10. Jake
JAKE
Carol still calls the cottage Emily's kitchen, and I let her, because some ground you do not fight for.
She'd been Emily's friend first, long before she was mine, the two of them meeting over a shared fence and a mutual distrust of the previous owner's rose bushes, and when Emily died Carol simply transferred her loyalty to the kitchen itself, like the room needed defending even if the woman who'd loved it couldn't do it anymore.
She let herself in most weeks with a key I'd given her without really deciding to, dropped a casserole dish on the counter like an offering, and started opening cabinets to see what I'd let run empty.
I never asked her to keep doing it after the funeral.
She just kept showing up, the way certain people do when they've decided grief is a shared project rather than a private one, and somewhere along the way I stopped thinking of her as Emily's friend who tolerated me and started thinking of her as mine too, prickly edges and all.
"You're out of coffee," she announced, holding up the empty canister like evidence in a trial.
"I have coffee. I have a different brand of coffee."
"You have brown water with delusions. There's a difference." She set the canister down hard enough to make her point and started unloading a grocery bag I hadn't asked her to fill, one item at a time, like she had all the patience in the world for this and none for anything else.
"Where's my favorite tyrant?"
"Backyard. He's drawing something involving what I'm fairly sure is a dinosaur wedding."
"A dinosaur wedding."
"There's a bride dinosaur. She's wearing a hat."
Carol laughed, short and genuine, the kind of laugh that came out before she'd decided to let it, and crossed to the window over the sink to look out at Noah bent over his sketchbook at the picnic table, tongue caught between his teeth in concentration.
"Emily used to draw dinosaurs with him," she said, not looking away from the window. "Bad ones. Worse than his, even, and he'd correct her anatomy like a tiny professor while she pretended to take notes."
"I remember."
"I don't think you do, not really. You were always at work by the time they got to the good part." She said it without any bite in it, just a plain fact laid down between us, and I let it sit there because arguing with a true thing never got anyone anywhere.
"I used to sit right there at that table and watch her let him win every single argument about which dinosaur had which teeth. She said losing on purpose was the only kind of losing that ever felt good."
"That sounds like her."
"It was exactly like her." Carol's voice caught for half a second, just long enough for me to notice, and then smoothed back over the way it always did, like she'd trained herself to grieve in installments small enough not to knock her over.
"I still miss her something awful, some mornings. Doesn't mean I think the rest of you are supposed to stop living because I haven't finished."
She went quiet for a second longer than the joke required.
"He's humming," she said.
"He does that sometimes now."
"Jake." She turned around fully, arms crossed, and I recognized the particular stillness in her the way I recognized weather fronts, something building that hadn't decided yet how hard it planned to land.
"He has not hummed since before Emily died. Not once. I would know. I have spent two years listening very hard for it."
I hadn't noticed I'd stopped breathing quite right until she said it out loud, the fact of it landing somewhere lower than my chest.
"He's been better lately," I said, which felt inadequate the moment it left my mouth.
"Better is not the word I'd use. Better implies incremental. This is not incremental, Jake. This is a different child than the one who used to sit under that same tree not saying a word for an hour at a stretch."
"He still doesn't talk."
"He doesn't need to talk to tell me something's changed. I've got eyes." She poured herself a glass of water she hadn't asked permission for, another habit I'd stopped fighting years ago, and leaned against the counter studying me the way she studied a crossword she suspected had a typo in it.
"What's different?"
"Nothing's changed. We've been settling in. Summer helps."
"Summer's helped every year of his life and he's never once hummed through it. Try again."
I busied myself putting away the coffee she'd bought, mostly to have something to do with my hands that wasn't answering her, and she let the silence sit there just long enough to make it clear she wasn't going to fill it for me.
"There's a family next door," I said finally.
"Woman named Aria. She's got a daughter Noah's age. They've been around a lot."
"Aria." She said the name slow, testing the weight of it, the way she tested everything before deciding whether to trust it. "The photographer everybody's been talking about."
"That's the one."
"The one from the Founders Day fair. The one you disappeared with for twenty minutes right before the sky fell in."
Heat crawled up the back of my neck, which was an absurd reaction for a grown man in his own kitchen, and I busied myself with the coffee canister again instead of answering right away.
"You saw that."
"Half the fairground saw that, Jake. You weren't exactly subtle about it. I sent you off with those twenty minutes on purpose, and you spent the whole ride home afterward looking like a man who'd lost an argument with his own good sense."
She set her water down with a small, decisive click. "So. Aria."
"It's not what you think."
"I haven't told you what I think yet."
