7. Lori
Lori
Three weeks in, and the truth is, I know this house better than the apartment I left.
I know this house more than a guest should.
Which is also how I wind up stealing a man's flannel without ever exactly intending to.
Soft red plaid, sleeves past my knuckles, smelling like cedar and laundry soap and home.
Carson hangs it on the hook by the back door after a run and never came back for it.
I borrow it the second week when the wind off the pasture got stronger.
It stays with me ever since, and I reach for it every morning.
The bun is gone too, which is, frankly, the more concerning development.
The bun was an Old Lori thing. New Lori gets caught at the counter at 6:30 a.m. with a baby on one shoulder, a bottle in the other hand, and zero remaining arms for a brush.
By the time it occurs to me I might want to look like a functioning adult, Cadie has already shows up to render a verdict.
"You're prettier with your hair down," she informs me, like she's settling a dispute I didn't know we were having.
"Is that so?"
"Waaaaay prettier." She grins at me. "You should leave it down all the time. Daddy thinks so too."
"Cadie. Boots." Carson sighs.
She clomps off to find her other sock, satisfied with her morning's work. I, the grown woman, stand in front of the hallway mirror and leave my hair down because a six-year-old said so, and I will not be examining the rest of what she said until I am alone with the kettle and a strong defense.
Wednesday at 1:40 p.m., Carson texts.
The teacher called. Cadie's at school. Can you grab her at 3 p.m.? Stuck on a call.
He texts me nine times in three weeks. Here I am answering them like we run this house together for years instead of weeks.
On it. Truck keys?
His reply comes quickly.
Hook by the door.
Cedar Hollow Elementary sits at the south end of town behind a low stone wall.
Live oaks, a flagpole snapping in the wind, and a pickup line of mothers in sunglasses and third-wave lattes, all of them looking like they coordinate outfits at the same brunch I wasn't invited to.
I slide in behind a black Tahoe at 2:50 p.m. and try to blend in.
Cadie's class files out at three on the dot. She is, without a doubt, the only first-grader at Cedar Hollow in rainbow cowgirl boots, doing the hop-shuffle of a kid whose bladder is about to burst. She spots the truck and her whole face lights up.
Her teacher walks the line down to the curb. Mid-fifties, olive cardigan, a lanyard with two pairs of reading glasses on it, and the unbothered face of a woman who hands kids over at school pick ups for thirty years.
"You must be Cadie's mom," she says, warmly. "She talks about you nonstop."
Oh.
The correction loads itself onto the tip of my tongue, polite and true and so deeply rehearsed I practice it twice this morning while pouring coffee, in case I needed it. Oh, I'm just a friend of her dad's.
Cadie hops onto the back seat and buckles herself. The practiced answer dies at the back of my throat.
"We're working on the nonstop part." I hear myself say instead.
"Oh, she's a delight," the teacher beams. "A real firecracker. She gives me a drawing of your whole family this morning. Stick figures. Names over the heads. Very organized."
"She's nothing if not thorough."
"You are the pretty one, apparently. With good hair."
I just laugh at that and say my goodbye.
We make it two whole blocks before Cadie starts.
"Lori."
"Yeah, sweetie?"
"You do not tell her."
"Tell her what?"
"That you're not my mom."
"I do not want to make a whole thing of it in front of other people.”
She considers this seriously. "That's okay, though. I like it."
And just like that, she's done with me. Kicks her boot heel against the seat twice and starts humming.
The word Mom climbs into my chest around the stop sign on Third and refuses to climb back out.
It’s still there at the grocery store, where I pick up the yellow box of diapers and milk and the loaf of bread Cadie squeezes till it’s flat.
It’s still there at 4 p.m. when Junie has her standing meltdown and it takes me twenty minutes of pacing the porch to get her down.
It’s still there at 5 p.m. when I fold laundry at the counter and a chicken is roasting, and I pretend not to notice the way the back of my mouth tastes when I say the word out loud.
