Whatever residual tension is left in the shop eases, and I smile.
I can't help it.
Ma’s cooking does something to me that very little else in the world can match, and judging by the way Cliff's shoulders have dropped two inches, I'm not alone.
"Are we going to her place?" Adam asks as he finishes his drink.
"She's coming to ours," Perrin says, pulling a rag from his back pocket and wiping his hands. "Her dining room table won't fit all of us anymore."
Adam blinks. Then something shifts in his expression, bright and immediate, like a kid who's been told there's a surprise waiting at home. "We're using the dining room?"
"That's the plan."
Adam turns to Elowen. "We have a dining room," he says, like it occurred to him.
"I know," she says. "I've seen it." She smiles as Adam’s excitement grows. “We even had a conversation in it.”
"But we never use it," he says. "It just sits there. Looking beautiful and completely wasted."
“Why is that?” Elowen looks between all of us with genuine confusion. "Why do you all crowd around the kitchen island like you're in a studio apartment?"
Everyone looks at Cliff.
"It felt too big for only four people," he says. "It’s a pain in the ass to carry everything down the hall when we can all eat and clean up in one spot.”
Adam opens his mouth, closes it, then opens it again. "There are five of us now," he says, and the smile that spreads across his face is so wide and so genuine that it makes something in my chest pull tight. "We finally have enough people to use the damn dining room."
We all work together to close up the shop.
Perrin wipes down his tools and puts them back in theexact order that makes him happy, but drives everyone else insane. Adam finishes his drink and tosses the can into the recycling before locking up the office. Cliff does a final walk of the lot, checking all the locks.
Elowen holds the shop door while Perrin carries out the last of the supply crates. She hands Cliff his keys when he can't find them, pulling them off the hook by the office door without being asked.
Then she falls into step beside Perrin on the way to the car, their shoulders almost touching, still talking in a low, easy way.
I watch her from the bay door for a second before I kill the lights.
Three weeks ago, she was sleeping on a cot mattress on the floor of a terrible apartment, completely alone.
And now she's laughing at something my mate said, waiting to go home and eat my mother's cooking at a dining room table that finally has enough people around it.
I hit the lights, and Adam calls out.
“Hey!” He’s still inside, gathering up the scattered shop towels from the tool chest and the workbench, and the hood of the Audi, balling each one up and lobbing it toward the laundry bin in the corner with varying degrees of success.
"Come on, Durrant," I call. "Ma doesn't wait for anyone."
"She absolutely waits for me," Adam says as he rushes toward me. "I'm her favorite."
"You are not her favorite," Perrin calls back.
"I'm absolutely her favorite, and everyone knows it."
I catch him as he passes and slap his ass hard enough to make him yelp and break into a jog the rest of the way to the car.
After Dinner
Elowen
