Page 11 of Grumpy Ex-Military Brewmaster’s Secret

"You get all this from doing hair?"

"It comes with the chair. Everyone in this town ends up in it eventually, and people talk when someone's got scissors near their head. Half of Pinewood Ridge has confessed something to me they'd never tell a priest." She winks, entirely unrepentant, and taps the roof of my car twice like she's sealing the conversation. "Enjoy the casserole. And honey, whatever that man's been through, he doesn't need anybody feeling sorry for him. He needs somebody who sticks around long enough to notice the rest of it."

I don't ask her to clarify what she means by the rest of it. Something tells me she'd just smile and tell me I'd find out soon enough.

I drive to the elementary school with a warm dish sliding around on the passenger seat and the distinct sensation of having been thoroughly, efficiently adopted by a woman I met eleven minutes ago.

Finishing the twins' registration paperwork turns into its own kind of chaos, the particular kind that happens when you get kids started at a new school two states ahead of the actual forms. Eli spends the first ten minutes trying to convince the front office that he should test directly into fourth grade math, presenting his case with the seriousness of a man arguing before a judge.

"I already know my times tables up to twelve."

"That's wonderful, sweetheart, but registration doesn't really work that way."

"What if I just took the test really fast so you could see?"

"Eli." I put a hand on his shoulder, mostly to keep him from actually climbing over the counter toward the stack of assessment forms he's been eyeing. "Let the woman do her job."

"I'm trying to help her do it faster."

The front office woman, a patient soul named Mrs. Delgado who I decide on the spot deserves a raise, handles it with the ease of someone who's seen every variation of Eli before, and the whole thing eventually resolves itself with a promise of a placement test sometime next month, which satisfies him completely.

Josie's meltdown takes longer to smooth over. She discovers her assigned cubby doesn't have her name on it yet, just a strip of blank tape where a name should be, and the unfairness of this apparently cracks something open that's been holding steady since we crossed the state line.

"Everybody else has their name. I don't have a name."

"Baby, they just haven't printed it yet. It'll be there by the time you start."

"But right now it's not there." Her voice cracks on the last word, and I crouch down to her level in the middle of a hallway full of strangers, feeling the particular helplessness of watching your kid cry over something you can't immediately fix.

"You know what. Give me one second." I dig a marker out of my bag, the emergency one I've carried since Ohio for exactly this kind of moment, and print JOSIE in careful block letters on a spare piece of tape from Mrs. Delgado's desk, then press it right below the blank strip. "There. Now it's there twice, which is better than everybody else."

She studies it for a long moment, sniffling, and then nods with the gravity of someone accepting a peace treaty. "Okay. That's better." She hugs the strap of her backpack to her chest and looks up at me like the whole crisis has already faded from memory. "Can we go now? I'm hungry."

That's the thing about Josie. The storm passes as fast as it arrives, no residue, no grudges, and I envy her that more than I'll ever say out loud.

By the time we're back in the car, both kids fed and quiet and half asleep before we've even hit the highway, something settles in my chest that I don't recognize right away because it's been gone so long. It isn't relief, exactly. It's steadier than that. I handled a leaking roof, a suspicious woodstove, a small-town gossip network, and two entirely different meltdowns before lunch, and none of it knocked me flat. I can do this.

The feeling lasts exactly until the sun goes down.

The woodstove and I have our final confrontation around seven, the twins fed and dropped off at Maggie's for the evening so I can deal with the cabin without an audience, when the temperature drops fast enough that I can see my own breath drifting toward the ceiling like proof of a crime. I've tried everything the internet swears works: dry kindling, a fire starter cube, three different arrangements of logs that all collapse in on themselves like they've personally decided against warming me. I sit on the cold floor in front of the open iron door with soot on my hands and something that isn't quite tears building behind my eyes. I do the math on how many blankets it would take to survive the night, and try not to think too hard about the fact that there's no garage here to run the truck's heater in anyway.

I'm seriously weighing the merits of sleeping in the truck, parked as close to the cabin as I can get it, when I hear an engine slow down on the gravel outside, tires crunching to a stop where there shouldn't be anyone stopping at all.

I go still, every instinct I've spent two years training snapping fully awake at once. Headlights swing across the front window and cut out. A door opens and closes. Footsteps cross the porch, unhurried, heavy enough that I know exactly how big whoever it is must be before I ever see him.

I get to the door in time to watch Rafe Montgomery step into the porch light, toolbox in one hand, breath fogging in the cold same as mine did a minute ago.

"Dot called me."

That's it. That's the whole explanation, delivered flat, like it answers every question I could possibly have about why he's standing on my porch after dark holding a toolbox he clearly intends to use.

I open my mouth to tell him I'm fine, that I don't need rescuing, that a woman who drove a U-Haul across eight states by herself can figure out one uncooperative woodstove without help showing up on her porch in the dark. What comes out instead is a lot less certain than any of that, and the steady, competent feeling I'd been carrying around all day starts to wobble.

"You didn't have to come out here."

"I know." He doesn't move to leave. He just stands there, toolbox in hand, looking at me like the cold porch and the late hour and the eleven miles between here and his own bed are simply not part of the conversation he's interested in having.

I step back from the door without deciding to, and he takes that as the invitation it apparently is, ducking under the frame and heading straight for the woodstove like it's just another job on tonight's list.