Tina · October
By one-thirty I had seventeen decorated pumpkins drying along the windowsill, twenty-two scarecrows in various stages of structural failure, and orange paint on the cuff of a cardigan I had owned for six years without incident.
October had been in Room 118 for four hours. It was winning.
“Mrs. Pappas?” Lily stood beside my desk holding a pumpkin covered in purple glitter and enough plastic jewels to make it a choking hazard from six feet away. Glitter had already migrated to her eyebrow. “Can pumpkins get married?”
“To each other?” I asked, putting a sad looking purple and green pumpkin on the shelf with the others.
She nodded.
The pumpkin had pipe-cleaner eyelashes and a pink bow hot-glued near the stem. The glue had come from my desk, because second graders were not allowed to use the hot-glue gun, and because I had apparently decided my Friday needed more ways to end at urgent care.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Even if they’re both girls?”
There it was.
“Yes.”
She considered this, serious, the way she considered subtraction when the numbers refused to behave. “Okay.”
Then she went back to her table. The jewels clicked against the pumpkin the whole way.
Maren looked at me from across the room. I looked at Maren. Neither of us said anything.
Teaching second grade was mostly answering questions you had not prepared for while pretending they were exactly the questions you had expected. Maren was still in the part of the year where that felt like a revelation. I was in the part where it felt like a job description.
I picked up a scarecrow arm.
Outside the windows, the maple beside the playground had finally committed to fall. Half of it was orange. The other half was still green in the stubborn way trees got when Minnesota weather changed faster than they did. Leaves scraped along the blacktop whenever the wind came up. Someone from fourth grade had lost a red sweatshirt near the fence before lunch, and it was still there, one sleeve turned inside out like the kid had fought it on the way off.
Inside, the room smelled like washable paint, crayon wax, pumpkin guts from the one we had opened at the science table, and the cinnamon broom I had bought at the grocery store on Sunday and immediately regretted. It was less cinnamon and more assault. The kids liked it. Of course they did. Lily had announced that the room smelled like a candle her yiayia was not allowed to light anymore.
My phone buzzed in the top drawer of my desk. I ignored it. The scarecrow arm came off again. Tape had given up on the yarn. I stared at the joint.
Three kids laughed. One of them was not even at the scarecrow table. Word traveled.
I put the scarecrow on its back and reached for the tape.
The phone buzzed again. That one I felt in my stomach, which was stupid, because I had no idea who it was. Except I did. Or I hoped I did. I closed the drawer harder than necessary. A glue stick rolled and hit the pencil cup.
“Five more minutes,” I told the room. “Then everything wet stays here until Monday. If you take home a pumpkin with wet paint, your grown-ups will blame me, and I would like to enjoy my weekend.”
Twenty-two children immediately began working as if I had announced the building was on fire. Brushes hit cups. Someone whispered that Mrs. Pappas was serious, which I was, and also not, and also tired of orange.
Maren covered her mouth.
“You’re learning,” I told her.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
That was apparently going around.
The message was from Sofia.
Niko says Theo needs the long sticks. Not the short sticks. Apparently the short sticks are useless.
I read it standing at my desk after dismissal, orange still under one nail, while Maren carried the last stack of fall books back toward the shelf. The room had gone quiet in the particular way classrooms did at three-fifteen, radiators ticking, a chair still warm if you put your hand on it.
Another message appeared.
He would also like you to know Theo said he has them. I don’t know why I’m involved.
I typed back.
Because you gave birth to management.
The typing bubble appeared immediately.
You gave birth to engineering.
Fair.
I put my phone down.
Then picked it up again.
There was another message below Sofia’s.
Harry.
Still seven?
Two words.
No hello.
No unnecessary punctuation.
Very Harry.
I looked at the clock over the door.
Three twenty-eight.
I had three and a half hours to finish here, collect Theo, get him fed, get him next door, shower, do something with my hair, put clothes on my body, take the clothes off because they were wrong, put different clothes on, decide those were worse, and eventually answer the door like I had not spent the previous hour behaving like a person who had forgotten how dates worked.
Plenty of time.
Yes.
I sent it.
The bubbles appeared.
I can come later.
I stared at that one longer.
Not Do you need me to come later.
Not Are you sure.
Just an exit left open in case I wanted it.
Harry did that.
I was beginning to notice.
Seven is fine.
I set the phone facedown. The case was warm from my hand.
Maren was watching me from the bookshelf, a picture book still in her arms, eyebrows already doing the thing.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re twenty-four. You’re terrible at nothing.”
Her eyebrows went up.
I regretted hiring an observant intern. She had been in the building six weeks and already knew which drawer the phone lived in.
“Those books aren’t going to shelve themselves.”
“They’re already shelved.”
I looked.
They were. Spines out. Fall display faced. She had even put the pumpkin one where the kindergartners could reach it, which was either thoughtful or a future glitter problem.
“Then you’re free to go.”
She smiled all the way to the door. The smile said she was going to text someone about my face. I let her. I did not have the energy to confiscate a twenty-four-year-old’s conclusions.
I waited until the door closed.
Then I picked up my phone again.
There was no new message.
Good.
I did not need a new message.
I had paint to get off a cardigan that was not going to forgive me.
I spent the next fifteen minutes wiping orange off tables and thinking about a man who had not sent me another message.
Very productive.
Theo came into my room at three fifty-three with his backpack open and one shoelace untied. A leaf was stuck to the heel of his sneaker. He had not noticed. He noticed almost everything else.
I noticed the shoelace first.
That was motherhood.
“Stop.”
He stopped.
“Foot.”
He looked down.
“Oh.”
I crouched and tied it before he could step on it and crack his head open in my classroom on a Friday afternoon. The lace was damp. Playground. He smelled like cold air and the chocolate milk they still served even though half the parents had opinions about it.
When I stood, he was already looking at the windowsill.
“Are those pumpkins?”
“No. Apples.”
He gave me the look seven-year-olds gave adults who had disappointed them intellectually.
“I know they’re pumpkins.”
“Then why did you ask?”
He ignored that and walked toward them, hands already coming up.
“Don’t touch.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were going to.”
“I was looking.”
“With your hands.”
He put both hands behind his back.
Better.
“Niko says you have the long sticks.”
“I do.”
“Where?”
I pointed toward the supply cabinet.
His face changed.
Not dramatically. Theo did very little dramatically before four in the afternoon. He just got more awake, the way a screen did when you touched it.
“How many?”
“Enough.”
“What size?”
“The long kind.”
“That isn’t a size.”
“It is today.”
He walked to the cabinet.
I watched him sort through the bundle I had set aside. Wooden craft sticks, two cardboard tubes from paper towels I had been saving without admitting I was saving them, a handful of dowels left from a project last spring. Things I would have thrown into the workroom eventually and forgotten existed.
To Theo and Niko, building materials.
“Niko said the short ones don’t work.”
“Your aunt mentioned.”
“He’s right.”
“I assumed.”
Theo gathered the sticks against his chest. One slipped. He caught it with his chin, which was not a method I endorsed and also worked.
“Can I bring the tape?”
“No.”
“We need tape.”
“Niko has tape.”
“His mom hides it.”
That sounded like Sofia. She had started hiding the good scissors after the great wheel-spoke incident, and I had not asked follow-up questions.
“I wonder why.”
Theo did not appreciate sarcasm when it interfered with construction.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
His head turned.
Mine did not.
“Are we going?”
“Yes.”
“Then why aren’t you packing?”
“I am packing.”
“You’re standing.”
“I can do both.”
He looked at the tote still sitting empty on my desk, next to a stack of spelling tests I was pretending I would grade before Monday.
I picked it up.
Children were exhausting.
At home, Theo ate half a grilled cheese standing at the kitchen island because sitting down would apparently have cost us critical minutes. Butter had hit the pan too hot. One side was closer to brown than I liked. He did not care. He cared about the sticks, which were already on the counter where he could see them, as if they might leave without him.
I made him sit anyway.
“Your cousin will survive.”
“He’s waiting.”
“He lives next door.”
“It’s more than twelve feet.”
“Eat.”
He ate. Crust first, which was a recent and unexplainable policy.
I rinsed my briki from that morning and set it upside down on the towel beside the sink. There were crumbs under Theo’s stool. A permission slip was still stuck beneath the magnet on the refrigerator even though I had signed it Tuesday. His lunch box needed washing. The basil on the windowsill had given up completely, a brown apology in a pot I kept meaning to replace.
Normal things.
Friday things.
Things that did not care that I had a man coming to my door in an hour and twenty-two minutes.
My phone sat beside the fruit bowl. One spotty pear. Theo’s leftover clementine, peeled and abandoned.
I had checked the time four times.
Not Harry’s messages.
The time.
There was a difference.
“Mom.”
“What?”
“I’m done.”
There was still a crust on his plate.
“Apparently.”
He slid off the stool. The sticks went with him.
“Can I go?”
“You need pajamas.”
“I have pajamas there.”
“Toothbrush.”
“I have one there.”
“Underwear.”
He paused.
Exactly.
I pointed toward the stairs.
