The bunkhouse has a sink and a first-aid kit, so I wash it, dress it, and tie a clean bandana over the dressing to keep the dust out.
Ten minutes away from the crib. I survive them without knocking on her door to ask whether this is enough.
Back on the porch, I check the instructions again. The mattress support fits when I stop trying to put it in backward. A small red spot shows through the bandana; the dressing beneath it stays in place.
I look toward the kitchen window.
She’s in there. I know she’s in there because I can see the kitchen light, can hear the faint sound of music through the windows, something acoustic and sad that she used to play when she was stressed.
I want to knock on the door and ask what’s wrong.
I want to make her tea and rub her feet and tell her bad jokes until she stops looking like she’s carrying the weight of the world.
But I did this. I made her carry it alone. So.
Slot, align, tighten.
The sun drops lower, painting everything gold and pink, and the crib starts looking like an actual crib.
Four sides. Mattress support. The convertible hardware tucked away in a labeled bag for later, when she needs to transform it into a toddler bed, when our daughter is walking and talking and has opinions about breakfast cereal.
I allow myself exactly thirty seconds to imagine it, June at two, June at four, June with Az’s eyes and my stubborn streak, before I shut that door hard.
Don’t earn it by imagining it. Earn it by showing up.
I’m attaching the last stabilizer bar when the screen door creaks open.
Az stands in the doorway, backlit by the kitchen, her hair loose around her shoulders. She’s wearing one of those soft dresses she likes, the kind that flows around her belly, and she’s frowning at my hand.
“What happened?”
I shrug, keeping my voice light. “It’s nothing.”
“You’re bleeding through that bandana.”
“Caught it on an edge. Washed and dressed it already.”
She doesn’t move closer, but she doesn’t go back inside either. Her eyes travel from my hand to the crib, and I watch her take it in, the clean lines, the warm wood, the simple design she chose before everything went wrong. The right one. Finally.
“You ordered this,” she says. Not a question.
“On my card. Delivered here, like you said.”
“You built it.”
“Instructions were upside down,” I admit. “Took me a minute.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. Almost. Not quite.
She walks closer, circling the crib slowly, and I stay very still, the way you do when a wild animal decides to investigate. Her hand trails along the top rail, testing the sturdiness, and I watch her face for any sign of disapproval.
“It’s straight,” she says.
“I checked. Three times.”
“The bolts are tight?”
“Checked those twice.”
She looks at it for a long moment. The light’s going pink and orange now, making her skin glow, and I have to look away because she’s so beautiful it actually hurts, a physical ache behind my sternum that never quite goes away.
“It’s the right one,” she says finally.
“I know.”
A pause. Then she nods, once, and turns back toward the house. The screen door closes behind her with a soft click, and I’m alone on the porch with a crib and a bandaged hand and the ghost of almost-approval lingering in the air.
I sit down on the porch step, hard.
The guitar is leaning against the railing where I left it this morning, Mateo’s guitar, borrowed with permission, because I didn’t think to bring mine when I drove up here half-crazy over a week ago.
It’s a decent acoustic, a little battered, good tone.
I’ve been playing it in the early mornings when I can’t sleep, picking out old songs with the volume down low, trying not to wake anyone.
But the sun’s setting, and Az is inside, and I’ve got nothing left to lose.
I pick up the guitar and settle it against my chest.
The first chord of Doorstep comes back easy, muscle memory from seven years of playing it in soundchecks and encores and late nights when I missed her on the road.
G to C to Em. Simple progression. I wrote it on her couch in that tiny Silver Lake apartment, soon after we met, when I was already so gone for her I couldn’t see straight.
There’s a girl on a doorstep, morning light in her hair…
My voice is rough, pitched low, barely louder than the guitar. I’m not performing. I’m just… playing. The way I used to, before the arenas and the production and the careful image management. Just me and a guitar and a song I wrote because I couldn’t not write it.
The song is about that first morning, me on her doorstep trying to rehearse a sentence that didn’t sound like too much. Seven years later, the song is still easier than asking for a place beside her.
I play through the whole thing, quiet at first, then louder as the chorus builds.
My voice cracks on the high notes, I haven’t been sleeping well, and it shows, but I keep going.
Pour everything into it. All the regret and the longing and the desperate hope that I haven’t broken this thing beyond repair.
The last chord hangs in the air.
I look at the front door.
And there, in the gap between the door and the threshold, I can see the shadow of two feet. Bare feet. Standing just on the other side, perfectly still.
She’s listening.
My throat closes up so hard I almost can’t breathe. She’s listening. She doesn’t open the door or come outside, just stands there in the dark with her hand probably on the doorknob, letting me play to her like I used to before everything got complicated.
I adjust my grip on the guitar, ignore the throb in my palm, and start again from the beginning.
Louder this time. Like I mean it.
Because I do.