Jojo shrugged, color rising on his cheeks. “It was a lot of cleaning bins and scrubbing floors. Not the fun side of produce. But I liked the ledgers. It was honest work.”
He grinned then, a real grin, like we were sharing a joke that nobody else in the house would ever bother to get.
Ethan gave up on the potatoes and started thumping a wooden spoon against the cabinet door. The sound was irregular but enthusiastic, like a garage band’s first practice.
Jojo looked over at him with the patient, world-weary smile of a parent already defeated by the day. “He’s learning to make music. I’m not sure the kitchen is ready for it.”
“I think he’s more percussion than melody,” I said, which surprised me by how much I meant it.
Jojo burst out laughing. “God, yes. He drums on everything. Arms, legs, the crib, me if I stand still too long.” He took another sip of coffee, grimaced again, but finished it anyway.
There was a stretch where neither of us said anything. Jojo watched Ethan. I watched Jojo watch Ethan. There was a rhythm to it: the way Jojo’s shoulders would rise every time Ethan went quiet, the way he’d relax again when the spoon started up. Like he’d never quite gotten used to the silence.
He looked at me sideways. “How’s the sleep going?”
I shrugged. “Better than last month. Emilio’s still obsessed with the late shift. Wakes up at four, screams until six, passes out for a nap at eight.”
Jojo nodded, as if I was reciting sacred knowledge. “Same here. If I ever meet a baby who sleeps through the night, I’ll assume it’s a government plant.”
That made me laugh—a sharp, sudden bark that bounced off the tile and startled even me. I clapped a hand to my mouth, as if it were a mistake.
Jojo looked at me, eyes soft and surprised, then smiled. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to break the peace.”
I shook my head. “You didn’t. I just—I haven’t heard a joke in a while.”
That was true. The only humor in the house lately had come from Hooper’s staccato one-liners, and most of those were aboutlivestock or the weather or things that, at best, barely counted as jokes.
Jojo’s face went serious, the way it sometimes did. “You doing okay?”
I blinked at him. “Yeah,” I said. “I think so.”
He didn’t press. He just refilled his coffee, sat down, and set about methodically picking dried food out of the sleeve of Ethan’s shirt.
“I wish I could say it gets easier,” he said, “but it just gets different.”
“I’ll take different,” I said.
We were quiet again, but it wasn’t the hard silence I’d known for most of my life. It was just two people in a kitchen, neither one trying to outlast the other.
Ethan finally tired himself out and flopped onto the floor, giggling at something only he could see. Jojo ignored him in the way that all good parents do: not by actually ignoring, but by keeping one ear cocked at all times, just in case.
“I brought a thing,” Jojo said, reaching into his bag and coming out with a plastic-wrapped bundle. “Burke made it, but he’s too proud to hand it over himself.” He peeled the plastic, revealing a small loaf of sourdough, dense and golden, the kind of bread that’s more meal than side dish.
“Thanks,” I said. “We’ll probably devour it before dinner.”
“That’s the hope,” Jojo said. “He thinks he’s Martha Stewart, but I swear half the time he forgets the salt.”
We both laughed at that, me again surprised by the sound and how easily it came.
Jojo looked at the table, then at me, then at the table again. “You ever think about leaving?” he asked, very quietly.
The question was so blunt that it stopped me. I looked at my hands, at the wood grain, at the pile of receipts I’d half-sorted.
“Sometimes,” I said. “But not lately.”
Jojo nodded, not as if he expected an explanation, but as if the answer made all the sense in the world. “I can’t imagine it anymore,” he said. “I keep thinking if I left, I’d just come right back.”
I let that sit for a minute, then said, “Yeah. Same.”