He went. The third step complained. It always complained. Nick had said he was going to fix it and then had fixed the back door instead, because the back door actually mattered and the step only complained.
I did not follow that thought up the stairs.
Three minutes later Theo came back down with his overnight bag and one sock sticking out of the zipper.
I pulled it free and tucked it inside. The sock did not match the one on his foot. I let it go. Sofia had a drawer for this. Sofia had a drawer for everything, labeled, which was how you knew she had not given birth to Theo.
“Did you pack clothes for tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Actual clothes?”
He sighed.
I opened the bag.
Pajamas. Underwear. Toothbrush. Two T-shirts. No pants.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
“Pants are implied,” he said.
I laughed before I could stop myself. It came out bigger than the joke.
“No, they’re not.”
He ran upstairs again. The step complained twice.
I checked the clock.
Fifty-eight minutes.
I was not nervous.
I was a grown woman who had been married, had a child, buried a husband, and once handled twenty-three vomiting second graders during a stomach bug that moved through Aspen Creek in under forty-eight hours. Maren still brought that up like it was a war story. It was a Tuesday.
I could go to dinner.
I went upstairs and changed my shirt three times.
Sofia opened her front door before we knocked. She had flour on one wrist and the look of a woman who had already negotiated once with an eight-year-old about tape.
“Niko is in the kitchen,” she said.
Theo went past her.
No goodbye.
No hesitation.
Just backpack, overnight bag, and a bundle of sticks headed toward the back of the house, where the good light was and where Niko liked the table because his chair fit without anyone moving a bench.
“Theo.”
He reversed.
I kissed his hair. It needed a wash. Tomorrow.
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Then he was gone again.
“Niko, I brought the long ones.”
From the kitchen came, “Good.”
Not hello. Not thank you. An assessment. I respected it.
Sofia leaned against the doorframe. The house behind her smelled like lemon and the chicken she had started too early because Niko did better when dinner was not a surprise.
I handed her the overnight bag.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You have a face.”
“I’ve always had a face.”
“That one is new.”
Her eyes moved over me.
I looked down at myself.
Jeans. Boots. A cream sweater I had put on eleven minutes ago after rejecting the rust dress for trying too hard and a black top for looking like parent-teacher conferences. The sweater had a small pull near the hem I had decided no one would see if I kept my coat on, which meant I was already planning to take the coat off.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Sofia.”
“You look nice.”
“I always look nice.”
“You look like you tried to look nice.”
I hated sisters.
“I changed my sweater.”
“How many times?”
“Once.”
She stared at me. Flour, and the stare she had been using since she was nine and I had stolen her good hair tie.
“Three.”
“There she is.”
“Good night.”
She laughed.
I started down the step. The air had cooled since school. Someone on the block had a fire going already, too early in the season for it, the smell of it sitting low over the street.
“Have fun, Tina.”
I stopped.
Not because of what she said.
Because of how she said it.
No teasing.
No question underneath it.
Just have fun.
I looked back.
She had already stepped inside. The door was still open a hand’s width, because she knew I was not done.
“Lock the door if they go outside.”
“They’re eight and seven, not raccoons.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’ll lock the door.”
“And Theo can’t have soda after—”
“Go.”
I went.
At six forty-nine, I made coffee.
That was a mistake.
I knew it while I was measuring the water.
One heaping teaspoon of Greek coffee. One level teaspoon of sugar. Stir until the powder disappeared. Stop stirring.
Rules that stayed put.
The foam rose in the neck of the briki. I pulled it off the heat before it climbed the side, the way my mother had taught me and the way I had taught myself again after there was no one else in the kitchen to watch the pot. My hand was steady.
That annoyed me.
Apparently the rest of me could behave like an idiot while my coffee remained excellent.
I poured it into the little cup and stood at the counter. The house was too quiet without Theo. It was always too quiet without Theo. The refrigerator hummed. The step did not complain. Nick’s mug was still in the cabinet above the briki, the one with the chipped rim he had refused to throw out, and I did not open the cabinet to check that it was there. I already knew.
I drank.
Seven minutes.
I checked my reflection in the dark kitchen window and immediately stopped, because the woman in the glass looked like she was waiting for a porch light, and that was pathetic.
Four minutes.
Headlights moved across the front wall. Not fast. The Blazer had a particular idle, low and a little uneven, the sound of a truck that had outlived several reasonable arguments for replacing it.
My stomach dropped.
Ridiculous.
I rinsed the cup.
Not because it needed rinsing immediately.
Because I was not going to stand in the front window waiting for a man.
The knock came before I finished. Two knocks. Not three. He never did three.
I dried my hands on the towel. Walked through the dining room. Did not hurry. The table still had Theo’s spelling list on it, facedown, a corner under the fruit bowl so it would not travel.
I opened the door.
Harry stood on my porch in dark jeans and a charcoal sweater under his coat. The coat was the one he wore when he was not coming from the rink. No team logo. No hat. His hair was still a little damp at the ends, which meant he had showered and then sat in the truck with the heat on and not quite dried.
Cold came in around him.
I forgot every sensible thing I had thought in the kitchen.
He took up the porch the way he took up doorways. That was not new information. Cora’s dining chairs had already filed a complaint. What was new was knowing why he had come.
Not for Theo.
Not because my family had pulled him into dinner and then pretended that had been an accident.
For me.
His eyes moved over my face, then lower, then back up. He did not rush it. He also did not perform it. Harry looked at things he intended to remember.
He did not say anything.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
I waited.
He kept looking. The porch light caught the gray at his temple and the place on his jaw the razor had missed.
“Harry.”
“You look nice.”
Nice.
I bit the inside of my cheek.
“Thank you.”
He frowned.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That was something.”
“I changed three times for nice.”
His face changed.
Just enough.
“Beautiful.”
I laughed.
“That doesn’t count now.”
“It was the first word.”
“Then you should have used it.”
“I was nervous.”
That stopped me.
Harry’s mouth flattened like he regretted the sentence as soon as it was out. One hand stayed at his side. The other had found the porch rail, which did not need holding.
I leaned against the doorframe. The wood was cold through the sweater.
“You were nervous?”
“No.”
“You just said you were.”
“I made a mistake.”
“Interesting.”
“Are you ready?”
Very interesting.
I grabbed my coat.
Harry opened the passenger door of the Blazer and then reached into the back before I could get in.
“I have something.”
I looked at him.
The truck smelled faintly like old leather, wintergreen gum, and the bird, even though Viggo was not in it. A towel was folded on the back seat in the shape of a concession. The carpet had the salt stain he had not bothered to explain.
Harry pulled a paper shopping bag from behind the seat.
“For you.”
I took it.
It was heavier than I expected. The handles cut into my fingers.
Inside were wooden dowels. Thin sheets of balsa. Small clamps. Tiny hinges. Two rolls of painter’s tape. Craft wood in sizes I had never bought, because craft wood had somehow become one of those things that cost thirty dollars without appearing to contain thirty dollars’ worth of anything. The receipt was not in the bag. He had taken it out. Of course he had.
I looked at him.
“What is this?”
“For Theo.”
My hand stayed on the edge of the bag. The balsa flexed under my thumb.
“He told you about the bridge stuff?”
“You did.”
I searched my memory.
Then found it.
Dinner. Cora’s, or maybe mine. I had said it while clearing plates, not complained exactly. Said it. Once. How fast the dowels disappeared. How the good tape migrated to Sofia’s and did not migrate back.
“You remembered that?”
Harry shrugged.
It was a terrible answer.
A very Harry answer.
“You didn’t have to buy these.”
“I know.”
“Harry.”
“They were there.”
“At a store.”
“Yes.”
“Where things are generally there so people buy them.”
His mouth moved.
Almost.
I looked into the bag again.
The tiny clamps got me.
Theo had asked for those twice. Once at the hardware store, once at the kitchen table, with a drawing that included labels. I had said maybe next month twice. Teacher salary. Mortgage. Groceries. Hockey registration, because he had decided this fall that he wanted to know how the game worked and not only who played it. Shoes, because apparently children grew feet for sport.
Maybe next month was not deprivation.
It was still maybe next month.
“I can give them back.”
My head came up.
Harry’s expression had gone careful.
Not hurt.
Not offended.
Just giving me the exit.
Again.
The bag handles creaked in my hand.
“No.”
I closed the bag.
“No, he’ll love them.”
Harry nodded. One nod. The kind he used when a thing had been settled and did not need a speech.
“You can give them to him.”
That mattered.
I did not know if Harry knew how much.
Theo knew Harry as the giant man with the rude bird from the garden center, and as the man who had started appearing at dinners because my family had the boundary control of a marching band. Theo knew Harry brought bread when he was told not to bring bread, and that the bird swore in Danish if you looked at it wrong.
Theo did not know this.
Whatever this was.
I was not ready for him to know.
Harry had not asked me to be.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I put the bag behind the seat. It sat next to the towel. I did not let myself picture Theo’s face when he found the clamps. That was a tomorrow problem, and tomorrow had pants in it.
When I turned back, Harry was watching me.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Apparently men had faces too.
North Line was busy enough that I would not have chosen it.
Harry had.
I understood why approximately thirty seconds after we walked in.
