And he wanted them anyway.
He’d wanted things before but always talked himself out of it.This time he wasn’t succeeding.He wanted the woman and the children and the loud house in spite of knowing he was bad for them.
“Coffee,” he said, getting up because he had to say something safe.“Then I’ll carry this brave young man to the couch and we’ll all calm down.”
The house emptied slowly, the way it did nowadays.Natalie took her kids home at dusk with Harris sucking a Popsicle and telling how he got his injury again to anyone who’d listen.Hank went into the dining room to wipe the last of the blood off the oak floor.
“He’s really okay?”Madison asked from the dining room entrance.She’d seen plenty of her father’s calm voice aimed at other people.She knew, better than most, what it did and didn’t mean.
“He really is.I’ll check swing by their place and check him again before bed.”Hank wrung the rag out.“You did good today.Getting Presley out of the room so fast.That was the right move.”
“You saw that?”she blurted.“You seemed totally focused on Harris.”
“Responding to a wound like that is as much about the people around the patient as it is about getting the bleeding stopped.”
Madison picked at a bit of gray paint still clinging to the doorframe.Then she said, in the careful way the Steeles said true things, “Sunny fell apart.I‘ve never seen her do that before.”A beat.“But she let you fix Harris.”
“She did.”
“She doesn’t usually let people do stuff for her.”Madison considered a spot on the far wall.“She’s like you that way.”She pushed off the doorframe.“Anyways.I like them.Sunny.Presley.The munchkins.”She got as far as the stairs and added, to the banister rather than to him, “You’re different, lately.Lighter, or whatever.”And then she was gone up the stairs.
Hank stood in the stripped room with the rag in his hand and his daughter’s approval sitting on his chest like a warm stone.She’d come to him tied in knots, carrying a backpack she wouldn’t set down.Lighter or whatever.He would’ve worked on this place with his bare hands for a year to earn that sentence.
Sunny came back after supper to finish the last of the paint stripping because she would no sooner leave a job half-done than stop breathing.He offered to help but she turned him down.He got the impression she needed to do something with her hands to work off the rest of the stress from today’s scare.He took his guitar out to the porch while she worked.
He’d been playing guitar most nights of his adult life, the half-hour after the work was done and before sleep would have him.He never played for anyone else.It was the one thing he did that wasn’t for a patient or family or anyone but him.
He sat in the aluminum chair everyone hated and tuned the strings by feel in the blue darkness.Then he played the quiet, old songs his granddad had taught him to play on a porch a thousand miles away from here.
He didn’t hear the screen door, but he felt the porch take her weight.
Sunny stood there in the dark with an expression he couldn’t read.He stopped playing, his palm flat on the strings.
“Don’t stop,” she said softly.“I didn’t know you played.”She came and sat on the matching crappy aluminum chair Reno had rescued from someone’s trash at the curb and brought over as a joke, teasing that maybe Hank’s chair would look better if it wasn’t alone.
She murmured, “I’ve been in your home every day for almost a month, and I had you pegged as the mostknowableman I ever met.And here’s a whole new room in you.”
“Everybody’s got a room or two they keep locked up and sheeted over inside.”He started playing again, low.“You of all people ought to know that.”
“That’s fair.”A breath of a laugh.Then, quieter, “I keep waiting for you to be less than you are.Finding the catch.It’s the only thing I’m really good at, getting under what a thing’s pretending to be.”She watched his hands move on the strings.“I can’t find yours.It’s making me crazy.”
“Maybe there isn’t one.”
“There’s always one.”
“Not always.”He let the last chord echo in the wood frame.His eyes adjusted enough to the dark for her face to become readable, and what was written on it had him setting the guitar down beside him.“Sometimes the surface is true all the way down.Maybe you’ve spent so long searching for the rot that you forgot to allow for a thing to be just well built.”
She sat very still.The night breathed around them, cooling gently.
“You stepped in front of Marlene Bray for me,” she said.“You saved a goat from my sons.You fixed Harris’s wound today as if it was the most ordinary thing in the world, and you weren’t even ...”She paused on the edge of saying too much.But this time she swept on over the edge on purpose.“Nobody’s taken a burden from me in a long time.I forgot that I’m allowed to let others help me.”
“You are allowed,” he said.
He didn’t reach for her.He’d decided sometime in the last week that it would be her closing the distance between them because she’d too many things decided for her, and he’d be darned if he’d be one more.
So it was Sunny who leaned across the small dark space between their chairs, put her warm hand along his jaw, and kissed him.
It wasn’t a careful kiss.He would’ve bet on careful, from her.Provisional, in pencil, ready to be erased.And he would’ve been dead wrong.She’d obviously run the numbers twice and decided to enter it in ink.
