Dad laughs the kind of laugh I hadn't heard from him in longer than I wanted to count. He'd been doing that more since Lily decided my house was an extension of her daily route.
I stand on the porch a moment longer, hair still smelling like smoke from a brush fire we'd put out near the highway. First shift back. I'd spent most of it thinking about what I'd come home to. Whether she'd be here. Whether I wanted her to be. I know the answer to the second one. I just don't like it.
I open the door and find them on the living room floor. Both of them. My fifty-year-old father, on the floor, back against the recliner, cast stretched out in front of him like he's settled in for the long haul.
Lily is cross-legged beside him, surrounded by papers and folders and what looks like years of Dad's paperwork spread in messy piles across the carpet.
She's wearing an oversized sweater with a wide neck, the kind that shows her collarbones and shoulders and way too much bare skin. She loves those and I hate them. I don't need to be seeing more of her naked skin than necessary if I am to survive her.
Her hair up, or trying to be. Twisted into something on top of her head and clipped there, but that hair doesn't cooperate with containment. It's thick, dark, ridiculous amounts of it spilling out of the clip and down her neck and over her shoulders in loose waves that catch the lamplight like she's doing it on purpose.
She has reading glasses on. Oversized, a little too big forher face, and I've never seen her wear them before. They shouldn't work, but they do. They make her look like someone you'd find curled up in a library, someone you'd want to interrupt just to watch her look up at you.
She's got a calculator in one hand, highlighter in the other, sitting in my living room like she's been doing this her whole life. Like she belongs here. In my house. On my floor. Next to my dad.
"Hey, son." Dad spots me first. There's more color in his face than he's had in weeks. "How was the shift?"
"Fine. Brush fire off 101, nothing major." I drop my bag by the door and toe off my boots. "Why are you two on the floor?"
"Lily needed space to organize."
"So you got on the floor. With a broken leg."
"The recliner was limiting my range of motion."
"Your range of motion for what?"
"Pointing at things." He points at a stack of papers to demonstrate. "See? Can't do that from a chair."
No matter how much I try not to, my eyes find her like they've been trained. But here, in my own house, I don't have Rome or anyone else monitoring my every movement. Here I can look my fill.
She glances up at me over those glasses. As if she needed the help. Every day I tell myself today will be the day I stop staring. That someone else will walk into a room and hit me the same way. It never works.
"Hi." Her smile pushes the rims of her glasses up a notch.
"Hi." I move inside and lower myself onto the far end of the couch. Maximum distance. Smart. Necessary.
She tilts her head and slides the glasses up onto her hair, studying me.
"You smell like smoke."
"Sorry. Sometimes a shower doesn't cut it."
"No worries." She turns back to the papers. "Smells nice."
She's back to the papers, brow furrowed, bottom lip caught between her teeth, like the invoices require her full attention. Maybe they do. Or maybe she knows exactly what she said and is choosing not to meet my eye.
Dad's eyes flick to me, eyebrows shooting up. I keep my face still and give him an annoyed glare that he pointedly ignores.
Two weeks of her coming around. That's all it's taken for my father to see and hear enough to know exactly what's happening. He also delights in watching me suffer. It's become his primary source of entertainment since the accident.
"What is all this?" I gesture at the floor, desperate for a subject change.
"Your father's bookkeeping system." Lily holds up a folder with two fingers like it might be contagious. "And I use the word 'system' very loosely."
"She's being dramatic."
"Will, you better hope you are never audited, because this is a disaster." She's scolding him now, full force. "We are going to implement a better system than 'table for Dave,' mark my words."