No one cared.
Not literally.
People noticed him. A six-foot-five goalie was difficult not to notice, even in a coat, even on a Friday when half the room was already loud. A woman at the bar clocked his height and then went back to her fries.
But the hostess said, “Hey, Harry,” instead of making the face people made when they recognized someone from television. The bartender lifted a hand without stopping the pour. A man at a high-top nodded at him and kept eating.
Harry knew where to stand while we waited. Out of the servers’ path. Close enough that I was not stranded in the draft from the door. That was the difference. He was comfortable.
Or as comfortable as Harry got, which seemed to be mostly the absence of visible discomfort.
“Vestergaard.”
A man came around the end of the bar. Apron. Rolled sleeves. The kind of forearms that meant he still did his own receiving.
I knew the face before Harry said anything. Northbend was small enough for that. I had seen him at the register when I cut through for parking, and once at a youth-hockey fundraiser I had attended because Theo’s class had been volunteered.
Arlo.
North Line was his.
“Thomas.”
Arlo looked at me.
Then at Harry.
Then back at me.
Harry saw it.
“Don’t.”
Arlo’s eyebrows went up. “I said hello.”
“You didn’t.”
“I was about to.”
I smiled.
Arlo held out his hand. It was warm, and it had a burn scar across one knuckle that looked old.
“Arlo.”
“Tina.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
He looked at Harry again.
Harry stared back.
I had no idea what conversation they were having without me.
I had siblings. I understood the format.
Arlo smiled, small, and let it go.
“Your table’s open.”
“Thanks.”
“Enjoy.”
Harry waited until he walked away.
“He seems nice.”
“He isn’t.”
I laughed.
Harry pulled out my chair. The legs caught on the floorboard and he lifted it the last inch without comment, which was somehow more distracting than the chair.
“He likes you.”
“He met me for eleven seconds.”
“He likes that you’re here.”
That was different.
I sat. The room was warm after the street. Someone had ordered something with rosemary. A hockey game played on the television over the bar with the sound off, which felt like a courtesy and also like Northbend refusing to pretend the season was not happening.
“Why?”
Harry picked up his menu.
“He is nosy.”
“Interesting.”
“No.”
“I didn’t ask anything.”
“You were going to.”
I smiled and opened my menu.
Maybe I liked making him nervous.
That felt new too.
Dinner got easier somewhere between the appetizers and Harry telling me Viggo had learned the microwave beep and was now reproducing it whenever Harry sat down.
“You’re lying.”
“I wish.”
“He just beeps?”
“Until I stand.”
“And then?”
“He stops.”
I put my fork down. The calamari was better than I had expected from a place I had driven past for years without going in.
“So the bird has trained you.”
Harry stared at me.
I laughed.
“He has.”
“You know you don’t have to get up.”
“He keeps doing it.”
“That is generally how training works.”
“I am aware.”
“Are you?”
He gave me a look.
I laughed harder. A woman at the next table glanced over and smiled into her wine like she had decided we were harmless.
There was a particular pleasure in making Harry Vestergaard look annoyed, because he was almost never actually annoyed.
Or maybe he was, and his face only had three settings.
I was still learning him.
That thought settled somewhere low and warm, under the rosemary and the heat of the room.
Learning him.
I took a drink of water.
His hand was on the table beside his glass. A scar across the knuckle of his index finger, thin and white. Hockey, or a kitchen, or both. I had not asked.
Mine was near the bread plate. I had not touched the bread. Habit. I liked bread. I just did not trust bread that arrived already sliced in a basket with a little knife no one used correctly.
He looked at my hand.
Then at me.
There was enough time between those two things for me to know what he was asking.
I turned my hand over.
Harry put his hand in mine.
Simple.
His palm was warm. His fingers closed around mine once and stayed. Not tight. Present. The callus at the base of his thumb caught against my skin.
I looked at our hands.
A restaurant table.
Two water glasses.
The remains of dinner.
His thumb against my knuckle.
Nothing dramatic.
That was the problem with the things that got me.
They were almost never dramatic.
Nick’s pillow still on the bed.
Theo’s shoes beside mine.
A man holding my hand across a table on a Friday night while a muted hockey game reflected in the window behind him.
I had held Nick’s hand thousands of times. In the car. On the couch. Walking into family parties where someone was already shouting about lamb. In the hospital when Theo was born and I had threatened to break his fingers during a contraction, and he had said, calmly, that I was welcome to try.
I had forgotten what it felt like for holding hands to be new.
Harry’s thumb moved once.
“You’re thinking.”
“I do that.”
“I noticed.”
I looked at him.
He did not let go.
“I almost canceled.”
There.
It came out before I had decided to say it. The word sat on the table between the water and the bread I was not eating.
Harry nodded.
That was all.
“You’re not going to ask why?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“If you wanted me to know, you would tell me.”
Annoying man.
I looked down at our hands again. His was big enough that mine disappeared at the edges. I did not feel disappeared.
“I haven’t done this in a long time.”
“I know.”
“It feels strange.”
His fingers loosened.
Not pulling away.
Making it easier for me to.
I tightened mine instead.
Harry went still. I felt it in his hand before I saw it in his face.
“I didn’t say bad.”
His eyes came back to mine.
“No.”
“I said strange.”
“Okay.”
“And stop giving me exits.”
His eyebrows pulled together.
“What?”
“You keep doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Making sure I can leave.”
He was quiet. A server passed with a tray. Neither of us moved our hands out of the way, and the server adjusted without comment, which was either professionalism or Northbend.
Then, “You should be able to.”
That shut me up.
Harry picked up his water with his free hand. The ice had melted. He drank anyway.
I watched him.
There was probably a correct thing to say.
I did not know what it was.
So I ate another bite of dinner and kept holding his hand.
That seemed honest enough.
When we stepped outside, the air had changed.
Cold enough now that my first breath caught a little. The fire smell from my street was gone. Here it was fryer oil and wet leaves and the river, faint, the way Northbend smelled when the wind came off the water after dark.
Harry put his hand at my back as we moved around a couple standing near the door. His palm stayed there after we passed them. Wool coat. Heat through it anyway.
I let it.
Across the street, Paper Lantern was still lit.
I had driven past it probably two hundred times.
Maybe more.
The front windows glowed gold against the dark. Books in one half. Café tables in the other. A chalkboard sign stood near the door with something written on it in looping handwriting I could not read from across the street. A couple came out with a paper bag and the particular satisfaction of people who had ordered the thing they actually wanted.
I slowed.
Harry noticed.
Of course.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He looked across the street.
“Bookstore?”
“Dessert.”
He looked again.
I pointed through the window.
“They have a pastry case.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve always wanted to try it.”
“Then let’s go.”
I looked at him.
“Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“We ate.”
“You said dessert.”
“I said I’ve wanted to try their dessert.”
“I heard you.”
“I don’t drink coffee from shops.”
Harry stopped walking.
I stopped too. A car passed. His hand was still at my back, lighter now, asking.
“What?”
“You don’t drink coffee from shops.”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“Why would I pay five dollars for coffee someone made wrong when I have a briki?”
He looked at me for a second. The streetlight cut across his mouth.
“What is a briki?”
I stared at him.
“We have been seeing each other for how long?”
His mouth twitched.
“Apparently not long enough.”
“That is embarrassing for you.”
“I’ll recover.”
I looked across the street again. The pastry case was a bright rectangle. I could not see what was in it. That was almost better.
Harry held out his hand.
I took it.
We crossed.
Naomi was behind the counter.
I recognized her in the way you recognized people in Northbend when you had lived there long enough. Face before biography. She had been at the elementary book fair two springs ago, the volunteer who knew where the graphic novels were without looking at the map.
She recognized Harry more directly.
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
Her eyes moved to me. Curious, and then done being curious, which was a rarer skill than people thought.
Harry did the introduction.
“Tina. Naomi.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
No weirdness.
No obvious inventory of my left hand.
I liked her immediately for that.
I looked into the pastry case.
Then regretted not coming sooner.
There was an apple cake with browned edges, a pumpkin cheesecake with a crust that had actually been pressed by a person, something chocolate with sea salt, and a maple bar that looked like it had no interest in moderation. The case smelled like butter and orange peel. A bell over the door kept ringing as people left with books.
Harry stood beside me. He did not hover. He also did not pretend he was shopping for himself.
“What do you want?”
“All of it.”
He nodded.
I looked up.
“That wasn’t permission.”
“You said all of it.”
“I was making an observation.”
“Pick two.”
“Why two?”
“So you don’t have to choose one.”
I stared at him.
He stared back.
That was unfairly reasonable.
“The apple cake.”
Naomi waited, pen already moving.
“And the pumpkin cheesecake.”
Harry nodded like we had completed a negotiation.
He ordered black coffee.
I ordered tea, because I had standards, and because the briki at home had already done its job and did not need competition from a machine that steamed milk like it was angry.
We took everything to a small table near the shelves. Poetry on one side. Children’s on the other. A stuffed fox watched us from the top of the picture-book spinner with the expression of an animal that had seen worse dates.
