Chapter 9 #2
He helps me clear the table, which is to say he clears the table while I supervise from the counter with the last of the wine, and when he reaches past me to rack the dish towel his hand settles on my hip on the way by, absent, proprietary, and stays.
"Hi," I say.
"Hi." His thumb finds the gap where my shirt's ridden up, one degree of contact, and my whole nervous system reorganizes around it like iron filings. "Punch list's done. Sketches are approved. I have no further business here."
"None?"
"Some." He turns me on the counter's axis, unhurried, and kisses me with the taste of my one recipe and someone's wine, and this is the difference in my house — in his house I was a guest and behaved like one, roughly, but this is my kitchen, my rules, and I walk him backward out of it by the shirt, narrating the route so he doesn't trip on the cat, up the stairs Bee carpeted in a pattern that should be illegal, into the room I painted the first week because I couldn't sleep inside beige.
This time it's a conversation with the walls down.
My hands relearn the architecture of him — genuinely unreasonable, the fire department should list him as an asset — and his run the inventory again like he's checking his measurements against the as-built, and we fall onto my bed laughing at something neither of us could name under oath, and the laughing changes key.
He's slower than last time. Softer, on purpose, holding himself on the frame of his arms and watching me with those readout eyes while everything in me climbs, and when I pull him down and take him in, the sound he makes is quiet and shattered and entirely worth the price of admission, which is my sanity, apparently, going forward.
"There," he says against my throat, like a man setting a level and finding true.
We move like we built the rhythm in his garage with the rest of the cut list. It gathers slow, and slow turns out to be a long fuse on a big charge, and I'm most of the way to the top, fingers wrecked in his hair, his name doing laps in my mouth—
—when twenty-two pounds of black cat lands on the bed like a depth charge.
Grady makes a sound no fire department trains you for. Beetlejuice, having achieved the summit, walks up the mattress and sits on the small of his back, facing the headboard. Supervising.
"Do not laugh," Grady says into my collarbone, dead level, holding position with a cat on his spine like a load test. "If you laugh, he wins."
"He always wins. He's undefeated." I'm already gone, laughing so hard the bed shakes, and the cat rides the turbulence with his eyes closed, and Grady's shoulders start going too, silent, the whole scaffolding of him shaking over me, and this — I file it right here, mid-disaster, his laugh caught against my neck and a cat refereeing from his back — this is the happiest sixty seconds of my adult life.
The cat is deported to the hallway with a dish of the prescription food, an outcome he planned from the start.
The door gets a chair under the knob, since the man fixes everything but my latch, and we pick the thread back up laughing — and finish it, eventually, not laughing at all, his forehead against mine and my name in his mouth like something structural.
After, in the dark, scratching at the door, dignified. We ignore it. There's a price for everything.
Saturday morning, the centerpiece problem gets real.
The homecoming needs one anchor prop, one thing at the heart of the table that reads from the street, and I know exactly what it is, because I grew up with it.
The moon. Bee's moon, the paper crescent big enough to stand in — hang it over the table, low, glowing, the family's porch light and harvest moon in one, face the porch so I can see them from my chair.
It's perfect. It's so perfect it feels less like design and more like dictation.
So I finally do the thing. I open the shed in daylight, both doors, all the way, and I inventory my inheritance.
The tarps come off one at a time, and it's a museum under there — the cauldron rig, the storm-fence maze panels, boxes labeled in marker, brIDE (VEIL SEPARATE), CANNON (ASK GRADY FOR COMPRESSOR), which I set aside to feel something about later.
I work shelf by shelf with a legal pad, the way she'd have wanted, and it takes until two in the afternoon to be sure, and then another hour of re-checking to believe it.
No moon.
No bride, either. No cannon — the box labeled CANNON holds mason jars.
The deeper I dig the more the collection thins, boxes present and contents gone, like a bank vault full of envelopes, and at four o'clock, wedged flat between the paint shelf and the wall, I find the answer trying to look like clutter.
A gray ledger, cloth-bound, her real one, the master inventory in her small exact hand.
Every prop she ever built, forty years of columns.
And down the final page, in ink shakier than the rest, entry after entry has been struck through. Single lines, ruler-straight even at the end, she'd have used a ruler in a lifeboat. Forty-one strikes. The bride. The cannon. The maze. The moon, last, the pen pressed so hard it grooved the paper.
Next to the strikes, one word, repeated down the column in that failing hand until the word itself starts to fail.
Given.
Given. Given. Given.
And at the top of the column, where the recipient's name should be, there is one — written once, for all forty-one.
The roof leak found it before I did. The ink has bloomed into a blue-gray ghost of itself, a smudge with a tall first letter, and I hold the ledger up to the window light and stare at that smear like it owes me money.
Given to. Given to whom, Bee.
There are a hundred explanations. This town is full of people she loved.
The historical society. The school. Dottie.
The church basement eats donations like a whale.
A hundred explanations, and I run every single one of them like fuses, in order, hopefully, and one by one they blow, because the historical society would have plaqued it, and the school would have lost it, and Dottie would have told me, Dottie tells me everything at the speed of weather.
A hundred explanations. I stand in the empty shed where a moon should be, holding a ledger that says given in a dying hand, listening to a winch run on the other side of the fence.
And I can already only think of one.