He crossed to the bouncer first. Kissed Nova on the head. Then he crossed to me at the table, put his hand on the side of my face, and kissed me on the mouth. Short, warm, tired.
He sat down across from me. He looked at the list on the table between us—the insurance company, the landlord, the bank, the medical leave extension—and his eyes moved down it without picking up the pen.
"The insurance company needs the policy number," I said. "I don't have it."
"They can look it up with your social." He was still looking at the list. "I'll call tomorrow."
"I can call."
"I said I'd call."
I looked at him. He looked at the list. The tiredness was in the set of his shoulders, the particular stillness of a man who had been moving for twenty-four hours and had just stopped.
"Duke."
He looked up.
"I can make one phone call."
He took a deep breath. Something moved across his face—the recognition of what he'd just done, the small correction happening in real time. He sat back.
"Yeah," he said. "Sorry. Call them." He rubbed the back of his neck. "I just—yeah. Sorry."
I let it go. He meant well. He always meant well, and today, he was running on nothing, and the difference between taking care of me and taking over was a line that blurred when he was tired. I knew that about him now.
He kissed the side of my head, breathing me in, before he clocked the lasagna container on the counter. "What's this?"
"My mom came by."
He read my face. "Yeah?"
I told him the parts that mattered. That she said she had been wrong, about me, about him, about what she had been measuring him against for nine months. That she apologized.
Duke took it in. His elbows on the table, his bandaged hands resting on the surface between us.
"That's good, Aud. That's really good." A beat. "How did your mom know about the fire?"
I shrugged. "She must've seen the address somewhere. Drove herself."
He nodded.
I pushed the scrap paper across the table to him. The list I'd been staring at all day. Insurance. Landlord. Bank. Medical leave. He picked it up with his bandaged hand, awkwardly, and read it.
"The amendment form," I said. "For Nova's birth certificate. It was in the apartment. I need to reprint it from the state site, and we'll both have to sign in front of a notary."
He nodded. He picked up the pen from the table and wrote something at the bottom of my list in his handwriting, left-handed and crooked because his right hand was the worse of the two.
I looked at what he wrote. Notary—town clerk's office, open Tues/Thurs.
"I asked Lou," he said. "His wife did a name change last year. The town clerk has a notary on staff."
I looked at the list. My handwriting at the top, his at the bottom. The amendment form in the middle, one item among four, sitting on a piece of scrap paper on a kitchen table between a lasagna container and a man who had already looked up where to find a notary.
He stood up. Kissed the top of my head. "I'm going to take a shower. I smell like the firehouse."
He went down the hall. I heard the bathroom door. The water.
I sat at the table with the list between my hands. His handwriting next to mine. The form I'd held in a drawer for three months was ash, and the man whose name belonged on it had just written the address of the notary's office at the bottom of my to-do list like it was the simplest thing in the world. For him, itwas. He asked, I said yes, and now we were going to the town clerk on Tuesday.