The pumpkin cheesecake was excellent. Cream, not gelatin. Spice that tasted like spice and not like a candle.
Harry hated it.
I knew from the first bite.
He swallowed.
His face did almost nothing.
Almost.
“You hate it.”
“No.”
“You do.”
“It is fine.”
“You made a face.”
“I did not.”
“You absolutely did.”
He took another bite.
The face happened again. Smaller. Worse, because he was trying.
I laughed.
“Stop eating it.”
“You like it.”
“Yes.”
“So eat the apple.”
“I like that too.”
“Then we chose correctly.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes complete sense.”
I laughed again.
Harry ate another bite of something he clearly disliked, because apparently abandoning half a dessert offended him personally. The fork looked ridiculous in his hand. He used it anyway, European, precise, a man who had been raised by people who finished what was on the plate.
I laughed hard enough that I had to put my fork down.
Not because it was that funny.
Because the whole night had become funny.
Harry nervous on my porch.
Arlo looking at him like a brother who had been waiting for evidence.
The bird training a professional athlete with microwave noises.
Five-dollar coffee.
Pumpkin cheesecake.
I put my hand over my mouth.
“I’m sorry.”
Harry was watching me.
“What?”
I tried to stop laughing.
Failed.
His mouth changed.
Not much.
A small smile.
Private.
“I like that.”
“What?”
“You laughing.”
The laugh stopped on its own.
I looked at him.
He picked up his coffee.
That was it.
No explanation.
No line after it.
I looked down at the plate. Apple, mostly gone. Pumpkin, rescued. A flake of crust on the paper napkin.
I had talked about Theo. School. My sister. His bird. I had eaten dinner and held a man’s hand and crossed a street because I wanted cake. I had laughed.
Nick had not left the room to make space for it.
He was still in the cabinet at home, in the chipped mug, in the step that complained. He was also not the reason I had stopped laughing.
The guilt came anyway.
Small.
Mean.
Familiar.
I picked at the edge of the apple cake. The cinnamon stuck to my finger.
Harry did not ask what happened.
I was grateful for that.
I was also a little irritated by how grateful I was.
He pushed the pumpkin cheesecake toward me. The plate touched my wrist.
“You finish it.”
I looked up.
“You finally admit you hate it?”
“No.”
“Coward.”
“Yes.”
I smiled.
The guilt stayed.
So did the smile.
They fit at the same table if you did not ask them to become the same thing.
I had practice.
Sofia’s porch light was on when Harry turned onto the street.
My house was dark.
Theo was fine.
I knew he was fine.
I checked my phone anyway. No message. No missed call. A photo from earlier in the week of Theo’s spelling test, which I had already seen and did not need to see again at ten o’clock.
Fine.
Harry parked in front of my house. The Blazer ticked as it cooled. Across the street, my parents’ kitchen light was off, which meant my mother had lost the argument about staying up to see who dropped me off. I was not going to survive that mercy. She would ask in the morning with eggs.
“You checked six times.”
I turned toward him.
“What?”
“Your phone.”
“You counted?”
“No.”
“That sounded like counting.”
“It was noticeable.”
“I have a child.”
“I know.”
“He’s sleeping somewhere else.”
“Next door.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Harry’s mouth twitched.
“More than twelve feet,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“You should be.”
He got out before I could tell him he did not need to walk me to the door.
I got out too. The cold had settled into the street. My breath showed.
The bag for Theo was still in the back seat.
I looked at it.
“I’ll get that tomorrow.”
Harry followed my eyes.
“Okay.”
No insistence.
No attempt to carry it to Sofia’s and turn a bag of clamps into a scene my sister could narrate for the rest of our lives.
He closed the truck.
We walked up the path. The mums by the step had finally given in to the frost, brown at the edges, still trying in the middle. I had been meaning to cut them back. I had been meaning to do a lot of things that were not this.
The porch light came on when we reached the steps.
I turned around.
Harry stopped one step below me.
It helped.
Not enough, but some. His mouth was closer to mine than it had any right to be, and still not close enough to be simple.
I had kissed this man before.
That should have made this easier.
It did not.
The last kiss had happened in my kitchen, Theo asleep upstairs, neither of us having called anything a date. Tonight had been one. There was something more frightening about doing a thing a second time on purpose.
“I had fun.”
I hated myself immediately.
Fun.
Excellent.
I sounded like I had attended a work mixer and won a gift card.
Harry nodded.
“So did I.”
Apparently he was willing to be terrible at this with me.
Good.
I looked toward Sofia’s house. A curtain moved on the second floor and then did not move again. Niko, or the heat, or my sister failing at not looking. I chose the heat.
Then I looked back at him.
“I really did.”
“I know.”
“You’re very confident.”
“No.”
I looked at him.
He put his hands into his coat pockets.
Oh.
I smiled.
“Are you nervous again?”
“No.”
“Harry.”
“Yes.”
That did something to me I did not need done. Low. Warm. Inconvenient on a porch with my sister twelve-plus feet away and my son hopefully asleep.
I stepped closer.
He took one hand out of his pocket.
His fingers touched my waist.
Lightly.
Waiting.
I put my hand against his chest. Wool. Heat. The steady argument of a heart that had skated today and was pretending it had not.
There.
That was easier.
He bent.
I lifted my face.
And his nose hit mine.
Not hard.
Enough.
We both stopped.
Harry closed his eyes.
I bit my lip.
“Don’t.”
I lost it.
I laughed against his coat. It smelled like cold air and the coffee he had not finished and, faintly, the wintergreen from the truck.
“Tina.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You are not.”
“No.”
I looked up.
He looked deeply unimpressed.
Which made it worse.
“You’re six-five. This is a geometry problem.”
“That is your excuse?”
“I am five-four. I’m not the obstruction.”
His hand moved around my waist. Solid. Still asking.
“You done?”
“Probably not.”
He kissed me before I could laugh again.
Better.
Much better.
My hand caught in the front of his sweater. His beard scratched lightly against my skin, the place along my chin that would still be there in the morning if I was unlucky or lucky, I had not decided. His mouth was warm. One of his hands stayed at my waist. The other came up behind my neck, not pulling, just there, thumb at the hinge of my jaw like he was learning the measurement.
I knew the mechanics. Mouth. Breath. The small adjustment when someone was taller and trying not to make you feel the height as a problem.
What I had misplaced was the want for the next one.
I kissed him again.
Harry made a low sound against my mouth that went straight through me.
That was new.
Or maybe not new.
Unused.
There was a difference.
When we separated, I kept my hand on his chest.
His heart was beating faster than I expected.
I liked knowing that.
Probably too much.
“Better,” I said.
Harry looked at me. His mouth was a little red. I did not point it out. I was not a monster. I was also not going to forget it.
“You’re difficult.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Recently?”
I smiled.
He knew exactly what he was doing now.
“Good night, Harry.”
“Tuesday.”
I blinked.
“What about Tuesday?”
“Dinner.”
“That sounded less like a question.”
“Do you want it to be a question?”
I thought about my classroom calendar.
Theo.
A staff meeting that would run long because someone would bring up the cinnamon broom, or something equally urgent.
Laundry.
The groceries I would need before Wednesday.
All the ordinary pieces that made a week.
Then I thought about Harry eating pumpkin cheesecake he hated because we had ordered it, and about the bag of clamps still in the truck, waiting for a boy who did not know yet that a man had gone to a store and thought of him.
“Seven?”
His face eased.
“Seven.”
I stepped backward toward the door.
Harry stayed where he was. Hands back in his pockets. Not following. Not leaving until the door was going to close.
I unlocked it. The key stuck the way it did when the night had gone cold.
“Good night.”
“Good night, Tina.”
I went inside.
The house was quiet.
Not cool-side-of-the-bed quiet.
Not the quiet of the bench at the cemetery, wind in the lindens, Theo’s voice doing most of the talking.
Just a house without a seven-year-old in it for one night.
I locked the door.
Put my purse on the dining table.
Took off one boot.
Then the other. My sock had glitter on it. I did not know how. October, probably. October got everywhere.
My phone buzzed before I reached the kitchen.
Tuesday.
I stared at it.
He had been gone maybe thirty seconds. The Blazer had not even turned over yet. I heard it a second later, that uneven idle, and then the careful three-point turn he did so he would not blind my parents’ bedroom.
You just left.
The bubbles appeared.
Making sure.
I leaned against the counter.
There were still crumbs beneath Theo’s stool.
The briki was upside down beside the sink.
His permission slip was still on the refrigerator, curling at the corner.
The chipped mug was still in the cabinet. I did not need to open it.
Nothing had been replaced.
That was the part I could stand.
I typed one word.
Tuesday.
Then I put the phone down, put my boots back on, and went next door to check on my son.
Not because Sofia needed me to.
Because I was his mother.
And because I could be that with Harry Vestergaard’s beard still on my chin, and the street cold, and the porch light at my sister’s already expecting me.
Both things were true.
I did not have to make them take turns.
By one-thirty I had seventeen decorated pumpkins drying along the windowsill, twenty-two scarecrows in various stages of structural failure, and orange paint on the cuff of a cardigan I had owned for six years without incident.
