I cried.
I hadn't cried for her. Not really. I'd cried at the funeral the way a man cries at a funeral, one hand on the back of a pew, one hand at his side. I'd stepped around the boxes in the hallway for a year and a half and not cried, and tonight on the floor with a woman I'd kissed for the first time two hours ago, I cried for an old golden retriever I'd buried under a rose, and I cried for a woman who'd left the porch light on for me at six in the morning, and I cried because the two of them were the last things in this house that had been mine.
Astrid held my hand.
She didn't say a word.
After a while, she lifted my hand to her mouth and kissed the inside of my wrist, once, the place where her thumb had been on the drive home, then set it back down on her thigh and kept her hand on top of mine.
I let my head go down on her shoulder.
She let it stay there.
At some point, the kitchen got the gray it gets right before the sky starts going. Penny's water bowl was still by the back door.I'd have to put it away in the morning. I'd have to do a hundred things I didn't have to do yet.
I sat on the floor with Astrid Matthews and didn't do any of them.
She turned her head against my hair, after a long time, and said, very quietly, "Do you want me to stay?"
I lifted my head off her shoulder.
I looked at her.
Honey-brown hair coming out of the knot she'd put it in for our date. The lipstick was gone. The small gold hoops she'd put on at the door were still at her ears. She'd cried at some point, and I hadn't seen her do it. The tracks were dry on her cheeks already.
"Yes."
"Okay."
"Astrid."
"Yes?"
"I don't mean?—"
"I know what you mean. I'm staying."
"Moose?”
"I already messaged Audrey. She's with him tonight.”
"Okay.”
She got up off the floor and held her hand out to me. I took it. She pulled me up the rest of the way and didn't let go.
She walked me to the bedroom at the end of the hall, the one that had been my grandmother's and had been mine for eighteen months. She turned the bed down on one side. She took her own shoes off, set them at the foot of the bed, and got under the quilt fully dressed, on the side closer to the door.
I lay down next to her.
She put her hand on my chest.
I put my hand over hers.
The breath went all the way down for the first time in eighteen months. Not the breath of a man let off a hook. The breath of a man who'd finally started to grieve.
I didn't mean Penny.
I didn't have to mean Penny.
