Chapter Twenty
Demetrius
Thefrontdooropenson the first knock.
Not the old front door, I should say. The old front door had a warped floorboard underneath it that made it stick in the frame. The new door hangs square and straight and opens cleanly.
Lenny Berwick stands in the doorway with a broad smile that twitches against his tusks.
"Demetrius." He looks up at me with a grin and steps aside. "Come in, come in. Grace is putting the finishing touches on her signature lemon cake."
"That alone is worth the drive across town."
"Beer?"
"Please."
He claps me on the shoulder as I pass. The house is warm and loud and smells of lemon cake and vanilla. I follow Lenny toward the kitchen and the noise rises with every step, because the kitchen is where the noise lives.
Grace Berwick is at the stove, and stationed at the kitchen table in the good chair closest to the window, presiding over the room like a visiting dignitary who has specific opinions about the seasoning, is my grandmother.
Some things don't need to change.
"The tuna salad needs more salt," Agatha says, cranking her neck to look at whatever Grace is preparing.
"There is plenty of salt," Grace says, without turning around.
A pause settles between them, brief and satisfied, the way silences settle between people who have decided they enjoy arguing with each other.
Agatha's cane is propped against the table leg. She's been railing against it for eight months, but she's still using it despite her misgivings. She glances at me from the corner of her eye and nods once.
"You're late," she says.
"I'm three minutes early."
"Semantics."
Lenny hands me a beer and I take it, leaning into the doorframe.
"What's in the yard?" I ask Lenny.
He tips his head toward the sliding door and I follow him around the island to look out, and the answer to my question is Jazz, standing at the grill with a pair of tongs and an expression of absolute authority. Lenny's senior site foreman, a centaur named Frank whom I have met twice, stands beside her with a look of cautious admiration.
"She showed up with a rub she made from scratch," Lenny tells me, his voice carrying the tone of a man who is not sure how this happened but has decided to be grateful. "Told Frank he'd been doing ribs wrong his whole life."
"Had he been?"
"According to Jazz." A pause. "Also, yes. Frank's ribs are terrible."
Jazz turns from the grill and catches sight of me through the glass. She points the tongs at me in what I have come to understand is her version of a greeting, then goes back to the ribs without a word. Frank watches her with a frown, then snaps pictures of whatever she's been doing.
I take a pull of my beer and consider the fact that Jazz and I are now so familiar with one another. She doesn't waste a single chance to make fun of me. Ruthlessly. But in the end, she decided to accept me as part of Maddie's life and we're now locked in a sort of truce. The universe, as it turns out, has a very specific sense of humor.
Then the hallway door opens and Maddie comes through it.
She has flour on her chin, which tells me she has been helping with the cake, and her hair is up in a messy bun. She wears a green blouse that is the color of the bay in the morning, and she stops when she sees me. She smiles, and my chest expands several sizes all at once.
In the eight months since that day I made a fool of myself in front of her entire family it has not faded by so much as a fraction.
