She was right there. Asleep, smiling faintly at nothing.
I got in the truck. I didn't look at him again. I pulled out slow and unhurried, like a man with nothing on his mind.
My hands were cold on the wheel. Cold all the way home.
20
Sophia
I woke before any alarm, on the one day I didn’t have to be anywhere, in the thin grey light that came through my curtains at the hour the birds got going.
I was alone. He’d gone before dawn — something muttered about the shop, getting in early, a hand spread flat between my shoulder blades and his mouth at my hairline and a low instruction to go back to sleep that I had, on the evidence, obeyed. But his side of the bed was still warm where his shoulder had been, and I’d rolled into it in my sleep without meaning to. I was wearing his t-shirt. I had no memory of putting it on. The cotton smelled of him — of the cedar shavings worked into the seams of everything he owned, and the plain soap he used, and under both the specific smell of the back of his neck, which I had no business knowing as well as I’d come to.
I lay on my side and let the night before come back in pieces.
His family had folded me in without ceremony — forty Maddoxes and honorary Maddoxes under the string lights, a four-year-old briefing me on a beetle, somebody’s grandmother beating me soundly at a card game I’d never heard of, and Caleb at the edge of all of it with a beer he wasn’t drinking, watchingme the whole while and not bothering to hide it. At some point he’d taken me upstairs to show me the room he’d grown up in — narrow bed, a shelf of boyhood trophies gone dull, a whole teenage life still pinned to a corkboard — and I’d gone soft over the thought of him at fifteen.
And then I’d shut the door, and we had not behaved at all.
That was the part that had me lying there at six in the morning, scandalized by myself. His family had been a stairwell away — and I had not cared. Up against the back of his boyhood door, with the party coming up through the floorboards, I’d been a woman I didn’t recognize. Sophia Walker. Senior trauma nurse. A person who color-coded her spice rack. Reduced, by one large unhurried man with a low voice and no doubt at all about what he was doing, to something that ought to come with a warning label.
I’d spent my whole life keeping every guardrail bolted down. He’d walked in and quietly taken them off, one by one, and I’d let him — which was the astonishing part, because I never had. Not once, not with anyone, in thirty years. With Caleb, I hadn’t even had to decide to.
I got up eventually.There was only so long a person raised on twelve-hour shifts could stay horizontal once the light was up, even one with nowhere to be and every reason to stay put.
The kitchen had quietly stopped being only mine. His mug sat upside down in my drying rack, the big ugly one stamped with the faded logo of a parts supplier two towns over, which he liked because it held exactly twice what a civilized cup should. I had to unplug his phone charger from the kitchen socket to plug in mine; his lived there now, coiled, beside the spot where minewent. His boots were on my porch. There was a flannel over the back of one of my chairs that I’d stopped thinking of as his and started thinking of as the one I threw on to take the bins out.
I made coffee and stood at the kitchen window with the cup in both hands, and looked across the road at his house.
Sycamore Row was a short street with a stupid name and a live oak halfway down that the developer hadn’t had the heart to take out, and his cottage sat directly across from mine, close enough that I’d once been able to pretend the man inside it was only the neighbor. That ship had not so much sailed as been set on fire at the dock. His place was now, in every way that counted short of the deed, one half of where I lived. His truck was gone. In the dark behind his partially opened garage door, I could just make out the Harley. The one I had now, God help me, actually ridden — arms locked round a man at a speed that should by rights have killed us both, and loved.
I drank my coffee and let myself have a thought I didn’t usually allow, which was that I was happy. Plainly. In the way I’d spent most of my adult life regarding with deep professional suspicion when I met it in other people.
I gave it about four seconds before the suspicion showed up on schedule. Then I told it to sit down, finished the coffee, and went to make something of the day.
Late morning,showered and eating toast standing up over the sink like the well-adjusted adult I am, I got a text from Stephy.
Stephy:you bringing your man to sunday dinner this week. aunt lou is asking and you know what that means
I laughed out loud. I did know what it meant. Aunt Lou asking was not a question. Aunt Lou had decided, sometime inthe last day or two, that Caleb was coming to Sunday dinner; she’d said as much to the women in her orbit; and she was now extending me the considerable courtesy of letting me be the one to say it out loud first, so the whole thing could go on the record as my idea.
Me:tell her I’ll think about it
Which Stephy would correctly read asyes, and which Aunt Lou had known the answer to before she ever sent her envoy.
Then I stood there a second with my thumb over the screen.
Because there was a version of me — most versions of me, the ones I’d been running for the better part of two decades — that did the looking-after. I was the one who sorted the room. Who knew who couldn’t sit next to whom, who needed the soft food, who’d go to pieces if you brought up the dog. I was not, historically, the one who asked for the people I love to be put in a room together forme.
I texted Caleb.
Me:Sunday dinner at the ranch this weekend. Are you up for it?
The reply came inside the minute, which it didn’t always — the man worked with his hands and his phone spent half the day in a drawer at the shop.
Caleb:You want me there?
Notsure. Notwhat time.You want me there?— handing the choosing back to me, making me be the one to say it. He’d taught me that without either of us ever once calling it teaching.
