“Ow,” Hank yelped.
Chloe laughed as if he’d done it entirely for her benefit, and the sound went straight through some old, locked door in him he hadn’t known still had its hinges on.
“She does that to everybody,” Presley informed him.
He looked up.Madison was halfway down the stairs, looking around in disbelief at the chaos that had been unleashed down here in the span of a few minutes.
Jenson held the stethoscope out toward her like an offering and said, “Come hear my heart.”
Hank watched in disbelief of his own as his careful, contained, locked-up-tight girl come the rest of the way down the stairs and gravely listened to a seven-year-old’s heartbeat.
She caught her father’s eye over the boy’s head.And for one unguarded second, before the caution climbed back into her face, she gave him a look that said,isn’t this something?
He also thought he caught a glimpse of her thinking, Can we keep them?
Sunny stopped cold in the dining-room doorway, staring at the Idaho water stain.
“Hi, Sunny,” Madison called out.
Sunny turned and called back a cheerful greeting.Her gaze took in her children swarming around Hank, lifted to her youngest perched on his hip, and for a moment, she smiled.
She caught herself at it the same instant he looked back at her, and they both looked quickly away.Outside, the rain that had been thinking about it all morning finally began to come down, soft and steady.
Sunny asked Madison and Presley to help her measure the dining room, and Hank stood in the middle of his loud, invaded, un-quiet house, the Tyrant on one hip, taking it all in.As much as he’d dreaded his quiet being disturbed, he had to admit that this was ...not exactly fun, but certainly ...stimulating.
He’d always wanted a big family, but Lorraine had been unwilling to have another child after Madison.It was just as well.She’d barely managed to care for one child.Any more would have completely overwhelmed her and been awful for the kids.
This is what it would have been like.
Well, not exactly like this.These children were happy and obviously well-loved by a parent who had a modicum of control over them.
As Harris and Jenson plied him with questions about the other medical equipment in the glass-doored cabinets along the wall, he reminded himself that the only way to earn a child’s respect was to give it to the child first, and then hold one’s ground when the child eventually challenged the adult’s authority.
Through the window he could see the aluminum porch chair, out in the rain with water dripping from it, holding its ground.
He understood exactly how it felt.
5
The dining room smelled like dust, old varnish, and the staleness of a room that hadn’t properly breathed for years.Sunny stood in the middle of it on the first real morning of renovation with a paint scraper in one hand and the deep, faintly illicit happiness of being about to take something apart.
“You’re sure we’re allowed to do this?”Madison hovered in the doorway with her dark hair knotted up out of the way and one of her father’s flannel shirts on over her clothes, the sleeves rolled three times to find her hands.She held the second paint scraper anxiously.
“Your dad signed a release this morning that I typed up myself, mostly to watch his face while he read it.”Sunny knelt at the wainscoting, where somebody—in a decade that ought to be ashamed of itself—had painted battleship gray over the original.“And he fixed the leak before we touched anything.Rule one of restoration.You don’t bring a body back to life while it’s still bleeding.”
Madison grinned.“And he griped about fixing that gutter the whole time he was on the ladder.But quietly.To the gutter.”
That sounded exactly right.In two weeks of working in his front parlor-turned-office, she’d learned Hank did his complaining the way other men prayed, privately, often aimed at inanimate objects that weren’t cooperating with him.
She scored a line through the gray with the corner of the scraper and worked a curl of paint loose with her thumbnail.It came away in a long, satisfying ribbon, and underneath ...
“Oh,” Madison said, very quietly.
...underneath was beautiful, age darkened oak.The grain rayed out in the nearly black stripes against rich gold that the old mills used to call tiger stripe.It looked entirely unbothered by the decades it had spent buried under dull gray.
“That’s been under there the whole time,” Madison said in wonder.
“Everything that’s best in this house has been hidden under something else.”Sunny sat back on her heels and smiled at the honest wood she’d just uncovered.The old joy of doing restoration work rose to the surface of her awareness, shocking her.She’d thought her first life had permanently curdled it for her.