Mom.
I keep waiting for it to start feeling like a lie I am telling. It does not.
Carson comes home at 6:30 p.m.
"Smells good," he says.
"It's chicken."
"It's always chicken."
"I have three recipes, West. You are getting the deluxe rotation. If you want a fourth, you can take that up with my schedule and my budget.”
The corner of his mouth tips up. “Mouthy today. Kind of missed that.”
He reaches past me for a glass — close enough I catch the smoke-and-cedar thing his shirts hold after shift, no matter how many laundry cycles they go through — and pours himself water from the tap.
He does not crowd me. He never does. He just becomes the closest, warmest thing in the room for a second, and then he's gone.
The dangerous 4 a.m. encounter fades. Good.
"Cadie home?"
"Toilet. Says she doesn’t want me to wait for her, needs her time alone. Don’t ask." The spatula acting as the exclamation point.
"Wasn't going to." He shrugs. “Junie?”
“Sleeping. In the bassinet, the guest room.”
Cadie thunders down the hall right on cue, still in her boots and her school polo. We sit and start to eat our dinner. Cadie pushes her peas to one quadrant as soon as she has the plate, while Carson shreds her chicken into pieces without being asked.
She makes it halfway through her milk before she remembers.
"Daddy. Mrs. Halloran said Lori is my mom."
Carson's fork stops an inch above his plate. "Huh. I see."
"She said, you must be Cadie's mom." Cadie does the voice — sunny, stretched long. "And Lori didn’t say no. And I didn’t either. So nobody knows for real."
I keep my eyes on the peas like they’re interesting. I don’t trust my face above a forty-five-degree angle.
"Do we have to tell Mrs. Halloran?" Cadie presses. "Because I don't want to. One time she makes me sit by Brayden and he eats glue."
Carson looks at me across the table. Since I don’t look back he takes the bait.
"We can let her be confused for a while, Pumpkin," he says. To Cadie, but not really. "Eat your peas."
"I don't want to."
"Eat them anyway."
"Daddy."
"Peas, Cadie."
She heaves the world-historic sigh of a child outmaneuvered by reason and bites a single pea, glaring at me the whole time for cooking it.
We finish dinner with the word Mom still sitting in the middle of the table.
By 7:30 p.m., Cadie is out cold. I feed Junie a bottle until she falls back asleep, then start the dishes.
The back screen creaks.
Through the window over the sink, I find Carson on the back porch with a mug in his hand. He stares out at the dark like something out there owes him an answer.
The boards are cold through my socks as I head out. Past the rail it is the deep Hill Country dark, just the live oak and the line of the pasture fence and one yellow bulb on the barn. I lower myself onto the step beside him. Close enough that my body has mapped every inch between his arm and mine.
"Long day?"
"Long week." He turns the mug a half-turn. "Pulls a kid out of a culvert off Ranch Road 12. He's fine. Scares ten years off his mother."
"How old?"
"Cadie's age."
"God." I pull the flannel tighter. "I can’t imagine.”
A loaded silence follows. He breaks first.
"The teacher calls," he says. "She apologizes. Said she isn’t sure you are Cadie’s mom. I tell her it doesn't matter. Even if it does."
"Yeah." I look out at the oak. "It does."
I should have left it there. But I don’t.
"She's six, Carson. She's going to ask me things I have no business answering. One of these days she's going to ask you. We'd better have figured out before then whether we're something she's allowed to want, or just something that happens to her."
I catch a beat after it leaves my mouth, and so does he.
"I'm just saying. We don't make it a thing, and it doesn't get to be a thing." I end it with a deep breath.
"You think too far down the road," he says, not in an unkind way. "She picks you since she meets you in the cereal aisle. She isn’t confused about it."
That shuts me up cleaner than any argument.
I don’t know who moves closer, but his shoulder finds mine in the next thirty seconds. His heat comes through both our shirts and lands on my arm like a flat palm.
