5. Lori
Lori
There is a moment, when you wake up in a bed that isn't yours, where your brain runs a quick risk assessment and decides whether to panic.
Mine takes the scenic route.
I sit up. The bed creaks under me, like it does not see much use.
I run the audit anyway, for in the audit, I trust.
Where I am: the guest room of a man I know only a few days and speak to in complete sentences maybe four times.
What I owe him: a tank of gas worth of mileage on a Ford F-150, a dozen diapers, a box of formula, and approximately one ruined first date.
How fast I can be gone: undetermined, pending a phone call from my sister I am currently refusing to think about.
Then I smell coffee. The kind a person makes when they buy beans at a real store and grind them at 6 p.m. I follow it down the hall.
From the kitchen, I can already hear Cadie. I am learning that Cadie is the kind of six-year-old you can hear from the next county.
"Daddy, you cracked it wrong."
"That's how you crack an egg, Pumpkin."
"That's how you crack an egg. Mia's mom says she wants to show you how"
I lean against the wall and stand there for a second, not because I am gathering courage but because I am deciding what face to put on. The day-after face. Let's both please pretend you did not pick me up off a porch last night with a baby and I hijack your guestroom face.
Not to mention that Mia's mom comment, which sits under my skin like a splinter.
There is, of course, no version of this morning where I look like a person in control. I am still in his sweater. Barefoot. Hair down because I do not put it on, and a hair tie at this point would announce a level of effort I cannot back up.
I find the resolve to go down the hall, into the kitchen.
Carson has his back to me at the stove. Jeans, no hat, white T-shirt, dark hair damp at the nape from a shower. Cadie is up on a chair at the counter in pajamas from two different sets, strawberry print on top, bumblebees on the bottom, hair doing whatever it wants.
"There she is!" Cadie says, like I am a national landmark.
Carson glances over his shoulder. He does not say good morning. What he says is, "Mug's at the end of the counter."
I look where he's pointing with his chin.
Red on the outside, white inside, with a drawing of a snowman smiling and dancing. The handle turned out, toward me. There is already coffee in it.
I take a sip, and the taste stops me cold.
Three sugars. With a generous splash of cream.
It is how I take it. It is exactly how I take it, the way I make it for myself on my break the night we meet, when he sits at the end of the counter and finds a pick-up line around it.
"How did you —"
"You make it that way at the diner, remember?" he says, breaking another egg into the pan one-handed. "Figure I save you the trouble."
That is the entire thing he says about it. No flourish, no eye contact, no I-have-been-thinking-about-you speech. Just a man cracking an egg one-handed in his own kitchen, telling me he remembers the precise way I take my coffee in his head since the night we meet.
I am going to need to sit down. The stool wobbles a bit as I put my weight on it.
"Daddy makes coffee weird," Cadie offers.
"Pumpkin —"
"He puts cinnamon in his."
"Cadie."
"You do."
"Eat your eggs."
"They're not on a plate yet."
"They will be, soon.”
I drink the coffee instead of explaining to a six-year-old that her father has just throws me off with some coffee in a mug.
Carson turns around to plate the eggs for the three of us. There is something in his face I cannot read yet, something quieter than the porch version and the truck version. Whatever it is, he packs it back up before I can name it.
Don't get cute, I tell myself. He just makes you coffee.
"Thank you," I say. For everything. That part, I do not say out loud.
"Yep."
Before I eat my breakfast, I go back to my room for my purse.
I push it onto the counter while he is at the sink, because I am a woman who solves problems, and a roof over my head is a problem with a number attached to it.
The checkbook is the cheap duplicate kind from a bank I keep when I am eighteen.
The pen at the bottom of my bag has a piece of gum stuck to it.
I peel the gum off on my thigh and tell myself this is a serious financial transaction.
Room and board, I write. I pick a number that would cover a month at the rental. I sign it, tear it off clean, and slide it under the napkin holder.
I drink more coffee. Delicious. Then I wait for him.
Carson dries his hands on a dish towel, comes back to the counter, sees the check before he sees me. Picks it up and reads it. Folds it once down the middle, neat as a guy folding a shirt at the laundromat.
And tears it cleanly on the fold.
He pours himself more coffee with the other hand.
I open my mouth. Close it. Stare at the two halves of my check on his kitchen counter.
"Carson."
"Yeah?"
"That was a check."
"Yep."
"I owe you for the night. The bed. The food. The bottle, formula, and diapers. For all of it."
"You don't."
