Winston’s mother passed away not long after her son, but Sunny was fairly sure she died of embarrassment rather than a broken heart.Her own family had wanted nothing to do with her or the kids in the aftermath of the scandal.They’d said they were afraid she would negatively impact their business reputations, which told her everything she needed to know about where she really stood with them.
The rest of the concert was fun, and thankfully, Chloe slept through it.She’d shot right past exhausted to fully off the cliff right about when Makayla finished her set.
The pie judging came next, and Sunny was startled at the big deal made over it.Although, she supposed this town wasn’t named after pie for nothing.The six finalists were brought up on the main stage and hundreds of people watched eagerly as the judges went down the line slowly, examining and tasting each pie.
Grace O’Donnell’s blackberry twisted-lattice pie decorated with artistic pastry leaves and berries took first by a margin the announcer described as “frankly rude.”Reno carried his fiancée around piggyback afterward while she held the blue ribbon overhead like a prizefighter.And soft, sweet, fragile-looking Grace, laughed the entire way.
Sunny stood at the edge of all of it with Chloe asleep on her shoulder and let it move through her.
She knew how to react to threats.But she had no response for all for this.It was an afternoon that simply kept being good.It handed her one true thing after another and didn’t present a bill at the end.
“You’re doing it again,” Hank said, beside her.
She hadn’t heard him come up.He had two paper cups of lemonade.He set them down, took Chloe from her, laid her down on a blanket in the shade.Then he handed her the cold cup, and she took it.Somewhere in the back of her mind she noted, against her will, that she was accepting things he handed her without even thinking about it first.
“I’m doing what?”she asked him.
“Standing at the edge, keeping watch.”He said it without weight, looking out at the crowd the same way she had been.“I do it too.Occupational hazard.I’m so used to being the one who spots serious injuries and reacts before the person even realizes they’re hurt that I forget I’m allowed to be in the photo.”
Off to her right, she spotted Madison and Presley.They had Lily up on a hay bale and were teaching her a clapping game of some kind with enormous solemnity.Just past them, the twins had located mud.Makayla was signing a little girl’s program with the gravity of Paganini.Jack stood watch over the entire operation with his hands in his pockets, bored, yet vigilant.
“They think you and I are an item,” Sunny said.She’d caught the looks all afternoon.Ruth Sanger’s friend at the jam booth, the way two women had gone quiet and pleasant when she and Hank stood near the lemonade together.“The town.They’ve decided we’re a ...” She didn’t finish it.She didn’t have to.
“I know,” Hank said.
“Does it bother you?”
He was quiet a moment.Up on the stage, somebody’s grandfather was murdering a Willie Nelson song and the afternoon light outlined everything around them in brightness.
“It bothers me that it’s not their business,” he said finally.“It doesn’t bother me the way you mean.”
She stood there with her sleeping daughter at her feet and her older daughter’s whole identity changed by one stranger’s kindness, and she let his answer stand without having to take it apart and look for hidden meanings.
She was living this afternoon in ink, not pencil, with no eraser anywhere near at hand.And for once she wasn’t panicked by that.
They motored back across the lake at dusk, the boat slow and quiet with sun-pinked and spent children.Chloe slept the whole crossing.Even the twins crashed as they finally, blessedly, ran out of steam.Presley sat in the bow with the trophy for winning best in show on her knees, and every so often she looked down at it to confirm it was still there.
Madison sat beside Hank with her head tipped back to find the first stars.Somewhere in the dark middle of the water she said to nobody, “That was a good day.”
Sunny had spent three years learning to hold things loosely: her housing, jobs, furniture, friends, because they couldn’t be ripped out of her hands hard enough to hurt.She’d gotten good at it.She’d thought she’d be good at it forever.
She sat in the stern with the wake spreading out silver behind them, and she understood with clarity she usually saved for account books, that sometime in the last three weeks she’d quit holding on loosely.She’d decided to keep this place.This life.It might be a salvaged thing and scarred, but it was too good and solid to let go of.The odd thing was she hadn’t noticed herself making the choice.
The dock drew near as darkness fell.Chloe didn’t wake even when Hank lifted her and climbed out of the boat.Sunny walked beside Hank up the hill toward the lit windows of a town that had, without asking her permission, started to feel like the bedrock under her feet instead of one more floor that might give way.
10
The dining room had been waiting eighty years for somebody to take it seriously, and Sunny had taken it more seriously than anything Hank had watched a person take anything in a long while.
It was a wonderful house, built honest, buried under decades of people who hadn’t listened to it or believed it.Hank had stopped being surprised by how much that bothered him.
He worked on a ladder, easing the last of the dropped-ceiling track loose from the wall.Sunny worked on her knees at the baseboard, loosening the last of the gray paint with a heat gun.The twins had been given the job of carrying scrap out to the truck, which kept them busy and theoretically out from underfoot, and Presley had set up at the bay window with her pencils to draw.Chloe was asleep in a laundry basket filled with clean sheets, because Chloe slept wherever the notion took her, like a cat.
It was, Hank thought, exactly the kind of morning he’d spent years telling himself he didn’t want or need.Loud.Cluttered.Full of children and a new woman in his life.He’d built himself a quiet house on purpose, closed up and covered with sheets the rooms he didn’t use, and learned to call it peace.But now there was sawdust flying and a toddler asleep in a basket, and the rooms he’d shut were coming open one at a time whether he’d decided to open them or not.
He climbed down from the ladder with the last of the dropped ceiling tracks, distracted by his thoughts.Which was why he didn’t pay attention to the ladder behind him.
He should’ve been watching it.He knew exactly how a child’s brain calculated risk, which was to say not at all.At least not at seven.And he knew Harris had spent the whole morning intently watching him climbing up and down it.
