14. Brooks
Brooks
“I leave pieces of myself everywhere.
Makes coming back easier.”
— Lauren
The house is loud the moment I unlock the door—alive in a way it usually isn’t. It’s not the mindless hum of a television, or the hollow, lonely drift of a radio left playing in an empty room. It’s real, messy, human loud.
I barely get the deadbolt turned before Sophie comes barreling down the hallway like a guided missile.
“Dad!”
She hits my knees with enough momentum that the grocery bag swings wildly. A carton of eggs does a rhythmic dance against the jug of milk, and I have to catch the bag against my hip to keep it from hitting the floor.
I scoop her up with my free arm. One of her socks has migrated toward her ankle, and there is a thick streak of bright purple paint across her cheek.
Behind us, drifting from the kitchen, comes Lauren’s voice. “For the record, our child has successfully managed to unionize.”
I kick the door shut with my heel and drop my keys into the ceramic bowl by the entryway. “Against what?” I ask, shifting Sophie’s weight to balance the groceries.
“Bedtime,” Lauren calls out. “Vegetables. And specifically, pants that have buttons. Apparently, they are a fundamental violation of human rights.”
Sophie buries her face into my shoulder, her voice muffled against my neck. “Jeans are too scratchy, Dad.”
“That’s a serious accusation,” I tell her solemnly, patting her back. “We may need to open a formal investigation.”
“With snacks,” she says, popping her head up to look at me with wide, expectant eyes.
“Obviously.”
The kitchen looks like a craft store exploded.
Construction paper covers half the table, and glitter sparkles across the granite in impossible places, caught in the grooves of the wood. Paintbrushes are soaking in a bowl beside the sink, and there is cloudy, murky purple paint water sitting in my favorite coffee mug.
Lauren’s open suitcase sits near the hallway, packed with her usual, slightly unsettling level of precision. Every shirt is folded into sharp, military-grade rectangles, with her shoes lined up perfectly beside her sketchbooks.
She’s standing at the stove, stirring pasta sauce with a slow, rhythmic motion while some indie track hums from her phone.
She glances over her shoulder when I walk in, her hair pulled back in a loose, messy knot. She points toward the middle of the table with the wooden spoon.
I stop in my tracks.
Sitting in the center of the craft-induced chaos is a birdhouse.
Purple paint drips unevenly down the sides, and bits of craft glitter have fused permanently into the wood grain. To top it off, several uncooked penne noodles are glued across the roof in crooked, ambitious rows.
I stare at it for a long, silent second. “The noodles,” I say carefully, “are for…?”
“They’re shingles,” Sophie says, wiggling out of my arms to scramble back into her chair. “For the bird’s rain protection.”
“Right,” I say, trying to keep my voice steady. “Of course. My mistake. I see the vision now.”
“It’s mixed media,” Lauren adds, leaning against the counter with a completely straight face, though her eyes are dancing with amusement.
I set the groceries down, and Sophie immediately grabs a brush, her tongue poking out the corner of her mouth with the intense, focused concentration of a surgeon.
“Don’t touch the west side yet,” she warns me. “It’s still curing.”
“There are specific sides now?”
“All houses have sides, Dad,” she says, as if I’ve just asked if water is wet. “And this one needs to be perfect.”
“Architecturally speaking, she’s very advanced,” Lauren says, turning back to the sauce.
I shrug out of my jacket and drape it over the back of a chair before sitting down. Sophie leans into my side, leaving a faint purple fingerprint across my flannel.
“You’re decorating me now?”
“You needed more color,” she says decisively.
There’s a scrap of sandpaper near my elbow. I pick it up automatically and begin to smooth a rough edge of the birdhouse while Sophie paints the windows with tiny, jerky motions.
Lauren notices immediately. “You’re sanding that like it personally offended you,” she observes.
“It’s just uneven.”
“You say that about literally everything, Brooks.”
“That’s not true.”
She raises an eyebrow, arching it slowly.
I glance around the kitchen—at the cabinet that hangs a millimeter crooked, the dining chair that wobbles every time someone leans back, and the overhead light that flickers every few minutes.
“…Fine,” I admit, dropping the sandpaper. “Maybe sometimes it’s true.”
Sophie watches us for a second, her brow furrowed in thought, before leaning toward Lauren and whispering loudly, “Dad likes fixing things because he’s really old.”
“I’m thirty-one, Sophie,” I interject.
“That’s basically historical,” Lauren says, stifling a laugh.
I point the edge of the sandpaper at her. “You are literally the same age as me.”
She presses a hand dramatically to her chest. “And yet, through some miracle of nature, I remain youthful and mysterious.”