October had been in Room 118 for four hours. It was winning.
“Mrs. Pappas?” Lily stood beside my desk holding a pumpkin covered in purple glitter and enough plastic jewels to make it a choking hazard from six feet away. Glitter had already migrated to her eyebrow. “Can pumpkins get married?”
“To each other?” I asked, putting a sad looking purple and green pumpkin on the shelf with the others.
She nodded.
The pumpkin had pipe-cleaner eyelashes and a pink bow hot-glued near the stem. The glue had come from my desk, because second graders were not allowed to use the hot-glue gun, and because I had apparently decided my Friday needed more ways to end at urgent care.
“I don’t see why not.”
“Even if they’re both girls?”
There it was.
“Yes.”
She considered this, serious, the way she considered subtraction when the numbers refused to behave. “Okay.”
Then she went back to her table. The jewels clicked against the pumpkin the whole way.
Maren looked at me from across the room. I looked at Maren. Neither of us said anything.
Teaching second grade was mostly answering questions you had not prepared for while pretending they were exactly the questions you had expected. Maren was still in the part of the year where that felt like a revelation. I was in the part where it felt like a job description.
I picked up a scarecrow arm.
Outside the windows, the maple beside the playground had finally committed to fall. Half of it was orange. The other half was still green in the stubborn way trees got when Minnesota weather changed faster than they did. Leaves scraped along the blacktop whenever the wind came up. Someone from fourth grade had lost a red sweatshirt near the fence before lunch, and it was still there, one sleeve turned inside out like the kid had fought it on the way off.
Inside, the room smelled like washable paint, crayon wax, pumpkin guts from the one we had opened at the science table, and the cinnamon broom I had bought at the grocery store on Sunday and immediately regretted. It was less cinnamon and more assault. The kids liked it. Of course they did. Lily had announced that the room smelled like a candle her yiayia was not allowed to light anymore.
My phone buzzed in the top drawer of my desk. I ignored it. The scarecrow arm came off again. Tape had given up on the yarn. I stared at the joint.
Three kids laughed. One of them was not even at the scarecrow table. Word traveled.
I put the scarecrow on its back and reached for the tape.
The phone buzzed again. That one I felt in my stomach, which was stupid, because I had no idea who it was. Except I did. Or I hoped I did. I closed the drawer harder than necessary. A glue stick rolled and hit the pencil cup.
“Five more minutes,” I told the room. “Then everything wet stays here until Monday. If you take home a pumpkin with wet paint, your grown-ups will blame me, and I would like to enjoy my weekend.”
Twenty-two children immediately began working as if I had announced the building was on fire. Brushes hit cups. Someone whispered that Mrs. Pappas was serious, which I was, and also not, and also tired of orange.
Maren covered her mouth.
“You’re learning,” I told her.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You didn’t have to.”
That was apparently going around.
The message was from Sofia.
Niko says Theo needs the long sticks. Not the short sticks. Apparently the short sticks are useless.
I read it standing at my desk after dismissal, orange still under one nail, while Maren carried the last stack of fall books back toward the shelf. The room had gone quiet in the particular way classrooms did at three-fifteen, radiators ticking, a chair still warm if you put your hand on it.
Another message appeared.
He would also like you to know Theo said he has them. I don’t know why I’m involved.
I typed back.
Because you gave birth to management.
The typing bubble appeared immediately.
You gave birth to engineering.
Fair.
I put my phone down.
Then picked it up again.
There was another message below Sofia’s.
Harry.
Still seven?
Two words.
No hello.
No unnecessary punctuation.
Very Harry.
I looked at the clock over the door.
Three twenty-eight.
I had three and a half hours to finish here, collect Theo, get him fed, get him next door, shower, do something with my hair, put clothes on my body, take the clothes off because they were wrong, put different clothes on, decide those were worse, and eventually answer the door like I had not spent the previous hour behaving like a person who had forgotten how dates worked.
Plenty of time.
Yes.
I sent it.
The bubbles appeared.
I can come later.
I stared at that one longer.
Not Do you need me to come later.
Not Are you sure.
Just an exit left open in case I wanted it.
Harry did that.
I was beginning to notice.
Seven is fine.
I set the phone facedown. The case was warm from my hand.
Maren was watching me from the bookshelf, a picture book still in her arms, eyebrows already doing the thing.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re twenty-four. You’re terrible at nothing.”
Her eyebrows went up.
I regretted hiring an observant intern. She had been in the building six weeks and already knew which drawer the phone lived in.
“Those books aren’t going to shelve themselves.”
“They’re already shelved.”
I looked.
They were. Spines out. Fall display faced. She had even put the pumpkin one where the kindergartners could reach it, which was either thoughtful or a future glitter problem.
“Then you’re free to go.”
She smiled all the way to the door. The smile said she was going to text someone about my face. I let her. I did not have the energy to confiscate a twenty-four-year-old’s conclusions.
I waited until the door closed.
Then I picked up my phone again.
There was no new message.
Good.
I did not need a new message.
I had paint to get off a cardigan that was not going to forgive me.
I spent the next fifteen minutes wiping orange off tables and thinking about a man who had not sent me another message.
Very productive.
Theo came into my room at three fifty-three with his backpack open and one shoelace untied. A leaf was stuck to the heel of his sneaker. He had not noticed. He noticed almost everything else.
I noticed the shoelace first.
That was motherhood.
“Stop.”
He stopped.
“Foot.”
He looked down.
“Oh.”
I crouched and tied it before he could step on it and crack his head open in my classroom on a Friday afternoon. The lace was damp. Playground. He smelled like cold air and the chocolate milk they still served even though half the parents had opinions about it.
When I stood, he was already looking at the windowsill.
“Are those pumpkins?”
“No. Apples.”
He gave me the look seven-year-olds gave adults who had disappointed them intellectually.
“I know they’re pumpkins.”
“Then why did you ask?”
He ignored that and walked toward them, hands already coming up.
“Don’t touch.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were going to.”
“I was looking.”
“With your hands.”
He put both hands behind his back.
Better.
“Niko says you have the long sticks.”
“I do.”
“Where?”
I pointed toward the supply cabinet.
His face changed.
Not dramatically. Theo did very little dramatically before four in the afternoon. He just got more awake, the way a screen did when you touched it.
“How many?”
“Enough.”
“What size?”
“The long kind.”
“That isn’t a size.”
“It is today.”
He walked to the cabinet.
I watched him sort through the bundle I had set aside. Wooden craft sticks, two cardboard tubes from paper towels I had been saving without admitting I was saving them, a handful of dowels left from a project last spring. Things I would have thrown into the workroom eventually and forgotten existed.
To Theo and Niko, building materials.
“Niko said the short ones don’t work.”
“Your aunt mentioned.”
“He’s right.”
“I assumed.”
Theo gathered the sticks against his chest. One slipped. He caught it with his chin, which was not a method I endorsed and also worked.
“Can I bring the tape?”
“No.”
“We need tape.”
“Niko has tape.”
“His mom hides it.”
That sounded like Sofia. She had started hiding the good scissors after the great wheel-spoke incident, and I had not asked follow-up questions.
“I wonder why.”
Theo did not appreciate sarcasm when it interfered with construction.
My phone buzzed on the desk.
His head turned.
Mine did not.
“Are we going?”
“Yes.”
“Then why aren’t you packing?”
“I am packing.”
“You’re standing.”
“I can do both.”
He looked at the tote still sitting empty on my desk, next to a stack of spelling tests I was pretending I would grade before Monday.
I picked it up.
Children were exhausting.
At home, Theo ate half a grilled cheese standing at the kitchen island because sitting down would apparently have cost us critical minutes. Butter had hit the pan too hot. One side was closer to brown than I liked. He did not care. He cared about the sticks, which were already on the counter where he could see them, as if they might leave without him.
I made him sit anyway.
“Your cousin will survive.”
“He’s waiting.”
“He lives next door.”
“It’s more than twelve feet.”
“Eat.”
He ate. Crust first, which was a recent and unexplainable policy.
I rinsed my briki from that morning and set it upside down on the towel beside the sink. There were crumbs under Theo’s stool. A permission slip was still stuck beneath the magnet on the refrigerator even though I had signed it Tuesday. His lunch box needed washing. The basil on the windowsill had given up completely, a brown apology in a pot I kept meaning to replace.
Normal things.
Friday things.
Things that did not care that I had a man coming to my door in an hour and twenty-two minutes.
My phone sat beside the fruit bowl. One spotty pear. Theo’s leftover clementine, peeled and abandoned.
I had checked the time four times.
Not Harry’s messages.
The time.
There was a difference.
“Mom.”
“What?”
“I’m done.”
There was still a crust on his plate.
“Apparently.”
He slid off the stool. The sticks went with him.
“Can I go?”
“You need pajamas.”
“I have pajamas there.”
“Toothbrush.”
“I have one there.”
“Underwear.”
He paused.
Exactly.
I pointed toward the stairs.
He went. The third step complained. It always complained. Nick had said he was going to fix it and then had fixed the back door instead, because the back door actually mattered and the step only complained.
I did not follow that thought up the stairs.
