“Yes.”
She breathes. “Okay. I still don’t agree to be inside your border,” she says. Her voice is mostly level.
“I know,” I reply.
“This doesn’t—”
“I know that too.”
She nods. Once. The nod that meanswe’re acknowledging this and not dissolving it into language.I receive the message and we stand at the counter for another thirty seconds that feel very long and very significant before she straightens. I straighten too and the game alley reintegrates around us.
She picks up the trophy from the counter where she’d set it. The tin thing, sixty years old. She carries it everywhere. She looks at me once more, the Lola-look I’ve been watching since day one and will apparently never fully decode.
Then she walks away up the game alley.
I watch her go.
Yeah, I think.
Pack.
Chapter 20
Lola
Friday night I don’t pretend I’m going back to Doris Harrow’s. I don’t construct a reason to stay. I don’t wait to be invited. I show up at the pack house at six with the leftover honey from the stall and a bag of the good bread Tristan made. I set them on the kitchen counter. Tristan looks at the bread and at me and does the quiet-pleased thing, and that’s the full extent of the negotiation.
I live here now, apparently.
I’m not examining this. I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing.
This Friday evening has a different feel than the previous ones, and I notice it from inside it, which is new. Before, I’ve been noticing things from a careful remove, by observing the room, observing myself inthe room, keeping the analytical distance that lets me pretend I’m here for reasons rather than wants.
Tonight I don’t have the distance.
Tonight I’m just in it.
Tristan makes dinner with the bread and something slow-cooked that has been running since this morning and fills the whole house with a smell that is one of the better things that has happened to me in recent memory.
Jack sets the table with the chaos of someone who knows where everything is and chooses to be chaotic about it anyway. I take the stack of plates from him mid-process and do it properly. He watches this with an expression of delight like I’ve performed a magic trick.
“She fixed my table,” he says, to the room.
“Your table was wrong,” I point out.
“My table was artistic.”
“Your table was going to cause someone to have an uneven number of glasses.”
“That someone would have coped.”
“Now they won’t have to.” I set the last glass. “You’re welcome.”
Ryan comes in and stops in the doorway. He looks at the table and then at me.
“She fixed it,” Jack says again.
“I can see that,” Ryan replies, and there’s something in his voice that I put in the pile of things I’m not examining.
