10. Lori
Lori
Here is what I know about a life that isn't mine.
Carson takes his coffee black. He burns the first batch of eggs because he cranks the heat too high and then gets distracted fixing whatever Cadie breaks or spills that morning.
He leaves his boots by the door, toes pointed out, hat on the hook above them.
He hums under his breath when he's scrubbing the cast iron after dinner, and he doesn't know he does it.
But I do.
Junie sleeps through the night now, or close to it, which means the dark hours have turned into something I almost recognize as rest. She knows his voice. She tracks him across a room the same way she tracks mine. That is not a development I am entitled to, but I have it.
Cadie stops asking if I'm going to live with them.
She just acts like I do. She now drops her backpack by the door next to my boots and calls my name from the bathroom when she needs her ponytail fixed.
She tells kids at school that Lori makes better pancakes than her dad, which is a flat lie, but Carson lets it go because correcting it would mean explaining what Lori is.
And we have come to a silent agreement not to explain it.
That week, I also notice the town has officially adopted Junie.
Mrs. Alvarez from the dry cleaner knits something tiny — pale yellow, small as a fist — and brings it to the diner.
"For the baby," she says, pressing the hat into my hands.
Larry, one of our regulars, asks how the little one is sleeping. I tell him better. He nods like that settles his business and goes back to his mashed potatoes.
The woman at table four leaves a $10 tip on a $6 check with diapers written on the receipt.
I don't understand these people. I think about it while I'm wiping down the pie case, and I mean it as a complaint, but it doesn't come out that way. It comes out as wondering.
Jason sends me home with two portions of food on Thursday. Just sets the containers by the register when I'm cashing out. "Those are gonna go to waste if nobody takes 'em."
"Jason."
"Don't Jason me. Just take the food, Lori."
I take the food along with every quiet thing this town keeps pushing across the counter at me. The problem isn't gratitude. The problem is that I am on the receiving end of nothing my entire adult life, and I don't know what it means when the receiving won't stop.
The days fold into each other. December in the Hill Country means short light and long cold and the sky goes white by 4 p.m. Carson's hand finds my lower back when we walk through the hardware store on a Tuesday.
His palm just lands there, warm through the flannel, like he does it a thousand times, and I let it stay because pulling away would require naming why.
I still try Ella's phone. Not every day anymore. Every third day, maybe. The calls go to voicemail and I leave the same message: It's me. Call when you can. They used to sound like a demand. Now, they just sound tired.
One day, I notice that I stop checking my duffel bag every morning.
I'm looking for my hairbrush and it's not in the toiletry bag where it should be.
It's on the bathroom counter, parked between Cadie's detangler, Carson's razor, and a tube of kids' toothpaste with the cap permanently lost. My hairbrush, sitting on his counter.
And then I see my toothbrush.
The blue one. Standing in the ceramic holder between Carson's green one and Cadie's pink one with the glitter handle.
Three toothbrushes in a row, like a family set in a drugstore commercial.
Somewhere between last week and this morning my hand just reaches for the holder instead of the bag.
I do not notice. Now it stands upright between theirs like it is there for years, and I stare at it like it just tells me something I am not ready to hear.
"It's just a toothbrush, Lori."
He is behind me when I turn around. He is leaning in the doorway with a dish towel over his shoulder, one eyebrow up, his mouth trying not to do something he regrets.
His hair is damp from the shower, his feet are bare on the tile, and he is very tall, very close, and very calm about the fact that my toothbrush just stages a one-woman coup in his bathroom.
"I know what it is."
"Really, now? That’s settled, then." He turns back toward the kitchen. "Eggs or oatmeal?"
"Eggs."
"Don't burn them!" Cadie yells from down the hall, listening.
"That was one time!" Carson calls back, without breaking eye contact with me.
"Every time!" Cadie shouts.
A laugh catches between us.
I look at the toothbrush again. Blue between green and pink. The most ordinary object in the world, and I can't stop looking at it, because somewhere in the last two weeks it weasels its way into their lives.
That evening, after both kids are down, the house goes quiet in a way that makes me very aware of where Carson is.
He is at the kitchen table with a stack of shift reports and a pen he keeps clicking.
I take a shower that lasts too long because the hot water in this house is a luxury I do not earn, and when I come out I am in his gray T-shirt I find in the guest room drawer, the one washed so many times it goes thin at the shoulders, and a pair of cotton shorts.
My hair is down, still damp, curling at the ends.
I come around the counter to get water.
He looks up and stops clicking the pen.
For about three full seconds, neither of us moves.
His eyes start at my bare feet on the tile and go up.
My legs. My shorts. His shirt on me, the collar stretched wide enough that one shoulder is almost showing.
My wet hair. He takes all of it in. I can feel the path his eyes take on my skin like a fingertip I imagine, one he's not offering.
His throat moves once. His hand goes flat on the table. He looks back down at the shift report, and I know he is absolutely not reading it.
The kitchen is ten feet across. It has never felt smaller.
"You should probably stop looking at me like that," I say, and I have no idea where the courage comes from, except that the alternative is pretending this isn't happening.
He doesn't look up. "Like what."
"Like that."
His jaw works once. "You come out here in my T-shirt and your hair down and you're telling me not to look."
"I came out here for water."
He still does not look at me, but his knuckles are white on the pen, his breathing changes, a muscle goes in his forearm. Every single nerve I own notices the restraint it takes for him to stay in that chair.
I want him out of the chair. I want him across this kitchen. I want his hands in my hair, his mouth on the soft spot below my ear. That spot belongs to him from the porch at 3 a.m., where he holds my head in his hand and does not kiss me.