Three minutes later Theo came back down with his overnight bag and one sock sticking out of the zipper.
I pulled it free and tucked it inside. The sock did not match the one on his foot. I let it go. Sofia had a drawer for this. Sofia had a drawer for everything, labeled, which was how you knew she had not given birth to Theo.
“Did you pack clothes for tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Actual clothes?”
He sighed.
I opened the bag.
Pajamas. Underwear. Toothbrush. Two T-shirts. No pants.
I looked at him.
He looked at me.
“Pants are implied,” he said.
I laughed before I could stop myself. It came out bigger than the joke.
“No, they’re not.”
He ran upstairs again. The step complained twice.
I checked the clock.
Fifty-eight minutes.
I was not nervous.
I was a grown woman who had been married, had a child, buried a husband, and once handled twenty-three vomiting second graders during a stomach bug that moved through Aspen Creek in under forty-eight hours. Maren still brought that up like it was a war story. It was a Tuesday.
I could go to dinner.
I went upstairs and changed my shirt three times.
Sofia opened her front door before we knocked. She had flour on one wrist and the look of a woman who had already negotiated once with an eight-year-old about tape.
“Niko is in the kitchen,” she said.
Theo went past her.
No goodbye.
No hesitation.
Just backpack, overnight bag, and a bundle of sticks headed toward the back of the house, where the good light was and where Niko liked the table because his chair fit without anyone moving a bench.
“Theo.”
He reversed.
I kissed his hair. It needed a wash. Tomorrow.
“Love you.”
“Love you too.”
Then he was gone again.
“Niko, I brought the long ones.”
From the kitchen came, “Good.”
Not hello. Not thank you. An assessment. I respected it.
Sofia leaned against the doorframe. The house behind her smelled like lemon and the chicken she had started too early because Niko did better when dinner was not a surprise.
I handed her the overnight bag.
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“You have a face.”
“I’ve always had a face.”
“That one is new.”
Her eyes moved over me.
I looked down at myself.
Jeans. Boots. A cream sweater I had put on eleven minutes ago after rejecting the rust dress for trying too hard and a black top for looking like parent-teacher conferences. The sweater had a small pull near the hem I had decided no one would see if I kept my coat on, which meant I was already planning to take the coat off.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Sofia.”
“You look nice.”
“I always look nice.”
“You look like you tried to look nice.”
I hated sisters.
“I changed my sweater.”
“How many times?”
“Once.”
She stared at me. Flour, and the stare she had been using since she was nine and I had stolen her good hair tie.
“Three.”
“There she is.”
“Good night.”
She laughed.
I started down the step. The air had cooled since school. Someone on the block had a fire going already, too early in the season for it, the smell of it sitting low over the street.
“Have fun, Tina.”
I stopped.
Not because of what she said.
Because of how she said it.
No teasing.
No question underneath it.
Just have fun.
I looked back.
She had already stepped inside. The door was still open a hand’s width, because she knew I was not done.
“Lock the door if they go outside.”
“They’re eight and seven, not raccoons.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I’ll lock the door.”
“And Theo can’t have soda after—”
“Go.”
I went.
At six forty-nine, I made coffee.
That was a mistake.
I knew it while I was measuring the water.
One heaping teaspoon of Greek coffee. One level teaspoon of sugar. Stir until the powder disappeared. Stop stirring.
Rules that stayed put.
The foam rose in the neck of the briki. I pulled it off the heat before it climbed the side, the way my mother had taught me and the way I had taught myself again after there was no one else in the kitchen to watch the pot. My hand was steady.
That annoyed me.
Apparently the rest of me could behave like an idiot while my coffee remained excellent.
I poured it into the little cup and stood at the counter. The house was too quiet without Theo. It was always too quiet without Theo. The refrigerator hummed. The step did not complain. Nick’s mug was still in the cabinet above the briki, the one with the chipped rim he had refused to throw out, and I did not open the cabinet to check that it was there. I already knew.
I drank.
Seven minutes.
I checked my reflection in the dark kitchen window and immediately stopped, because the woman in the glass looked like she was waiting for a porch light, and that was pathetic.
Four minutes.
Headlights moved across the front wall. Not fast. The Blazer had a particular idle, low and a little uneven, the sound of a truck that had outlived several reasonable arguments for replacing it.
My stomach dropped.
Ridiculous.
I rinsed the cup.
Not because it needed rinsing immediately.
Because I was not going to stand in the front window waiting for a man.
The knock came before I finished. Two knocks. Not three. He never did three.
I dried my hands on the towel. Walked through the dining room. Did not hurry. The table still had Theo’s spelling list on it, facedown, a corner under the fruit bowl so it would not travel.
I opened the door.
Harry stood on my porch in dark jeans and a charcoal sweater under his coat. The coat was the one he wore when he was not coming from the rink. No team logo. No hat. His hair was still a little damp at the ends, which meant he had showered and then sat in the truck with the heat on and not quite dried.
Cold came in around him.
I forgot every sensible thing I had thought in the kitchen.
He took up the porch the way he took up doorways. That was not new information. Cora’s dining chairs had already filed a complaint. What was new was knowing why he had come.
Not for Theo.
Not because my family had pulled him into dinner and then pretended that had been an accident.
For me.
His eyes moved over my face, then lower, then back up. He did not rush it. He also did not perform it. Harry looked at things he intended to remember.
He did not say anything.
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
I waited.
He kept looking. The porch light caught the gray at his temple and the place on his jaw the razor had missed.
“Harry.”
“You look nice.”
Nice.
I bit the inside of my cheek.
“Thank you.”
He frowned.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That was something.”
“I changed three times for nice.”
His face changed.
Just enough.
“Beautiful.”
I laughed.
“That doesn’t count now.”
“It was the first word.”
“Then you should have used it.”
“I was nervous.”
That stopped me.
Harry’s mouth flattened like he regretted the sentence as soon as it was out. One hand stayed at his side. The other had found the porch rail, which did not need holding.
I leaned against the doorframe. The wood was cold through the sweater.
“You were nervous?”
“No.”
“You just said you were.”
“I made a mistake.”
“Interesting.”
“Are you ready?”
Very interesting.
I grabbed my coat.
Harry opened the passenger door of the Blazer and then reached into the back before I could get in.
“I have something.”
I looked at him.
The truck smelled faintly like old leather, wintergreen gum, and the bird, even though Viggo was not in it. A towel was folded on the back seat in the shape of a concession. The carpet had the salt stain he had not bothered to explain.
Harry pulled a paper shopping bag from behind the seat.
“For you.”
I took it.
It was heavier than I expected. The handles cut into my fingers.
Inside were wooden dowels. Thin sheets of balsa. Small clamps. Tiny hinges. Two rolls of painter’s tape. Craft wood in sizes I had never bought, because craft wood had somehow become one of those things that cost thirty dollars without appearing to contain thirty dollars’ worth of anything. The receipt was not in the bag. He had taken it out. Of course he had.
I looked at him.
“What is this?”
“For Theo.”
My hand stayed on the edge of the bag. The balsa flexed under my thumb.
“He told you about the bridge stuff?”
“You did.”
I searched my memory.
Then found it.
Dinner. Cora’s, or maybe mine. I had said it while clearing plates, not complained exactly. Said it. Once. How fast the dowels disappeared. How the good tape migrated to Sofia’s and did not migrate back.
“You remembered that?”
Harry shrugged.
It was a terrible answer.
A very Harry answer.
“You didn’t have to buy these.”
“I know.”
“Harry.”
“They were there.”
“At a store.”
“Yes.”
“Where things are generally there so people buy them.”
His mouth moved.
Almost.
I looked into the bag again.
The tiny clamps got me.
Theo had asked for those twice. Once at the hardware store, once at the kitchen table, with a drawing that included labels. I had said maybe next month twice. Teacher salary. Mortgage. Groceries. Hockey registration, because he had decided this fall that he wanted to know how the game worked and not only who played it. Shoes, because apparently children grew feet for sport.
Maybe next month was not deprivation.
It was still maybe next month.
“I can give them back.”
My head came up.
Harry’s expression had gone careful.
Not hurt.
Not offended.
Just giving me the exit.
Again.
The bag handles creaked in my hand.
“No.”
I closed the bag.
“No, he’ll love them.”
Harry nodded. One nod. The kind he used when a thing had been settled and did not need a speech.
“You can give them to him.”
That mattered.
I did not know if Harry knew how much.
Theo knew Harry as the giant man with the rude bird from the garden center, and as the man who had started appearing at dinners because my family had the boundary control of a marching band. Theo knew Harry brought bread when he was told not to bring bread, and that the bird swore in Danish if you looked at it wrong.
Theo did not know this.
Whatever this was.
I was not ready for him to know.
Harry had not asked me to be.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
I put the bag behind the seat. It sat next to the towel. I did not let myself picture Theo’s face when he found the clamps. That was a tomorrow problem, and tomorrow had pants in it.
When I turned back, Harry was watching me.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Apparently men had faces too.
North Line was busy enough that I would not have chosen it.
Harry had.
I understood why approximately thirty seconds after we walked in.
No one cared.
Not literally.