My hand is on the porch boards. His right hand comes down beside it. An inch off. Maybe less. One finger from either of us and we are in so much trouble.
I press my thighs together. I keep my spine very straight, because if I slump even a fraction I tilt into him.
We stay out there longer than the cold should allow.
He stands first.
"Getting cold." His voice is rough and dropped an octave. "Come inside before you catch something and pin it on me."
"Can't dream of it."
"You would. You'd put it on a list."
It is almost a joke. Something loosens in my chest — I miss this, the easy volley of us. I bite the inside of my cheek so I don't grin like an idiot.
He holds the screen for me. I walk within an inch of his chest and the heat of him pours against my front, my arm, the side of my throat, and he stays perfectly, deliberately still. He can put a hand on my hip without moving his feet and we both know it, but he doesn't.
The screen catches behind us. He stops at the mouth of the hall. I stop at the counter. Half nod. He goes to his room, and I go to mine.
The doors shut.
Sleep, when it finally comes, is a fragile thing that shatters the moment the morning light hits the kitchen window.
The next morning, Jason catches me at the pie case before the rush.
"Listen, Kid." He doesn't look up from the coconut cream he plates. "I leave at the end of next week, for five days. Going to my sister's place in Galveston. She's been after me since Easter."
"Good. You do not take a day off since I start, Jason."
"I take plenty." He has not. "Wendy's got the kitchen, Marta's got the floor. Don't call me unless the building is on actual fire."
"Understood."
"Three meatloaf pans in the freezer. I do not haul them to the coast." He slides the plate down the pass without looking at me. "Take one home. Take two. Baby's gotta be drilling you to the bone."
"Jason, I'm fine."
"Do not ask if you are fine." He cuts a look at me — the same flat once-over he gives a delivery invoice. "Ask if you want meatloaf. And if you need an advance, you say so before Friday. Tips hold up. It is a good time."
"I'm okay."
"All right, then." He turns back to the grill like he has already forgets he says any of it, which is how I realize what happens. What happens?
The extra shifts every time my hours run thin.
The shift after I found Junie on my porch and he hands me coffee without a word.
The week of emergency leave I never ask for.
The truck he loans. In the winter I have the flu and he sends me home at ten with soup and the lunch tip jar shoves in my apron.
On Christmas, every server gets a $100 and he calls it a bonus in a voice that dares you to say thank you.
He holds me up for three years. And the whole time, I congratulate myself on how independent I am.
I work the rest of the shift on autopilot. Count the jar at five. Clock out. Drive Jason's truck home.
The porch light is on when I pull up. Carson's truck in the drive.
Through the kitchen window, I can see him at the counter with Junie on his shoulder, sways without knowing he is doing it, the radio low.
He hums — three notes, the same little tail he hums every night down the hall — and I realize, with the kind of honesty you only allow yourself in the dark, that it is the lullaby I start humming the second week.
He picks it up off me without either of us saying a word about it.
Junie's lullaby.
I stand in front of the window a full minute before I go inside, not crying for the town that has begun to care for me.
That night in bed, I run through the list.
Jason helps me for three years, quiet about it.
Tina, with her casserole and Junie on her hip saying you go on, honey, I've got her.
Carson. Carson everywhere. The torn-up checks. The baby stuff. The porch light he leaves on for me. Jason’s truck, which has just now occurred to me, Carson gasses up in his free time. The flannel on my chair.
I receive help my entire adult life.
I think I get by because I do not ask for help. I think the line I draw around myself is the thing keeping me upright. The line does not keep me upright at all. It is just where everyone else is standing — quiet, patient, an arm's length out — exactly where I insist.
Down the hall, I can hear him moving in the kitchen, heating up the kettle. I note the quiet way he closes the cabinet door so as not to wake the baby. It is the careful, unannounced care that is simply him.
And my want for him at that very moment is the loudest thought in the night.