"You're building up to it. I can hear it happening."
Carol didn't deny it. She just watched me for a second, the way she watched a stubborn jar lid before deciding how much force the situation actually called for.
"Fine. Here's what I think." She crossed her arms again, settling into the posture I recognized as the one she used when she'd finished being patient.
"I think that boy out there hummed a tune over his dinosaur wedding for the first time in two years, and I don't think that happened because of better weather."
"He likes Lily. Kids attach fast."
"Kids attach fast because grown-ups let them.
You could've kept him away from that family the second you noticed how attached he was getting, if you'd wanted to protect him from anything.
You didn't. Which tells me something about what you actually want, whether you've admitted it to yourself yet or not. "
I opened my mouth to argue and found I didn't actually have the argument ready, which had never happened to me in a conversation with Carol before, not in the two years I'd known her well enough to have them.
The screen door creaked before I could recover, and Noah appeared in it with his sketchbook held up in both hands, offering it to me the way he did when something in it mattered enough to interrupt whatever grown-up conversation was happening.
It was the dinosaurs again, three of them now instead of two, a small one added off to the side wearing what might have been a tiny paper crown.
"That's a nice touch," I told him, tapping the crown. "Very formal."
He nodded, satisfied, and disappeared back out to the yard without waiting for more of a review than that, screen door banging shut behind him.
Carol watched the whole exchange with an expression I couldn't quite place, something between amusement and an old, familiar ache.
"He used to do that with her too," she said quietly.
"Bring the book in. Wait for the verdict. Leave before you could say too much and ruin it."
She shook her head once, like she was physically setting the memory back down where it belonged. "Anyway. Where were we?"
"You were building a case."
"I was stating facts. There's a difference, same as the coffee."
"It's complicated," I said, which was true and also a coward's answer, and some part of me knew it even as I said it.
"Complicated how?"
"He's already lost one mother, Carol. I'm not going to hand him another one to get attached to unless I know for certain it's going to stick. That's not caution. That's just basic math."
"That's fear wearing caution's clothes, and you know the difference better than most men I've met." She let that sit a second before pressing on, gentler now but no less direct.
"You think if you go slow enough, careful enough, nothing can ever hurt that boy again. I understand it. I do. But you can't measure your way out of loving somebody, Jake. Believe me, I've tried."
"You've tried?"
"I tried twice. Married once, buried him, swore off the whole business for a decade after. Turns out being careful just means you're lonely on a schedule instead of by accident."
She waved a hand like she was swatting the memory away before it could land too hard.
"Point is, I know the math you're doing. I did the same math for ten years. It never once came out in my favor."
"Everything's complicated when you want it to be an excuse." Her voice softened, just slightly, the prickliness underneath it shifting into something closer to the grief that lived under most of what Carol said if you listened long enough.
"I loved Emily. You know that. I'm not going to sit in this kitchen and pretend I don't still miss her every time I open that cabinet and see the mugs she picked out."
"I know."
"But Emily's not in that backyard anymore, and neither is the man who used to be too scared to leave the house most days. You built something back from nothing, Jake. I watched you do it. I am not about to watch you throw it away because you're afraid of what it means to want something again."
"I'm not afraid."
"You're the most afraid man I know, and I like you anyway, which should tell you exactly how much that's saying." She reached over and knocked her knuckles once against my arm, gentle for a woman who did most things like she meant to leave a mark.
"That boy needs a mother who sees him the way Aria already does. And you need somebody who makes you forget you're supposed to be sad all the time. Those aren't the same thing, but they're not so different either."
I didn't have anything to say to that, so I looked out the window instead, watching Noah add what appeared to be a second, smaller dinosaur to his wedding scene, tongue still caught between his teeth, humming something tuneless and completely his own.
"He's going to ask about her," Carol said, following my gaze. "Sooner than you think. Kids do the math faster than we give them credit for."
"I know that too."
"So figure out your answer before he asks the question. That's all I'm saying."
I didn't have one yet, not one I trusted enough to say out loud, but I could feel the shape of it sitting in my chest anyway, stubborn and unwilling to be talked back down no matter how many times I tried.
Carol watched me not answer with the patient, unimpressed look of a woman who had raised three kids of her own and buried a husband.
She had absolutely no more time left in her life for men who needed things spelled out twice.
She gathered her purse from the counter, pressed a hand briefly to my shoulder on her way past, the kind of touch that carried more weight than the two seconds it lasted, and paused at the door with her back still to me.
"You like her," Carol said, not a question. "Do not waste this one being a coward, Jake."
I have been called worse. It has never landed harder.