People noticed him. A six-foot-five goalie was difficult not to notice, even in a coat, even on a Friday when half the room was already loud. A woman at the bar clocked his height and then went back to her fries.
But the hostess said, “Hey, Harry,” instead of making the face people made when they recognized someone from television. The bartender lifted a hand without stopping the pour. A man at a high-top nodded at him and kept eating.
Harry knew where to stand while we waited. Out of the servers’ path. Close enough that I was not stranded in the draft from the door. That was the difference. He was comfortable.
Or as comfortable as Harry got, which seemed to be mostly the absence of visible discomfort.
“Vestergaard.”
A man came around the end of the bar. Apron. Rolled sleeves. The kind of forearms that meant he still did his own receiving.
I knew the face before Harry said anything. Northbend was small enough for that. I had seen him at the register when I cut through for parking, and once at a youth-hockey fundraiser I had attended because Theo’s class had been volunteered.
Arlo.
North Line was his.
“Thomas.”
Arlo looked at me.
Then at Harry.
Then back at me.
Harry saw it.
“Don’t.”
Arlo’s eyebrows went up. “I said hello.”
“You didn’t.”
“I was about to.”
I smiled.
Arlo held out his hand. It was warm, and it had a burn scar across one knuckle that looked old.
“Arlo.”
“Tina.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
He looked at Harry again.
Harry stared back.
I had no idea what conversation they were having without me.
I had siblings. I understood the format.
Arlo smiled, small, and let it go.
“Your table’s open.”
“Thanks.”
“Enjoy.”
Harry waited until he walked away.
“He seems nice.”
“He isn’t.”
I laughed.
Harry pulled out my chair. The legs caught on the floorboard and he lifted it the last inch without comment, which was somehow more distracting than the chair.
“He likes you.”
“He met me for eleven seconds.”
“He likes that you’re here.”
That was different.
I sat. The room was warm after the street. Someone had ordered something with rosemary. A hockey game played on the television over the bar with the sound off, which felt like a courtesy and also like Northbend refusing to pretend the season was not happening.
“Why?”
Harry picked up his menu.
“He is nosy.”
“Interesting.”
“No.”
“I didn’t ask anything.”
“You were going to.”
I smiled and opened my menu.
Maybe I liked making him nervous.
That felt new too.
Dinner got easier somewhere between the appetizers and Harry telling me Viggo had learned the microwave beep and was now reproducing it whenever Harry sat down.
“You’re lying.”
“I wish.”
“He just beeps?”
“Until I stand.”
“And then?”
“He stops.”
I put my fork down. The calamari was better than I had expected from a place I had driven past for years without going in.
“So the bird has trained you.”
Harry stared at me.
I laughed.
“He has.”
“You know you don’t have to get up.”
“He keeps doing it.”
“That is generally how training works.”
“I am aware.”
“Are you?”
He gave me a look.
I laughed harder. A woman at the next table glanced over and smiled into her wine like she had decided we were harmless.
There was a particular pleasure in making Harry Vestergaard look annoyed, because he was almost never actually annoyed.
Or maybe he was, and his face only had three settings.
I was still learning him.
That thought settled somewhere low and warm, under the rosemary and the heat of the room.
Learning him.
I took a drink of water.
His hand was on the table beside his glass. A scar across the knuckle of his index finger, thin and white. Hockey, or a kitchen, or both. I had not asked.
Mine was near the bread plate. I had not touched the bread. Habit. I liked bread. I just did not trust bread that arrived already sliced in a basket with a little knife no one used correctly.
He looked at my hand.
Then at me.
There was enough time between those two things for me to know what he was asking.
I turned my hand over.
Harry put his hand in mine.
Simple.
His palm was warm. His fingers closed around mine once and stayed. Not tight. Present. The callus at the base of his thumb caught against my skin.
I looked at our hands.
A restaurant table.
Two water glasses.
The remains of dinner.
His thumb against my knuckle.
Nothing dramatic.
That was the problem with the things that got me.
They were almost never dramatic.
Nick’s pillow still on the bed.
Theo’s shoes beside mine.
A man holding my hand across a table on a Friday night while a muted hockey game reflected in the window behind him.
I had held Nick’s hand thousands of times. In the car. On the couch. Walking into family parties where someone was already shouting about lamb. In the hospital when Theo was born and I had threatened to break his fingers during a contraction, and he had said, calmly, that I was welcome to try.
I had forgotten what it felt like for holding hands to be new.
Harry’s thumb moved once.
“You’re thinking.”
“I do that.”
“I noticed.”
I looked at him.
He did not let go.
“I almost canceled.”
There.
It came out before I had decided to say it. The word sat on the table between the water and the bread I was not eating.
Harry nodded.
That was all.
“You’re not going to ask why?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“If you wanted me to know, you would tell me.”
Annoying man.
I looked down at our hands again. His was big enough that mine disappeared at the edges. I did not feel disappeared.
“I haven’t done this in a long time.”
“I know.”
“It feels strange.”
His fingers loosened.
Not pulling away.
Making it easier for me to.
I tightened mine instead.
Harry went still. I felt it in his hand before I saw it in his face.
“I didn’t say bad.”
His eyes came back to mine.
“No.”
“I said strange.”
“Okay.”
“And stop giving me exits.”
His eyebrows pulled together.
“What?”
“You keep doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Making sure I can leave.”
He was quiet. A server passed with a tray. Neither of us moved our hands out of the way, and the server adjusted without comment, which was either professionalism or Northbend.
Then, “You should be able to.”
That shut me up.
Harry picked up his water with his free hand. The ice had melted. He drank anyway.
I watched him.
There was probably a correct thing to say.
I did not know what it was.
So I ate another bite of dinner and kept holding his hand.
That seemed honest enough.
When we stepped outside, the air had changed.
Cold enough now that my first breath caught a little. The fire smell from my street was gone. Here it was fryer oil and wet leaves and the river, faint, the way Northbend smelled when the wind came off the water after dark.
Harry put his hand at my back as we moved around a couple standing near the door. His palm stayed there after we passed them. Wool coat. Heat through it anyway.
I let it.
Across the street, Paper Lantern was still lit.
I had driven past it probably two hundred times.
Maybe more.
The front windows glowed gold against the dark. Books in one half. Café tables in the other. A chalkboard sign stood near the door with something written on it in looping handwriting I could not read from across the street. A couple came out with a paper bag and the particular satisfaction of people who had ordered the thing they actually wanted.
I slowed.
Harry noticed.
Of course.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He looked across the street.
“Bookstore?”
“Dessert.”
He looked again.
I pointed through the window.
“They have a pastry case.”
“Okay.”
“I’ve always wanted to try it.”
“Then let’s go.”
I looked at him.
“Just like that?”
“Yes.”
“We ate.”
“You said dessert.”
“I said I’ve wanted to try their dessert.”
“I heard you.”
“I don’t drink coffee from shops.”
Harry stopped walking.
I stopped too. A car passed. His hand was still at my back, lighter now, asking.
“What?”
“You don’t drink coffee from shops.”
“No.”
“Ever?”
“Why would I pay five dollars for coffee someone made wrong when I have a briki?”
He looked at me for a second. The streetlight cut across his mouth.
“What is a briki?”
I stared at him.
“We have been seeing each other for how long?”
His mouth twitched.
“Apparently not long enough.”
“That is embarrassing for you.”
“I’ll recover.”
I looked across the street again. The pastry case was a bright rectangle. I could not see what was in it. That was almost better.
Harry held out his hand.
I took it.
We crossed.
Naomi was behind the counter.
I recognized her in the way you recognized people in Northbend when you had lived there long enough. Face before biography. She had been at the elementary book fair two springs ago, the volunteer who knew where the graphic novels were without looking at the map.
She recognized Harry more directly.
“Hey.”
“Hi.”
Her eyes moved to me. Curious, and then done being curious, which was a rarer skill than people thought.
Harry did the introduction.
“Tina. Naomi.”
“Nice to meet you.”
“You too.”
No weirdness.
No obvious inventory of my left hand.
I liked her immediately for that.
I looked into the pastry case.
Then regretted not coming sooner.
There was an apple cake with browned edges, a pumpkin cheesecake with a crust that had actually been pressed by a person, something chocolate with sea salt, and a maple bar that looked like it had no interest in moderation. The case smelled like butter and orange peel. A bell over the door kept ringing as people left with books.
Harry stood beside me. He did not hover. He also did not pretend he was shopping for himself.
“What do you want?”
“All of it.”
He nodded.
I looked up.
“That wasn’t permission.”
“You said all of it.”
“I was making an observation.”
“Pick two.”
“Why two?”
“So you don’t have to choose one.”
I stared at him.
He stared back.
That was unfairly reasonable.
“The apple cake.”
Naomi waited, pen already moving.
“And the pumpkin cheesecake.”
Harry nodded like we had completed a negotiation.
He ordered black coffee.
I ordered tea, because I had standards, and because the briki at home had already done its job and did not need competition from a machine that steamed milk like it was angry.
We took everything to a small table near the shelves. Poetry on one side. Children’s on the other. A stuffed fox watched us from the top of the picture-book spinner with the expression of an animal that had seen worse dates.
