5. Lori #2
"And the bottle warmer's in the cabinet above the stove.” She’s talking to me now. “Lori, right? He tells me that’s your name, sweetheart. I hope it's okay that we skip introductions. Are you eating?"
I open my mouth and close it.
"You come by my house any time you want. Have chicken and dumplings every Wednesday. Sunday dinner there is a standing thing. Six o'clock sharp. You don't bring anything but yourself, you hear me?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Tina."
"Tina."
"Good. That's settled then."
Carson is leaning against the doorframe behind her with his arms crossed. When I look at him past his mother’s hair, he lifts one shoulder. The smallest helpless shrug a grown man has ever produced.
That's how she is, the shrug says.
Tina holds Junie. She walks her up and down the hall, humming something without words.
She folds onesies on the dresser and tells me which drawer has been the sock drawer in this house since Carson is four.
She tells me Wednesday is six o'clock sharp because her friend comes by for cards at 7:30 p.m. and that woman will not eat.
She tells me she runs a feed store and if I need a single thing for the baby I am to come find her there and she will take care of it.
Carson asks Tina if she can keep an eye on Junie and Cadie while he takes me to my rental to pick up the rest of my things.
“Go,” Tina says without hesitation. “I have this.”
Carson drives me to my rental in silence.
When we get there, I only pack the necessities — clothes, undergarments, shoes, toiletries, important documents, two framed pictures.
I don’t have that many things to begin with.
The furniture comes with the rental. My whole belongings fit in one duffel bag and one big cardboard box.
When we arrive back at Carson’s, Junie is asleep in her bassinet and Cadie is drawing on a piece of paper with crayons. Carson helps me with the box and drops it in a corner of the guest room. I put the duffel bag next to it.
Tina leaves not long after. When she goes, she kisses Cadie's hair, hugs Carson with two pats on the back like he is twelve, and stops in front of me at the door. She looks at me a second longer than is comfortable. She nods.
"Sunday."
"Sunday." I repeat, confirming my fate.
The truck reverses out of the drive. The kitchen smells like a casserole I don't make and a pie I don't bring, and on the chair is a paper bag of onesies for Junie.
Carson cooks us dinner. He tells me he takes the next two days off to help with the baby. I volunteer to wash the dishes to be useful.
I am at the sink when Carson comes through behind me to put a glass back in the cupboard above it. The kitchen is small. I’m sure he does this maneuver in his own kitchen ten thousand times. He can do it with his eyes closed and one hand.
He reaches past me. Long arm up over my shoulder. The inside of his bicep a half inch from my upper arm, his chest a half inch from my back through the borrowed sweater. He doesn't put his hand on me. He doesn't move into space. He just holds it there.
I forget to breathe.
The heat coming off him reads through the cotton like a stove someone forgets to turn off.
He smells like clean soap and laundered cotton and something darker underneath that is just him, and my skin picks it up before my brain catches up.
Every nerve down the front of me lights up at once.
Collarbone. Sternum. The thin place under my ribs.
I want to lean back. To put my shoulder blades flat against his chest. To turn under his arm and find out what his mouth does when he doesn’t talk. To know what his hands would do if I give them a single nod of permission.
He holds the air between us and I can feel his restraint in my whole body. The deliberate distance of it.
"Sorry," he says, near my ear. The sound of his voice that close goes through me in places I am going to have to deal with later. "Cannot reach."
"You could've asked."
I say it to the soap suds because I cannot turn around.
If I turn around, I am not responsible for what I do next, sleep-deprived or not.
I am gripping the rim of the sink hard enough to leave a mark on my palms, and my pulse is doing something panicked and slow at the base of my throat at the same time.
He laughs, one short exhale of it that brushes the hair at my temple, and the heat of his breath there is worse than his hand is.
"I know." Then he steps back.
The air rushes in cold where he was, and my body protests the loss of him before my mind catches up.
I close my eyes. He has imprints himself on every inch of me where he chose not to touch, and I can feel his absence more sharply than I feel anyone's presence.
Underneath that is what actually scares me; that if he does not step back, I do not ask him to.
He sets the glass in the sink on his way past.
"Leave the rest," he says, easy. "I've got it. Go check on the baby."
I sit on the edge of the guest-room bed for a long time after that, in the dark, listening to Junie breathe in the basket and the dishwasher run in the kitchen down the hall. Tina promises to bring a bassinet for her the next time she visits.
I take inventory of what is in this house that is not here before I arrive.
A baby.
A basket.
A bag of onesies from a cedar chest at Tina’s.
A casserole dish that needs returning.
A standing Sunday-dinner invitation lodged in my chest like a splinter I am not going to pull.
A coffee mug at the end of a counter, poured before I came down the hall, served just the way I like it.
A chicken-and-dumplings Wednesday I somehow accept without remembering that I do.
I think, without sugar-coating it, that in less than three days, if my math serves me correctly, I am adopted.
And then the second thought, the one I am going to carry into the dark with me for a long time after: that scares me more than $26.01 ever does.