I stay there while Lauren finishes dinner, and something in my chest loosens, just a little.
The house hasn’t sounded like this in a long time.
Lauren moves through it like she still belongs here; she opens cabinets without asking where things are, hums under her breath while she works, and leaves tiny, colorful messes everywhere she goes.
It should bother me more than it does, but instead, it just feels warm.
Dinner is a loud, chaotic affair. Sophie spends most of it explaining a passionate argument she had in kindergarten about whether turtles would enjoy birthday parties.
“I think they would,” she says around a mouthful of spaghetti. “But only small ones. With no loud music.”
“That’s fair,” Lauren agrees, twirling her fork. “Turtles strike me as introverts.”
Halfway through the meal, the chair beneath Lauren gives a sharp, protesting creak. She freezes. I look down at the loose leg before pushing my plate back to stand up.
Lauren groans, her head falling back. “No. Brooks, sit down. It’s fine.”
“It is not fine. It’s unsafe.”
I head out to the garage anyway, returning with a screwdriver while Lauren shakes her head at me like I’m a particularly exhausting, albeit endearing, project.
By eight-thirty, Sophie crashes hard. One minute she’s explaining why the birdhouse needs a “tiny welcome mat for bird feet,” and the next she’s curled against my shoulder, rubbing her eyes with her fists.
I carry her upstairs while Lauren begins clearing the dishes. Sophie’s room smells like crayons, the bed covered in stuffed animals that look like they’ve just finished a long, exhausting negotiation.
I tuck the blanket around her while she blinks up at me.
“Dad?”
“Yeah, bug?”
“Do you think birds actually want houses?”
I think about it, looking at her small, tired face. “Probably. Especially when it rains.”
She nods, satisfied that the universe makes sense again. Then, quieter, she adds, “Mom won’t be here tomorrow.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“She’ll come back, though.”
“She will,” I promise, smoothing her hair.
She closes her eyes, drifting off before I’ve even reached the doorway. I stand there in the quiet, envying the way kids trust things so completely. They love without hesitation, without the careful, guarded walls I’ve spent years building.
When I get back downstairs, the house has settled. Lauren is at the table, organizing her charcoal pencils into neat rows beside her half-zipped suitcase. The lights are dimmed, and the only sound is the rhythmic, metallic scrape of pencils against the table.
“Mark’s driving down tomorrow to meet me halfway,” she says without looking up. “Apparently the diner near the highway has terrible coffee, but he’s emotionally committed to the tradition now.”
“That sounds like a character flaw.”
She rolls her eyes, already grinning like a fool. “He’s an artist. That’s basically our brand. He called me at two in the morning last week because he got excited about a sculpture armature. He was covered in welding sparks, talking about negative space like he’d just discovered fire.”
I lean back, a small, knowing smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. “That’s romance.”
She lets out a happy breathless laugh and shakes her head. “It kind of is.”
There’s a genuine warmth in her voice when she talks about him. I’m glad someone looks at her like she’s the only person in the world.
Lauren zips one side of the suitcase closed, and the room settles into the kind of comfortable quiet that only exists between people who know each other’s history by heart.
Lauren studies me for a moment. “You’re doing it already.”
“Doing what?”
“Getting quiet. Bracing for the silence before I’ve even left.”
I lean back against the counter, crossing my arms. “I’m just standing in my kitchen.”
“You’re brooding in your kitchen,” she corrects. “With emotional intensity.”
I shake my head, but she just smiles, knowing she’s hit the mark.
“You always do this,” she says more gently. “You brace for the empty space before it’s even here. You think if you don’t carry the weight of everything yourself, it isn’t real.”
I look down at the counter instead of at her. I look at the glitter still stuck beside the fruit bowl, the purple paint fingerprints, and the ridiculous birdhouse sitting in the middle of the mess.
“You don’t have to earn every good thing by suffering through it first,” she says.
I don’t have an answer for that.
? ? ?
The sun isn’t fully up when I wake to the sound of the front door clicking shut.
I don’t rush to the window. I know she’s gone—she’s always been good at leaving without making a scene.
I walk into the kitchen, the house feeling significantly larger than it did last night. The air is still, the silence creeping back into the corners. My gaze settles on the center of the table.
The birdhouse is still there, purple and crooked and covered in noodles.
I walk over to the sink and pick up the mug she used for her paint water. Clouds of purple swirl faintly along the bottom. For a second, I think about washing it, about scrubbing the evidence of the evening away.
Instead, I set it back down beside the birdhouse—glitter, noodles, and all. A small, messy piece of her left behind.
And for once, I let it stay.