The pumpkin cheesecake was excellent. Cream, not gelatin. Spice that tasted like spice and not like a candle.
Harry hated it.
I knew from the first bite.
He swallowed.
His face did almost nothing.
Almost.
“You hate it.”
“No.”
“You do.”
“It is fine.”
“You made a face.”
“I did not.”
“You absolutely did.”
He took another bite.
The face happened again. Smaller. Worse, because he was trying.
I laughed.
“Stop eating it.”
“You like it.”
“Yes.”
“So eat the apple.”
“I like that too.”
“Then we chose correctly.”
“That makes no sense.”
“It makes complete sense.”
I laughed again.
Harry ate another bite of something he clearly disliked, because apparently abandoning half a dessert offended him personally. The fork looked ridiculous in his hand. He used it anyway, European, precise, a man who had been raised by people who finished what was on the plate.
I laughed hard enough that I had to put my fork down.
Not because it was that funny.
Because the whole night had become funny.
Harry nervous on my porch.
Arlo looking at him like a brother who had been waiting for evidence.
The bird training a professional athlete with microwave noises.
Five-dollar coffee.
Pumpkin cheesecake.
I put my hand over my mouth.
“I’m sorry.”
Harry was watching me.
“What?”
I tried to stop laughing.
Failed.
His mouth changed.
Not much.
A small smile.
Private.
“I like that.”
“What?”
“You laughing.”
The laugh stopped on its own.
I looked at him.
He picked up his coffee.
That was it.
No explanation.
No line after it.
I looked down at the plate. Apple, mostly gone. Pumpkin, rescued. A flake of crust on the paper napkin.
I had talked about Theo. School. My sister. His bird. I had eaten dinner and held a man’s hand and crossed a street because I wanted cake. I had laughed.
Nick had not left the room to make space for it.
He was still in the cabinet at home, in the chipped mug, in the step that complained. He was also not the reason I had stopped laughing.
The guilt came anyway.
Small.
Mean.
Familiar.
I picked at the edge of the apple cake. The cinnamon stuck to my finger.
Harry did not ask what happened.
I was grateful for that.
I was also a little irritated by how grateful I was.
He pushed the pumpkin cheesecake toward me. The plate touched my wrist.
“You finish it.”
I looked up.
“You finally admit you hate it?”
“No.”
“Coward.”
“Yes.”
I smiled.
The guilt stayed.
So did the smile.
They fit at the same table if you did not ask them to become the same thing.
I had practice.
Sofia’s porch light was on when Harry turned onto the street.
My house was dark.
Theo was fine.
I knew he was fine.
I checked my phone anyway. No message. No missed call. A photo from earlier in the week of Theo’s spelling test, which I had already seen and did not need to see again at ten o’clock.
Fine.
Harry parked in front of my house. The Blazer ticked as it cooled. Across the street, my parents’ kitchen light was off, which meant my mother had lost the argument about staying up to see who dropped me off. I was not going to survive that mercy. She would ask in the morning with eggs.
“You checked six times.”
I turned toward him.
“What?”
“Your phone.”
“You counted?”
“No.”
“That sounded like counting.”
“It was noticeable.”
“I have a child.”
“I know.”
“He’s sleeping somewhere else.”
“Next door.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Harry’s mouth twitched.
“More than twelve feet,” I said.
“Sorry.”
“You should be.”
He got out before I could tell him he did not need to walk me to the door.
I got out too. The cold had settled into the street. My breath showed.
The bag for Theo was still in the back seat.
I looked at it.
“I’ll get that tomorrow.”
Harry followed my eyes.
“Okay.”
No insistence.
No attempt to carry it to Sofia’s and turn a bag of clamps into a scene my sister could narrate for the rest of our lives.
He closed the truck.
We walked up the path. The mums by the step had finally given in to the frost, brown at the edges, still trying in the middle. I had been meaning to cut them back. I had been meaning to do a lot of things that were not this.
The porch light came on when we reached the steps.
I turned around.
Harry stopped one step below me.
It helped.
Not enough, but some. His mouth was closer to mine than it had any right to be, and still not close enough to be simple.
I had kissed this man before.
That should have made this easier.
It did not.
The last kiss had happened in my kitchen, Theo asleep upstairs, neither of us having called anything a date. Tonight had been one. There was something more frightening about doing a thing a second time on purpose.
“I had fun.”
I hated myself immediately.
Fun.
Excellent.
I sounded like I had attended a work mixer and won a gift card.
Harry nodded.
“So did I.”
Apparently he was willing to be terrible at this with me.
Good.
I looked toward Sofia’s house. A curtain moved on the second floor and then did not move again. Niko, or the heat, or my sister failing at not looking. I chose the heat.
Then I looked back at him.
“I really did.”
“I know.”
“You’re very confident.”
“No.”
I looked at him.
He put his hands into his coat pockets.
Oh.
I smiled.
“Are you nervous again?”
“No.”
“Harry.”
“Yes.”
That did something to me I did not need done. Low. Warm. Inconvenient on a porch with my sister twelve-plus feet away and my son hopefully asleep.
I stepped closer.
He took one hand out of his pocket.
His fingers touched my waist.
Lightly.
Waiting.
I put my hand against his chest. Wool. Heat. The steady argument of a heart that had skated today and was pretending it had not.
There.
That was easier.
He bent.
I lifted my face.
And his nose hit mine.
Not hard.
Enough.
We both stopped.
Harry closed his eyes.
I bit my lip.
“Don’t.”
I lost it.
I laughed against his coat. It smelled like cold air and the coffee he had not finished and, faintly, the wintergreen from the truck.
“Tina.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You are not.”
“No.”
I looked up.
He looked deeply unimpressed.
Which made it worse.
“You’re six-five. This is a geometry problem.”
“That is your excuse?”
“I am five-four. I’m not the obstruction.”
His hand moved around my waist. Solid. Still asking.
“You done?”
“Probably not.”
He kissed me before I could laugh again.
Better.
Much better.
My hand caught in the front of his sweater. His beard scratched lightly against my skin, the place along my chin that would still be there in the morning if I was unlucky or lucky, I had not decided. His mouth was warm. One of his hands stayed at my waist. The other came up behind my neck, not pulling, just there, thumb at the hinge of my jaw like he was learning the measurement.
I knew the mechanics. Mouth. Breath. The small adjustment when someone was taller and trying not to make you feel the height as a problem.
What I had misplaced was the want for the next one.
I kissed him again.
Harry made a low sound against my mouth that went straight through me.
That was new.
Or maybe not new.
Unused.
There was a difference.
When we separated, I kept my hand on his chest.
His heart was beating faster than I expected.
I liked knowing that.
Probably too much.
“Better,” I said.
Harry looked at me. His mouth was a little red. I did not point it out. I was not a monster. I was also not going to forget it.
“You’re difficult.”
“So I’ve been told.”
“Recently?”
I smiled.
He knew exactly what he was doing now.
“Good night, Harry.”
“Tuesday.”
I blinked.
“What about Tuesday?”
“Dinner.”
“That sounded less like a question.”
“Do you want it to be a question?”
I thought about my classroom calendar.
Theo.
A staff meeting that would run long because someone would bring up the cinnamon broom, or something equally urgent.
Laundry.
The groceries I would need before Wednesday.
All the ordinary pieces that made a week.
Then I thought about Harry eating pumpkin cheesecake he hated because we had ordered it, and about the bag of clamps still in the truck, waiting for a boy who did not know yet that a man had gone to a store and thought of him.
“Seven?”
His face eased.
“Seven.”
I stepped backward toward the door.
Harry stayed where he was. Hands back in his pockets. Not following. Not leaving until the door was going to close.
I unlocked it. The key stuck the way it did when the night had gone cold.
“Good night.”
“Good night, Tina.”
I went inside.
The house was quiet.
Not cool-side-of-the-bed quiet.
Not the quiet of the bench at the cemetery, wind in the lindens, Theo’s voice doing most of the talking.
Just a house without a seven-year-old in it for one night.
I locked the door.
Put my purse on the dining table.
Took off one boot.
Then the other. My sock had glitter on it. I did not know how. October, probably. October got everywhere.
My phone buzzed before I reached the kitchen.
Tuesday.
I stared at it.
He had been gone maybe thirty seconds. The Blazer had not even turned over yet. I heard it a second later, that uneven idle, and then the careful three-point turn he did so he would not blind my parents’ bedroom.
You just left.
The bubbles appeared.
Making sure.
I leaned against the counter.
There were still crumbs beneath Theo’s stool.
The briki was upside down beside the sink.
His permission slip was still on the refrigerator, curling at the corner.
The chipped mug was still in the cabinet. I did not need to open it.
Nothing had been replaced.
That was the part I could stand.
I typed one word.
Tuesday.
Then I put the phone down, put my boots back on, and went next door to check on my son.
Not because Sofia needed me to.
Because I was his mother.
And because I could be that with Harry Vestergaard’s beard still on my chin, and the street cold, and the porch light at my sister’s already expecting me.
Both things were true.
I did not have to make them take turns.
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