There is a small, mean, hyper-rational part of me that wants to throw the mug at his head. There is a much larger and possibly meaner part of me that wants to crawl into the pocket of his jeans and live there for the rest of my life. Both are off the table at present, so I write another check.
This one is pettier. Smaller number, just insulting enough to make a point. I slide it across.
He picks it up. Same. Folds and tears. Sets the new pieces on top of the old. Four paper halves on his kitchen counter, like I am quilting him a wall out of my refusal to be a burden.
"Carson!"
"I'm not going to take it."
We have a stare-off until I finally concede and look away.
Cadie has stopped chewing in order to watch the grown-ups do something genuinely interesting for once in her young life.
"So. Are you gonna live with us now? Because if you are, I get to pick the next movie to watch, because Daddy picks movies with a lot of talking and they're booooooooooooring."
He looks at me for confirmation and I shrug, leaving him to interpret what that means.
"Miss Lori's staying for a while," he says. "The guest room's hers. No pressure on it. She stays as long as she wants to stay, not a minute longer if she doesn't. House rule."
"That's only one rule."
"That's the one that matters."
"Are there more?"
"No cartoons after 8 p.m."
"WHATTT???"
"My house. My rule."
"That's a bad rule, Daddy!"
"Eat your breakfast."
I check on the baby after breakfast. It was eventful, thanks to Cadie. I hear that the next few months are a cycle of eat, sleep, poop, repeat. Currently, the channel is on sleep.
I try Ella from the back porch while they are doing the dishes.
First call: voicemail. Hey, it's Ella, leave a message after the beep!
I hang up. I call again.
Voicemail again.
The third time, I dial slower, as if maybe she does not get to the phone yet. The fourth time, I dial like I am angry at it. By the seventh, I am saying out loud to nobody, Ella, pick up the goddamn phone! El, please, please pick up the phone.
I lose count of how many times I call. I finally accept that she is not picking up this morning.
I sit with the phone in my lap and let myself, for one very brief and unsanctioned moment, feel sorry for myself. Two minutes, tops. I have somewhere to be, which is, embarrassingly, back inside the kitchen of a man's house.
Behind me, the screen door bumps.
"Tina's pulling in," Carson says. "My mama. Just so you know, she likes to show up unannounced.”
"Your mother is here?"
"Yep."
"Carson. I am in your sweater. I have not brushed my hair. There is a baby in your guest room and I am about to cry on your back porch about a sister who will not pick up her phone. And you tell me your mother is here?"
"She isn't going to make anything of it."
"Carson, that is genuinely not how mothers work!"
A truck door slams in the drive on the far side of the house.
"Carson West, get out here and help your mother!"
That is the voice of a woman in no way surprised to be talking to a man not yet outside. He gives me one short look, a half apology of sorts, and leaves.
Tina West does not knock. I find out about this by being in the kitchen when she comes through the front door like it had expects her, behind a casserole dish balanced on one hip, a brown paper bag tucked under her other arm, and a foil-wrapped pie sitting on top of the casserole.
"Honey." She finds me through the kitchen doorway. "I'm Tina. I'm Carson's mama and I bring lunch. Don't fuss. Pot on the stove, I’ll reheat the casserole for twenty minutes. Oh, and I bring some baby clothes, too."
She sets everything down. Suddenly there's pie on the table, a bag on a chair, and a casserole ready to reheat. Then, she looks at me the way a woman looks at a horse she is deciding whether to buy.
"You're the one."
"Ma'am?"
"Don't ma'am me. Where's the baby?"
"Asleep. Down the hall."
"Show me, sweetheart."
I show her the way. She follows me in stocking feet because she leaves her boots at the door. She stops in the doorway of the guest room and lets out a little gasp, hands clasped at her chest like she is holding her own ribs together.
"Oh, look at you," she says, voice low. "Look at you, honey."
She is not speaking to me. She is talking to the baby in the basket on the guest-room floor.
"May I?" she asks me.
"She isn't mine."
"I know that. I'm asking. May I?"
"Yes, of course."
She bends. Picks Junie up with one hand under the head and one under the bottom, no fumble between them, like a woman who lifts a thousand babies and is on number one thousand and one.
Junie stays asleep. She does the small recognizing thing babies do when somebody who knows what they're doing picks them up — she settles.
"Carson!" Tina says over her shoulder without turning. "Grab the bag off the chair. Onesies in there. I dig them out of the cedar chest. Some of them are Cadie’s."
He nods and leaves for the kitchen.