I caught her hand and held it.
I made the eggs. Whitley ate at my kitchen table with her hair loose and her feet tucked up under her on the chair, and I was already planning what to make her for breakfast tomorrow.
Epilogue
Whitley
SCORCH HAD A VERY SPECIFICsystem for putting up a Christmas tree.
Step one: remove the box from the hall closet where it had apparently lived for six years without being opened.
Step two: spread all three sections of artificial pine across the living room floor and stand back with your arms crossed.
Step three: look at the woman he'd talked into moving her whole life two hundred miles southwest and say, "You're going to want to supervise this."
"Supervise it?" I set down my cider. "You want me to supervise it."
"I'm aware of my limitations."
"You ran logistics for a three-club rally."
"Those things aren't contradictory." He picked up the stand. "The stand goes first, right?"
I crossed the room.
The house was different at Christmas. Not changed. It was still exactly what it had been the first morning I'd walkedthrough it, spare and clean, everything in its place. But the early light this time of year came in low through the front windows and lay across the floor at a different angle, and it had been snowing since sometime in the night, fine and slow, laying itself across the mesquite and the limestone and the ridge. Gran's photo was on the mantle. Now it also had a string of lights I'd found at the hardware store in Bandera.
Three weeks back I'd signed the paperwork on the bungalow. Yellow door and all, to a young couple from Katy who'd probably paint it something sensible and never think about it twice. I stood on the porch the week before I left, gave it four minutes, and then I drove west.
I was exactly where I was supposed to be. New badge in my wallet from Hill Country Regional, a commute that was fifteen minutes of limestone and sky, and the Hill Country right outside the windows.
I crouched to fit the first section into the stand and Scorch came around to hold it steady. Twenty minutes and one disagreement about whether the middle section went in before or after the lights. It went in before; I was correct; he accepted this with the dignity of a man who would bring it up again in March, and the tree was up.
It listed left.
"It has character," Scorch said.
"It's listing at a twelve-degree angle."
"Character with a lean to it." His expression didn't move. "I've seen worse."
I adjusted it twice. He held it. The third time it stayed, close enough, and I let it go. Pre-lit, the label had said. All the lights still worked, which was more than I'd expected from a tree that had apparently been waiting a long time for someone to need it. I turned them on and the room went bright and Scorch had the good sense not to say anything.
The ornaments were underneath, most of them still in the original tissue paper, untouched, which told me everything I needed to know about the last six Christmases in this house. I unwrapped them one by one and handed them to him and he hung them, and we worked through them in an easy back-and-forth that had no reason to feel as natural as it did and felt that way regardless.
Loretta had taken up her position on the arm of the couch somewhere around the first ornament and had not moved since. Her green eyes tracked every piece from hand to branch. She was running her calculations.
By noon the tree was finished and the room smelled like artificial pine and the lights were doing their job. I stood back and took it in. It had turned out well, better than it deserved to, honestly, given that it had sat untouched through six Christmases still in the box.
Loretta stepped down off the couch arm, made her way across the room with her tail up, sat in front of the lowest branch, and made deliberate eye contact with Scorch.
Then she batted a single red ornament off the tree, watched it roll to a stop against his boot, and walked back to the couch.
"She reviewed it," Scorch said.
"She did."
"Verdict?"
