Chapter 6
Tank
I’m starting to understand a fraction of Lindy’s exhaustion after two nights in Pat and Lindy’s guest room.
With Evangeline—Evie as I’ve taken to calling her—screaming all night as though the world’s very survival depends on her decibel level, we’re all a bunch of zombies.
The coffee has hardly finished brewing when we descend on the pot like a bunch of feral honey badgers.
As if coffee can really help negate the effects of multiple nights of no more than two consecutive hours of sleep. But right now, the hope of caffeine is all we’ve got.
I’ve always been a man who requires more sleep than most, but once I hit fifty, it’s like my body doesn’t fully activate if I get less than nine hours.
This morning, I wake with a sore back and a mild headache.
My eyes feel gritty and my limbs too heavy.
Two nights in a row of this, and I can feel myself powering down like a used-up battery.
Only Jo and Evie are seemingly unaffected by the lack of sleep.
Jo is dancing around in a ballerina skirt, waving a princess wand with streamers in front of her sister.
The baby tracks every movement from some kind of bouncy chair swing contraption they definitely did not have when my kids were little.
Every time Jo passes by, Evie smiles a big gummy smile.
It makes me feel slightly more human. But no less exhausted.
“I’m sorry, Pop,” Pat says, glancing up at me with red-rimmed eyes. “I thought maybe you’d sleep through it. Like Jo.”
I don’t know how the whole town of Sheet Cake didn’t hear Evie. It’s a shock that Chevy, one of Sheet Cake’s deputy sheriffs and what my sons call a bonus brother, didn’t show up because of a noise complaint.
“What’s like me?” Jo asks, flouncing over and giving Pat a gentle tap on the head with the wand.
He immediately pretends this turned him into a frog and begins hopping around the kitchen, chasing her with loud noises that I think are supposed to be ribbits.
He sounds a little more like a screaming goat with indigestion.
Jo immediately forgets her question. Squealing, she darts away. Evie coos and kicks her feet wildly, dislodging the tiniest purple sock from her foot in the process. The dogs match their morning energy and join the chase, barking and playfully nipping at Pat.
It’s the best kind of chaos, triggering not a memory, but what I call memory feel.
I think of memory as related to a specific moment in time I can actively remember and picture in my mind. Memory feel is when something I see or hear or even smell recreates how I felt in a longer expanse of time. It’s almost a more visceral form of nostalgia that washes over me from time to time.
Right now, the memory feel sweeps me back to the best of days—right after I retired and was home a lot.
Before Michelle got sick. When the Austin house was all noise and mess and chaos and joy.
Even my current body-aching exhaustion fits in with the wave of emotion, and I find myself grinning at the scene before me.
Lindy’s smiling too, but it quickly gets swallowed up in a yawn. She folds her arms on the counter, dropping her head onto them and closing her eyes. “Oh, to be young again,” she mutters. “To sleep through a screaming baby and not need caffeine to feel human in the morning.”
“As the oldest one in the room—not counting the dogs, who I think in dog years, might both be my senior—I am qualified to speak on this. And you are not old,” I tell her.
She peers up at me with one eye. “But I’m not young enough to function like this.”
I give her a serious, assessing look before quietly asking, “Are you okay? I mean, I know the no-sleep thing is hard, and I’m certainly feeling it myself, but are you truly doing okay right now?”
Lindy sits up, staring at me for a moment before she smiles softly.
Leaning over, she pats me on the arm. “Thank you for asking. The sleepless night part is not fun. I had blocked it out because it’s been so long since I did the all-night-long thing.
It jogged my memory of that one,” she says, jutting her chin toward Jo, who is now the frog, while Pat twirls around the room with the wand.
Evie has somehow fallen asleep in the last two minutes and has one small fist jammed in her mouth, sucking as she sleeps.
“I’ll get through it. What I do know is it won’t last. People always say you should enjoy every moment and that you’ll miss these times, but …
” Lindy shakes her head, mouth twisting into a sour expression.
“I never liked when people said things like that to Michelle. They never did to me—I think everyone prefers to shame mothers and then treat dads as heroes if they do something simple like take their own kids to the store. Michelle used to tell me that she tried to pick one joyful moment out of each day. Sometimes it would only be that—a moment. Many days were hard. Especially when I was traveling. But one moment? That felt doable to her.” I pause, feeling my throat tighten.
“I did the same thing after she died. After I … got better. I’d find one moment, even on the hardest day. ”
I’ve been watching Pat and Jo’s antics while Lindy spoke. Their game has turned from frog and princess to frog and frog. But when I hear a sniffle, I turn and find Lindy with tears streaming down her cheeks, dripping right into a fierce scowl.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and she startles, then rubs her face.
“Ugh. No—it’s not you. Well, it’s partly you, but please don’t feel bad.
Hearing about you and your wife and remembering you did this alone times four—it just got me.
Normally, I’d be moved at the thought, but I wouldn’t cry like this.
I hate crying,” she says, practically spitting out the words. “The only thing worse is throwing up.”
“Or both at the same time,” I offer, and she laughs.
“No, the worst is throwing up and having diarrhea at the same time,” Lindy says, at the exact second Pat joins us again at the counter.
He looks horrified. “Yuck! Why are y’all talking about that? It’s way too early in the morning for talk of bodily fluids of any kind. Don’t we have enough of that with Little Miss No Sleep who loves her diaper explosions?”
Lindy laughs, then presses up on her toes to give Pat a lingering kiss on the mouth. When she goes to pull away, he circles an arm around her waist and kisses her again. Clearly, the body fluid conversation did not bother him that much.
