I drive her home through the Missouri dark, no streetlights, just headlights and tree lines and the occasional eye reflecting from the ditch. She’s settled beside me in the way she settles when she’s comfortable.
Different from the drive to the diner, when she was pleasant and careful, sitting very correctly, asking sensible questions. Now she’s just here. Relaxed like a person who’s forgotten to monitor herself, not someone performing comfort.
She’s also sitting differently than she was at the start of the evening. Just slightly. Weight redistributed, her left hand resting on her knee rather than in her lap. I notice it the way I notice things, without deciding to, and I don’t say anything about it because there’s nothing to say. She managed the evening. Came out anyway. Danced.
I think about that moment on the gravel drive when we were walking to the car, where the drive dips and her gait went careful for just a second, and I filed it without knowing what I was filing. I know now. I’m glad I turned when I turned and said nothing when there was nothing to say.
“Thank you for Delia’s,” I say.
“Thank you for asking.”
“You could have said Applebee’s.”
A pause. Then, “I could have.”
She looks out the window, and I look at the road, and neither of us says anything else because the sentence is complete and we both know it.
I turn onto her drive. The house is lit from inside, the warm amber of the lamps visible through the lace curtains, the workshop dark beside it. I stop the car and come around to her side and open the door. She steps out, and we’re standing in the dark in front of her grandmother’s house with the creek running down the hill and the summer night loud with crickets and the smell of cut grass and the snowball bushes coming into bloom.
She looks up at me.
“Do you want to come in?” she asks.
I do. “Yes,” I say.
She leads me up the porch steps and through the front door, and the house closes around us, warm and amber and full of four generations of staying. I duck the doorframe and I’m inside.
Chapter Fifteen
Honey
The house closes around us, and we’re both standing in it.
This is the part I didn’t think through. I thought through the dinner: what to wear, what to order, whether to suggest Delia’s or somewhere more neutral. I thought through the drive home, the porch, and asking: do you want to come in?
What I did not think through was the part where he is actually in my living room at nine-thirty on a Thursday night, and we are both aware of the current running under the room, and neither of us has named it.
“Tea?” I ask.
He looks at me with that look he has, the one that isn’t performing anything, that lands and stays and doesn’t pretend it didn’t.
“There’s chamomile,” I say. “Or regular. Or I think there’s something with ginger.”
Apparently I am listing teas. In my grandmother’s kitchen. To a seven-foot orc who just took me to dinner.
I decide not to examine this too closely.
He puts one hand over his stomach. “I think two chicken-fried steaks might tide me over.”
“Right,” I say. “Obviously.”
“The tea sounds good another time.”
“Sure,” I say. “Yes. Another time.”
We stand here for another moment. The kitchen is very quiet. Outside the window, the workshop is a dark shape against the darker oaks, and the crickets are amping up for a boisterous round, and inside this kitchen nothing is happening at a loud volume.
“I’m just going to…” I say, gesturing vaguely toward the living room. The sentence doesn’t fully complete itself, but it’s enough to get me moving.
