The hallway door opened and Bonnie stepped into the outer office to greet him.As Sunny picked up Chloe from the mayor’s chair, she spied a big man in a pressed shirt who filled the whole space.He had a rancher’s hands and a politician’s smile, and he aimed both at Bonnie.
“Bonnie.Sweetheart.”The smile did not move.“Saw the mayor’s light on.You’re putting in awful long hours for a job you haven’t got yet.”
“Long hours for the job I’m already doing, Dale.”Bonnie’s voice stayed pleasant.But Sunny noted what the pleasant tone cost her.
“Sure you are.”Tolliver’s gaze drifted to the open office, to Chloe and Sunny stepping out.Sunny saw him run a swift inventory that filed her somewhere betweendecorativeandbeside the point.“Running a town’s more than tidying up after a man, though.It’s knowing folks.Knowing what a place like Cobbler Cove actually is.Some things just don’t fit on a spreadsheet.”He winked—winked—at Bonnie.“No offense to all your hard work, Little Lady.”
Sunny felt outrage on Bonnie’s behalf surge up her throat.She swallowed it with difficulty.She was four weeks into this town and ninety seconds onto this woman’s payroll.It was not her fight to start.But the work of not starting it left her hands unsteady enough that Chloe sensed her distress and abruptly went still and silent, staring warily at the stranger.
Tolliver helped himself to a peppermint from the dish on Bonnie’s desk and left, taking most of the air in the room out the door with him.
“Who’s that?”Sunny asked.
“Dale Tolliver.He’s already declared that he’s running for mayor.If I don’t run against him, no one else in town will.”
“Does he have a chance of winning?”Sunny asked.
“He might.He’s got the ranchers, and he’s got the vote of everyone in this valley who’d rather believe Lucas Shoemacher is a wronged old man than believe what us widows are saying about the fire.Dale’s whole campaign is,Nothing’s wrong here.Never was.People want to be told that.It’s restful.”She looked tired for exactly one second, then put it away somewhere.“My whole campaign is that the books have to add up.That one’s not sexy or exciting.But it’s what matters.”
“The books will add up when I’m done with them,” Sunny declared.“That’s a promise.”
She drove back to Hank’s with Chloe asleep in her car seat and a box of the town’s ledgers in the trunk.She found him on the front porch in the aluminum chair, drinking a glass of lemonade and supervising the twins, who were demonstrating, at considerable length, the many uses of the tape measures he was never getting back.
“I took a second job,” she said, coming up the steps.She braced for the thing every man in her old life would have done with the news: the frown, theis that wise,the condescension dressed up as concern.
Hank turned it over.“The town’s books, by any chance?”
“Bonnie cornered me.She got me the original drawings of your house and I was grateful.She caught me in a weak moment.”
He took a slow sip of his drink.“So ...my desk’s about to be buried all over again.”
“I built your desk a system.That system will hold.”She sat down on the porch’s only other seat, a paint-flecked stepstool left over from the demolition because the aluminum chair was spoken for and evidently always would be.“You’re not going to tell me it’s too much.”
“Didn’t figure it was my place to.Besides.A town with its books in order is a town that’s a far sight harder to lie to.Strikes me as the kind of thing a person ought to be willing to be weak over.”
He went inside and returned in a minute with another glass of lemonade over ice.As she took it, their fingers brushed on the cold, sweating glass.Her pulse leaped, and his gaze snapped to their hands.Neither of them said anything about it, and she found herself looking out at the children for a moment longer than her children, strictly speaking, required.
That night, after the kids had been fed and bathed and mercifully defeated by sleep, Sunny carried the town’s ledgers into her living room and set the boxes on the floor.
By every rule of arithmetic she trusted, she’d just made her life impossible.But by every rule she didn’t trust yet, it was going to be fine.
Rose had taken to sending Jack over to ride herd on the children a few afternoons a week and neither of them would hear a single word about being paid for it.Natalie, who taught a summer camp at the elementary school had offered to absorb all four kids into the morning program.
Then there was Madison, who’d discovered she’d rather captain four kids than sit alone in her beautiful old room.She babysat on the days Jack didn’t come over.
As for Hank, he’d said nothing whatsoever about any of it.He’d simply thrown his loud, half-wrecked, gorgeous house open and let her whole family move through it as though it had been built for exactly this many people.
For three years Sunny had kept a private ledger no one could see, and at the top of every column had stood the same running figure—how much longer until I can leave.Leave California.Leave the whispers.Leave the pitying or scornful looks.
She sat on the living room floor looking at the ledgers and realized she hadn’t thought about leaving this place in weeks.There was nowhere else she was trying to get to anymore.There was only here, loud and unfinished and full of other people’s children and her own.
She picked up the first ledger and went to work on a set of numbers she wanted, for once in her life, to come out true.
7
Saturday dawned hot and bright, the lake lying flat as hammered tin between the mountains, and by eight in the morning Hank had the front porch torn down to its bones.
He had known the floor was bad.He had not known how bad until he set a pry bar under the first board and it came up in his hand soft as wet cardboard, the joist beneath it gone dark and punky and smelling of slow rot.That was the trouble with old houses.The damage always ran further under the surface than a person expected.Indeed, that was the trouble with a good many things.
