4. Tempering #5
Lightning split the sky, thunder chasing right behind it. She jumped, hand flying to her chest.
"Come in so I can grab an umbrella. I'm walking you home." I tried, knowing I was gonna call Penny anyway instead of taking the risk of being struck by lightning.
"No, I'm fine."
"I'm not letting you walk back in this."
"I got here just fine." She said it with more defiance than her age had any right to carry.
Just then, headlights swung up my driveway, cutting white through the rain.
"Shit." Mrs. Donovan grumbled, sounding for a second like a teenager caught past curfew. "They done found me."
"You in trouble now." I teased her as the white G-Wagon came to a stop.
She sucked her teeth at me.
"Mama!" Penny came running through the rain soon as she hit the break, worry was written across her whole face.
"She just showed up. Thought it was mahjong night." I told Penny, a woman in her mid-forties who always reminded me of Robin Givens.
"Snitch." Mrs. Donovan cut her eyes at me.
"Dillion, I'm so sorry." Penny said, holding her mother's hand like she was checking it was still attached. "It's late, she must've woken you and it's your solo week. You need your rest, no one is supposed to bother you."
"I was up. Was about to call you." I said.
Only then did I catch Penny taking me in, the black silk pajamas, my shirt hanging open over my abs, before she cleared her throat and gathered herself back together.
"Well." She licked her lips, unable to help herself. "The ferry isn't running in this storm, so I knew she couldn't go far. Something told me she was here, and this was my first stop, so thankfully we weren't panicked too long. I'll call my husband and let him know I got her. Thank you."
“I can help you both to the car.”
“No it’s ok. We’ve put you out enough.” Penny insisted.
"I'll see y'all on Tuesday. I'll make that snack board y'all love." I smiled.
"Boy, don't play with me." Mrs. Donovan fanned herself with one hand like the memory alone had worked her up.
"The one with little whipped goat cheese and them candied pecans you do something to, I don't know what, but they don't taste like any pecan I ever had growing up. And that jam. Lord, that jam."
"That's the fig and bourbon reduction." I said.
Her whole face lit up. "See, this is why I keep telling everybody on this island, our boy is wasting his talent on strangers when he could be running a real restaurant." She patted my arm. "You hear me? A real one. White tablecloths."
"I run a real restaurant, Mrs. Donovan. Capa Dillion, remember?"
"I know, I know, the fancy one downtown." She waved that off like it was a technicality. "I mean one where I don't need a reservation three months out to get a table."
I smiled and opened Mrs. Donovan's umbrella for them.
"Come on, Mama, I gotta get you to bed." Penny said, taking it from me.
"I ain't no child." Mrs. Donovan complained.
"Thanks again, Dillion." Penny said with a smile, and started helping her mother down the steps.
"Tuesday!" I said over the rain, then watched them drive off once they got settled.
I closed the door and stood there a second with my eyes shut, listening to the storm work on the roof.
Upstairs, Madeline was waiting on me, having no idea what I was about to walk up there and lay at her feet.
Might catch a hand across the face for this one.
Wouldn't say a word if I did. Man doesn't get to flinch at a bill he ran up himself.
"Fuck." I said to myself, and tapped the back of my head against the door a couple times, coaching myself through it. "Be a man, Dillion. You brought her into this, and you gotta get her out. Whatever the consequence—"
The doorbell rang, and I turned to look at the door quick. I hadn't seen Mrs. Donovan forget anything on the porch. Maybe Penny needed something else.
I unlocked the door and swung it open. "Penny, what —"
She was soaking wet. Standing on my porch in the middle of a storm that had spent three hours trying to dismantle the island, rain coming down behind her like a curtain being drawn by something with a sense of theater and no mercy.
Hair plastered to her face and her neck the way it had been the first day I ever saw her, that day in my kitchen, the wrong order and the right mouth and the audacity of a woman who had no idea she was about to change the entire shape of my life.
Seven years ago she walked in out of the rain and something in my chest shifted and settled different, and it was doing it again, against every instruction I had given it for four months.
And that was the part that made me angry.
My body had been alerted of her presence since the hallway minutes before she even stepped foot on the property.
It had recognized her through storm and door and four months of silence like she was a book I was born reading.
Four months of trying to need her less…all my work, the woman upstairs, the distance, gone just like that. Undone before I touched the handle.
"Aurelia," I said.