I’m about to clear my throat when Jo says, “Ewww! Enough with the kissing! Is this a kissing kitchen?”
Pat and Lindy break apart, both laughing.
“A kissing kitchen?” I ask, hoping the origin of what’s obviously an inside joke is something I actually want to know.
“We just watched The Princess Bride for the first time,” Pat explains.
“Jo moved from asking if every book is a kissing book to asking if just about every part of daily life is a kissing thing.” As though to illustrate, Pat grabs Jo and swings her up until they’re nose to nose.
“Is this a kissing wand?” he asks, nodding toward the wand in her hand.
Jo chucks it across the room. “Noooo!”
“Are you suuuure?” Pat gives her a loud kiss on the cheek that starts her giggles again.
“I hate to break up the party, but I think it’s time to get dressed for school,” Lindy says.
Pat begins marching toward the stairs with a wiggling Jo still laughing in his arms. “Is this a kissing tutu?”
“No!”
“Is that a kissing laugh?”
“No!”
They disappear upstairs, the sound of loud kisses and laughter trailing down. There is a blessed beat of quiet, and Lindy sighs.
Too soon, it seems, because Evie, having lost the fist she was gnawing in her sleep, begins fussing and rooting around.
“Funny how she saves all the screaming for the middle of the night. Don’t you, little nugget?” Lindy asks, unbuckling the baby and lifting her into her arms. She settles onto the couch to feed Evie.
Glancing away, I take a sip of coffee, which is now lukewarm.
I almost choke on it when Lindy asks, “So, how’s the baker staying in your place? Have you talked to her lately?”
I have not talked to Rose, though it’s been a battle every time I pick up my phone not to text.
After buying all of the baking things for the kitchen, I found myself in the grip of second-guess panic. It felt like the right thing at the time to supply her with anything she might need. I felt good about it. Like I’d taken care of her but also surprised and delighted her.
But almost immediately after talking to her on the phone, I wondered if it was too much. I mean, obviously—yes, it was too much. Normally, that’s my thing. I like going overboard to take care of the people in my circle. Some might say that I spoil them.
But for someone I’ve only had one real conversation with …
I’m afraid I might have showed my hand a little bit.
Because Pat was right with everything he said the day I arrived.
I do like Rose. There’s an unassuming beauty about her that I noticed the first time I met her.
Not just her physical attributes, which are absolutely lovely, but something about the way she carries herself, a brightness in her blue eyes that seems to be lit from within.
If I weren’t so used to not noticing women, to not thinking about a relationship as a thing that still existed for me, maybe I would have been delivering gifts of stand mixers from the start.
A whole bouquet of mixers, a different color for each day of the week.
Had I thought of this the other day, I might have done it, so I guess it’s good that I didn’t.
I would have loved to hear the fight in her voice as she tried to tell me it was too much, that she couldn’t possibly accept.
For whatever reason, it took Rose quoting from an old cartoon in a sweltering hot room to make me blink awake and see what was right in front of me.
To admit that maybe the possibility of hummingbird cake wasn’t the only thing drawing me into the bakery a few times a week.
I’d been completely disarmed by her charm and her humor, even though she was clearly flustered.
It had been years since I enjoyed that kind of back and forth with a woman, and the flirtatious wordplay made me hungry for more.
I was like a man who’d grown so used to going without, that one tiny taste was all it took to make me realize I had actually been starving for years.
For the last two nights, while listening to the soundtrack of Evie exercising her lungs and her free will, I could only think of Rose.
I wanted to text her at two a.m., though thankfully, even in my exhausted state, I had enough sense not to.
I didn’t want to overwhelm her, to come on too strong too fast. And right now, I think my medium setting is broken.
After talking to her on the phone and being interrupted by Evie, I thought I should give her some space. Maybe I was really giving myself some time to parse out how I’m feeling.
Somehow, that hasn’t felt right either.
“Uh, Rose is fine, I guess.”
Lindy’s smile is sly. “Too early to talk about it?”
“To talk about what?”
“Riiiiight.” Lindy winks. “Well, just for the record, I think it’s high time you do something for yourself. You spend more than enough time keeping us all in line. Falling in love seems like the perfect next step for you.”
I can feel heat rising up my neck. “No—it’s not—she’s just—”
Lindy laughs. “Pretend I didn’t say anything.” Her expression grows serious, and the shift in gears is so quick I almost get left behind. “Thank you again for checking on me, Tank. It really does mean so much. And I’m sorry you haven’t gotten any sleep.”
I draw in a breath. “Eh. I’ll be fine.”
“You will,” she says, and I don’t think she’s talking about sleep anymore.
But I’m still thinking about it and wondering if there’s another option besides a hotel by the highway when Chevy pops inside the house. His fiancée, Val, practically pushes him aside as she makes a beeline for the baby.
“Give me that little baby with the big name,” she coos, and though Lindy was burping her, she gladly hands the baby to Val.
As the two of them fuss over Evie, Chevy sidles over and helps himself to a mug of coffee. Seeing as it’s the last one, he starts setting up a fresh pot and then glances over at me.
“How’s it going?” he asks. “You look uh … alive?”
I chuckle at this. “Barely. I was just thinking I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a noise complaint from the sounds at night over here.”
“Can’t be worse than the coyotes,” he says. “I was actually hoping I’d run into you. Had a little bit of trouble and thought you might be able to help.”
“When?”
“Now would be good.” Chevy’s casual tone belies a harder look in his blue-gray eyes.
Curiosity piqued, I rinse my mug out in the sink and grab my boots. “Let’s go, Sheriff.”