3. Courtney
CHAPTER THREE
Courtney
Tom threw a dinner for the site team every time they cleared a major milestone, which was how Ryan and I ended up at a steakhouse off Colorado Boulevard on a Thursday night, Melody farmed out to my parents for a rare overnight, both of us dressed up enough to feel slightly like teenagers playing adult.
My mother had practically shooed us out the door when Ryan dropped off the overnight bag, delighted at the prospect of a full evening and morning with her only grandchild, and I'd spent the drive over doing the math on how long it had been since Ryan and I had gone anywhere together without a diaper bag or a bedtime deadline hanging over us.
Four months, at least. Long enough that I'd forgotten how it felt to put on real shoes.
"You’ll actually get more than five minutes with Michelle tonight," Ryan said in the car, fixing his collar in the visor mirror. "You’ve met her a handful of times, but usually at site events where everybody’s moving in six directions at once."
"I feel like I already know her better than that. You’ve told me approximately four hundred Michelle stories."
"They're all true."
"That's what worries me."
She was exactly as I remembered from the handful of times our paths had crossed: tall, sun-weathered in the particular way of someone who spent real time outdoors, with an easy manner and a laugh that came from somewhere low and unhurried.
She’d already claimed the seat next to the head of the table when we arrived, like she’d done this enough times to know which chair avoided the draft from the door.
"There she is," she said, standing to give me a quick hug. "I was starting to think Ryan only brought you to events where neither of us had time to finish a conversation."
"That’s because he’s afraid we’ll compare notes."
"Smart man. Sit. I want the version of you I get directly for once instead of whatever he decides belongs in a Courtney story."
I sat, amused by how easily she picked up a conversation we’d never quite had time to finish.
By the time the appetizers came, I understood something about Michelle that our brief earlier encounters and Ryan’s four hundred stories hadn’t fully conveyed: she had absolutely no interest in flattering anyone, including Ryan, which was oddly reassuring.
"He tell you about the riser thing?" she asked at one point, cutting into a roll with more precision than a roll strictly required.
"The eighteen inches. Yes. Repeatedly."
"Did he tell you I had to talk him off a ledge about it, or did he skip that part and make himself sound like he handled it solo?"
"He mentioned you made him take a walk."
"I made him take a walk because he was about to write a change order angry, and angry change orders have typos, and typos cost money.
" She said it with the flat authority of someone who'd clearly seen it happen before.
"He's good at this job. He's just bad at knowing when to step away from a problem for ten minutes instead of white-knuckling through it. "
"You sound like you've had a lot of practice managing men who don't know when to walk away from something."
"Fifteen years in this industry, honey. I could write a book.
" She said it without bitterness, more like a woman reciting a résumé she was proud of.
"I came up on crews where I was the only woman on-site for the first six years.
You learn fast how to get taken seriously without losing your mind, or you don't last. I didn't have a choice about learning it.
Ryan's lucky I already know how to talk a stubborn man down from something dumb. Cheaper than therapy."
"Is that where the divorce comes in, or is that a separate lecture?"
"Separate lecture, and you'll need a second bottle of wine for that one.
" Michelle laughed, easy about it in a way that told me the wound, whatever it was, had scarred over years ago.
"Short version, I married a guy who wanted a wife who'd be home by five.
I was never going to be that wife. Some people aren't built for the compromise.
I'm better off, he's probably better off, and I get to eat dinner with people like you instead, so I count it as a win. "
Down the table, Ryan caught the tail end of that and leaned in. "I heard my name being dragged."
"We're discussing your flaws," Michelle said. "There's a list."
"There's a list," he agreed, easy, unbothered, and reached over to steal a piece of bread off my plate instead of his own, which was such a small, familiar theft that I didn't even react to it anymore.
Somewhere between the entrée and dessert, Tom stood to say a few words about the project, thanking the crew for pushing through a brutal stretch, and made a point of singling out Ryan and Michelle both for the riser fix, calling it "the kind of teamwork that keeps a job like this from falling apart.
" The table applauded, good-natured and a little rowdy after several rounds of drinks, and I watched Ryan duck his head slightly at the attention, pleased and a little embarrassed in the way he always was when praised in public, and Michelle simply raised her glass, unbothered, entirely at ease being seen.
"He hates being singled out," Michelle said to me, low, once Tom had moved on to thanking the electrical foreman. "Have you noticed that? Give him a hard problem to solve alone, he's fine. Give him applause in front of a room, and he turns into a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar."
"He's been like that since college. Hated his own birthday parties for years."
"That tracks." She smiled, easy, watching him across the table. "Good thing you married him instead of me. I'd have made him give a toast just to watch him suffer."
