“Tell that one however you’d like,” he said with a shrug.He stood to take his cup to her sink because his Mother had taught him and his brothers that it was polite not to leave a dish on the table for his hostess.“It’s the only thing you’ve been right about and kind about in the same breath all month.”
She cackled at his remark and was still laughing as he let himself out into the long, late afternoon light.He’d driven over to turn the tide flooding this town around and found, the way he generally did, that the work was mostly a matter of looking straight at the one person nobody else had bothered to look at in years.
The house was nearly finished, and Hank kept catching himself standing in the middle of rooms with no work left to be done in them.
He’d never once stood in the front parlor without seeing a project in need of doing in here.The dropped ceilings throughout the entire house were gone, even on the third floor where he’d barely set foot since he moved in.The true ceilings soared fourteen feet overhead on the ground floor and twelve feet overhead on the second and third floors.Each room’s hand-carved ceiling medallions and original wood trim were stripped, sanded, and freshly re-stained.
The wallpaper Sunny had steamed off in long, ugly sheets had given way to the original paint colors and rolls of wallpaper dating back to the building of the house that she’d found in the attic and sent to a wallpaper restoration company that duplicated the lovely floral pastels upstairs and rich jewel tones downstairs.
The tall windows had all been taken out, restored to working order, repaired, re-finished, and re-installed, as well.Light streamed through the thick, faintly wavy original glass and crossed the oak floors the way it had when the floor was brand new.
Every single room he’d kept locked shut before stood open now, cleaned, restored, and redecorated with the treasure trove of original furnishings Sunny’d found in the attic and lovingly cleaned, repaired, and reupholstered with Madison’s eager help.
The house didn’t look new.Sunny didn’t do new.It looked like itself, the way it was meant to before forty years of people didn’t listen to it.It looked old, but sound and honest, the scars kept where they told a true story and mended where they didn’t.
He didn’t know what to do with six more bedrooms and two more bathrooms on the third floor, but they were ready for someone to fill them.Somewhere in the past few weeks, it had quit being just a house he owned and started being a place he was a part of.He was just the latest in a long line of people who’d lived here and become part of its history.
It felt good to be part of this home.To know it was alive and bustling with people the way it always should have been.He couldn’t picture it empty and quiet without Sunny’s brood and Madison and whatever neighbor kids happened to be here running in and out the slamming screen doors, laughing and yelling and living in this space.
He supposed that ought to frighten him more than it did.
Chloe had annexed the dining room’s window seat as her throne, her bed, and her court of law.The twins had been appropriated the entire fourth floor attic with its slanted ceilings as their playroom on the condition they quit using the laundry chute as a slide, a treaty they honored at a rate of roughly sixty percent.Presley had set her drawing things in the dining-room corner where the morning light fell best.And Madison, who’d come to him locked up tight as a bank vault, had taken to doing her summer reading on the floor in a heap of other people’s children.Twice this week he’d heard her laugh, really laugh, at something a seven-year-old said.
The only person in the house who never sat down was the one who’d brought it back to life.
Sunny worked hard and constant as if something were gaining on her.She’d carved up a grown man in front of three hundred people on Tuesday night and been back on her knees at a baseboard by seven Wednesday morning.Hank watched her cross the office a third time in ten minutes moving things that didn’t need moving and recognized the condition the way he would recognize his own face in a dark mirror.
Like him she’d learned that the moment she stopped moving, the thing she was outrunning would catch her.He knew that walk.He’d been doing it for the past five years.
He wanted to take some of the load off her but didn’t know how to do it for a woman who flinched at being helped.He’d worked out that it couldn’t be done head-on, so he did it sideways, the way he doctored patients too proud to admit they were hurting.
He lifted Chloe off Sunny’s hip without asking because Chloe lived on that hip and nobody could rest with thirty pounds of tyrant attached.He carried the heavy end of everything Sunny moved before she could reach for it.When she skipped lunch he didn’t tell her to eat.He simply set a plate down at Presley’s drawing table, said the light was best over there, and mentioned that somebody ought to keep Presley company while she worked.Sunny was halfway through the sandwich before she noticed she’d been outflanked.
And at the end of the day, when the kids went home for the evening and she came back to finish one last thing because she could no sooner leave a job half-done than stop breathing, he beat her to the kitchen and put the kettle on himself.
This evening, she stopped in the kitchen doorway, looked at the kettle, and then at him.Bewilderment crossed her face.“You don’t have to make me tea.”
“I know.”He got down two mugs.“That’s generally how I can tell something’s worth doing.”
She came in and leaned against the counter while the water heated.“I’m not used to this,” she said, more to the kettle than to him.“Somebody having my back.Catching things before I drop them.I keep waiting to find out what it’s going to cost me.”
“Nothing.”He measured out the tea and dipped the tea ball in the water several times before leaving it alone in the mug to steep.He set a timer on the stove for three minutes, the way she did it, which he’d learned without being told.
“That’s the part that’s hard to credit, I know.But there’s no invoice coming.”
“There’s always an invoice.”
“Not here,” he said it bluntly.“You’ve spent so long looking for the string attached to every kindness that you forgot some folks actually help others because they like helping others and do it naturally, without thinking.For better or worse, I’m one of those.Look for strings from me as long as you need to.I’ll still be here when you figure out why I do things for you.”
The timer on the stove buzzed, and they drank the standing in the half-dark.He’d drank something hot in the evening alone for more years than he cared to count, but in the past few weeks that had changed.And he liked it.
He wanted this.Not the way he wanted something he could talk himself out of by morning.He wanted it the way this house wanted to be lived in, its purpose for being built in the first place.He wanted to make this woman tea at the end of a hard day for the rest of the days and years he had.He wanted the loud, cluttered, multi-kid future he’d spent a decade telling himself—lying to himself—that he was better off without.
He’d built his whole life on the understanding that wanting something for himself was how the people he loved got hurt.But standing with her in his kitchen with her shoulder a foot away from his, he found himself questioning that belief.Hard.Sometime in the past week or two, it had gone quiet in his head.Stopped insisting it was the truth.And he was in no hurry to go looking for where that voice had gone off to.
He didn’t say a word of what he was thinking.It wasn’t a night for words, and he’d never had much use for them regardless.He made them tea and stood close to her to drink it.And he let the wanting settle inside him instead of turning it into a fight with himself.
When Sunny rinsed her mug and said she ought to go, he walked her out to the porch and the two ugly aluminum chairs that lived there, now.He didn’t reach for her.As always, he let her be the one to rise up on her toes in the dark and kiss him goodnight before she went down the steps.