My hand is shaking as I open the cabinet to get a glass and fill it with water. The reason I come out.
"Goodnight, Carson."
"Sweet dreams, Lori." The last syllable of it follows me all the way down the hall.
I close the guest room door and lean against it. The duffel is in the corner where it's been since the first night. Packed. The exit I keep loaded in case I need to remember how to leave. I do not open it in four days.
The low rough sound of my name is still in my ears. The distance between the kitchen and this door has never felt so short.
The days blur into a quiet rhythm, and by Sunday, the whole family migrates to Tina's.
On Sunday, Tina calls at 8 a.m. and tells Carson she needs help stacking firewood, which is Tina-speak for bring everyone and come eat. We drive over in the truck, Cadie chattering in the back about how Mrs. Halloran says her cursive L is the best in the class, with Junie asleep in the car seat.
Tina's house is the single-story brick place beside the feed-store lot. Christmas lights line the gutter, white and tasteful, clearly Hank's work.
We end up on the porch with a colander of green beans between us on an overturned crate. Snap the ends, pull the string, drop the cleaned one in the bowl. Tina does it without looking, forty years of tradition in her fingers.
Inside, Carson is on the floor with Cadie and a box of ornaments. I can hear them through the screen door.
"Pumpkin, that one goes on the tree, not on the dog." Carson says.
"Hank's dog doesn't have a tree!"
Tina shakes her head and smiles. Continues snapping the beans.
Through the window, Cadie says something I can't hear. Carson laughs, head tipped back. The sound comes through the window faint and warm.
"Honey, I don’t see my boy smile like that in two years." She drops the cleaned half in the bowl. "I just want you to know I notice."
The bean in my hand splits wrong. I set both halves in the bowl like they're fine.
"Tina, I —"
"You don't have to say anything. I'm just telling you what I see." Another handful from the colander. "That's all."
I excuse myself to get more water, which is the world's most transparent exit but Tina lets me have it.
Her kitchen is small, clean and smells like chicken she put on at 6 p.m. The counter is yellow tile, cracked near the stove, grout darkened with decades of cooking.
I put my hands flat on it and breathe. On the fridge, there is a photo of Carson at maybe fourteen, all elbows and ears, standing next to a man with his same jaw.
His father. The ring he never takes off comes from that man.
The wall clock ticks loud enough to count against my ribs.
Sometime in the afternoon, Cadie lies on the living room floor with a box of crayons and a piece of paper big as a placemat, coloring for twenty solid minutes with the intensity usually reserved for surgery.
I'm on the couch with Junie in my arms. Carson is in the kitchen on the phone with dispatch about a shift swap and the station Christmas party next weekend, his voice a low murmur through the wall.
"Done!" Cadie holds up the paper. Four stick figures on a green line of grass. A tall one in a hat, a small one in rainbow boots, a baby in a basket, and a brown-haired woman. Each figure has a name floating above its head in careful, shaky printing. DADDY. CADIE. JUNIE.
And at the end: LORI.
My stick figure has long brown lines coming off the round head.
Hair down. Blue dots for eyes. A wide red smile that takes up half the face.
She draws me happy. I cannot remember the last time someone draws me at all, and the fact that a six-year-old sat on her living room floor and includes me without hesitating, without anyone telling her to, without it even occurring to her that I might not belong in the picture, does something to my chest.
"That's you," Cadie says, pointing. "With your hair down. Daddy likes your hair down."
The murmur on the phone stops.
I swallow. "It's beautiful, Cadie."
"I know." She scrambles up, carries the paper to the refrigerator in the kitchen, moves a magnet and a recipe in Tina’s handwriting, sticks the drawing dead center. Steps back. Adjusts one corner.
"There," she says, satisfied.
My name in a six-year-old's handwriting. LORI, in shaky capitals, floating above a stick figure with her hair down. She draws a family and I am in it. She does not even pause.
I shift Junie to my shoulder. "I'm gonna take her outside for a moment."
Carson ends the call now, phone in his back pocket. He watches me walk away and says nothing. If he says a single kind thing to me right now I come apart. All because of a stick-figure drawing.
I stand on the porch with Junie's warm breath on my neck.
I don't know what to do with a life that keeps handing me things I do not pay for.
My whole life, kindness comes with clauses. I keep waiting for the invoice. The part where someone tells me what I owe.
My mother's kindness comes with don't make this harder. Ryan's comes with a joint account and nothing left in it. Ella's comes with a closed door and a phone that stops ringing.
Tina just sees me leave the kitchen and pass the living room, and lets me go without following.
And in the non-expectation of it all, a thought comes that questions the entire premise of my life.
I want this.
Not just him. All of it. The green beans. The Sunday drives. The woman in this house notices her son smiling and thanks me without expecting anything. The little girl who writes my name on a drawing because it never occurs to her that I might not stay. The baby who reaches for me in the dark.
I want all of it. I want to stop looking at the duffel bag and start calling this what it is. I want to sit on this porch every Sunday with the green beans. I want to be the woman Tina notices. I want to deserve my spot in the toothbrush holder.
And I am terrified. Not of losing it, but of keeping it.
Of finding out, the bill comes later and I can't afford it.
Of being the woman who stays too long and takes too much and leaves a mess for a six-year-old to clean up because the adults are not honest enough to stop it.
Every good thing I am given by this family, from the toothbrush holder to the name on the fridge, is a contrast against the duffel bag I keep, and I can't figure out which one of them is telling the truth.
Through the window, Tina moves past the stove, not looking at the porch, giving me the space she always gives me. The space in their lives I never ask for yet cannot stop taking.
I hug Junie a little tighter and stay there for a few more minutes.