I liked her. That was the plain truth of it by the time dessert came around.
She reminded me, in a way I couldn't have explained to a stranger but understood completely, of Kate, Ryan's sister: unimpressed by his charm, quick to call him on nonsense, entirely comfortable telling him he was wrong in front of other people.
It was the kind of dynamic that only worked between people who genuinely respected each other underneath the ribbing, and watching it play out across the table, I felt something settle in me that I hadn't known was unsettled.
Ryan spent ten, eleven hours a day at that site.
It mattered, more than I usually let myself think about, that the person he spent most of those hours with was someone sharp and steady and entirely uninterested in being impressed by him.
The electrical foreman's wife, three seats down, leaned toward me at one point with a grin. "Bet you love having a work wife on the team. Keeps him in line when you can't."
"Something like that," I said, keeping it light because it was true in the most ordinary way possible.
Michelle wasn't a threat. She was logistics.
She was the person who made sure my husband ate lunch and didn't write angry paperwork, and if that made her something like a work wife, then I was grateful for her in the same uncomplicated way I was grateful for good daycare and a reliable mechanic.
"He's lucky to have her out there," I told Ryan later, in the car, my heels off and my feet up on the dash in a way that would have horrified me at twenty-five and felt exactly right at thirty-four.
"She'd tell you she's the lucky one. Keeps her entertained."
"I mean it. I worry less about the whole thing when I know somebody out there is actually looking out for you, not just the schedule."
"She's a good egg." He reached over and took my hand off my knee, threading his fingers through mine on the console between us, and for a few minutes we drove in the kind of comfortable quiet that only happened after a good night.
"Speaking of the schedule. Heads up, next Thursday's going to be ugly.
We've got the ownership walkthrough and I'm probably not seeing daylight most of the day. "
"Noted."
"But I've got Melody pickup on the calendar for Tuesday, and that one's not moving. I already told Tom I'm out the door by four thirty that day no matter what's on fire."
"You say that like fires wait for four thirty."
"They will this time," he said, with the particular confidence of a man who genuinely believed it, and I believed it too, because he'd never once let me down on a scheduled pickup in three years of us juggling this exact kind of math. "I want that one. She's been asking for the donut place again."
"You're going to rot her teeth out with that donut place."
"One tooth at a time," he said, and I laughed, and reached over to turn the radio up.
We didn't go straight home. Ryan took a detour past the overlook off Lookout Mountain Road, more out of habit than plan, the way we used to do in the early years when a night without a curfew felt like something worth stretching out.
We sat on the tailgate with the heater running and the whole grid of the city laid out below us, and he pulled me in against his side the same way he had a thousand other nights, and for a while neither of us said much of anything, because there wasn't anything that needed saying.
It was close to one in the morning before we finally made it home, to a house that felt strange in its quiet without a three-year-old's monitor crackling somewhere in the background, and neither of us minded the strangeness one bit.
My mother met us at the door the next morning, still in her robe, coffee in hand, looking entirely too pleased with herself for eight in the morning.
"She was an angel," my mother announced, before I'd even asked. "We made pancakes shaped like dinosaurs, badly, and watched approximately four hours of the same cartoon about singing vegetables. I'd like to do this again sometime, preferably soon."
"You say that now. Ask me again after she's asked you seventeen questions about why the sky is blue."
"I answered all seventeen. I made up at least twelve of the answers.
" My mother handed over Melody's overnight bag, considerably more disheveled than it had left in, and studied me for a second with the particular scrutiny she reserved for evaluating whether I actually looked rested. "You look happy. Good dinner?"
"Really good dinner. Ryan's coworker Michelle was there, finally got to put a face to about four hundred stories."
"And?"
"And I liked her. She's exactly what he's described, minus none of the personality he always undersells.
" I found Melody in the living room, fully absorbed in reassembling a puzzle she'd apparently already finished twice that morning, and scooped her up despite her token protest about being in the middle of important work.
"Thank you for this. I didn't realize how much I needed one night of feeling like a person instead of just a mom and a wife juggling logistics. "
"That's what grandmothers are for. Go home, both of you, and don't feel guilty about needing it." She kissed Melody's head and shooed us toward the door with the particular efficiency of a woman who had raised three children and knew exactly how precious an unscheduled morning actually was.
We drove home that morning, satisfied and easy in the particular way of two people who'd had a genuinely good night, Melody narrating the entire plot of her cartoon from the back seat with great enthusiasm, and I thought, with no reason yet to think otherwise, that Tuesday would go exactly the way every other Tuesday had gone for the last three years.