The crowd lets us through. Not moving away in fear now. Making space. Different thing. Better thing.
Inside, Sweet Tooth smells like cinnamon, coffee, fresh bread, fried potatoes, lemon cleaner, and home. The repaired display case hums. The mural is cleaned, though faint traces of the old boot mark remain if one knows where to look. The reinforced stool waits at the end of the counter. My tools are arranged beneath the register. The paper dragons hang along the back wall, more than I realized existed.
Evie watches my face. “Too much?”
“Yes.”
“Bad too much?”
“No.”
Darlene pushes a mug into my hand. “Drink before you start leaking feelings on the floor.”
I accept the coffee. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. Don’t get sentimental. I’m still mad at you.”
“For what?”
“General reasons.”
“That seems broad.”
“I’m old. I like flexibility.”
Over the next week, I move in.
The process is less dramatic than the fear that preceded it. My life fits into fewer boxes than Evie expected and more emotional weight than I anticipated. A coat. Two spare shirts. Tools. A few military tags I keep wrapped in cloth. Esme’s drawings. A cracked Vakutan prayer token from my mother. Al’s terrible blanket, which he insists is mine because I slept under it once while feverish and therefore “bonded with the ugly thing.”
Evie makes room in her drawers.
I stand in her bedroom holding one folded shirt, unable to move.
She appears beside me, hair tied up badly, wearing one of my spare shirts over sleep pants because she is unfair and beautiful and apparently trying to test my healing wounds.
“What’s wrong?” she asks.
“You made space.”
“Yes.”
“For me.”
“That is usually how moving in works.”
I look at the drawer. “I have never had a drawer.”
Her expression softens.
I regret saying it because softness from Evie is dangerous. It enters the body and rearranges things.
“Well,” she says, voice gentle, “now you have two.”
“That seems excessive.”
“You’re very large.”
“I do not store myself in drawers.”
