Instead, I stood by the wall and waited until it was time to stop by the house.
Rhett's childhood home smelled of coffee and lasagna, and too many people wore too much perfume in a small space.
The living room—where I'd met Rhett's mother three days ago, watching his father die in increments—had been rearranged. The hospital bed was gone. In its place were folding tables covered in tinfoil-wrapped dishes and Pyrex containers with masking tape labels:Tuna casserole – reheat 350. Chicken soup – freezes well.
I stood in the doorway with my coat still on, watching the house fill with relatives, neighbors, and people who probably hadn't spoken to Rhett's father in years but showed up anyway because that's what you did.
Sloane corralled her kids toward the kitchen. Rhett's mother sat in the recliner—the same one she'd occupied during the vigil—accepting murmured sympathies.
Rhett was nowhere.
I spotted him finally, backed into a corner by the stairs, trapped in conversation with an older man in a too-tight suit. The man was gesturing, and Rhett was nodding with that same blank expression from the funeral home.
I couldn't get to him. Too many bodies between us. Too much polite navigation required.
So I did what I knew how to do.
I moved.
Boots cluttered the entryway—snow-crusted, salt-stained, and piled in a hazardous heap. I started pulling them aside, liningthem up along the wall in neat pairs. Small boots with cartoon characters. Work boots caked in mud. Sloane's practical flats.
"Oh, you don't have to do that," someone said behind me.
I kept going. "It's fine."
Once I handled the boots, I moved to the coat rack. Someone had hung three coats on one hook, and the whole thing was listing dangerously. I redistributed the weight, finding space on the banister for the overflow.
In the kitchen, I found extra coffee filters in the cupboard above the sink and started a fresh pot.
"Can you grab that?" A woman with silver hair and Rhett's eyes—an aunt, probably—gestured at the top shelf. "The good plates."
I reached up and pulled down a stack of china that looked like nobody had used it since the eighties. Set them on the counter.
"Thank you, dear." She patted my arm absently. "You're tall."
"Yeah."
People kept appearing with more food. I cleared space on the dining room table, shuffling casserole dishes into common sense configurations. The work was simple. Mechanical. It required nothing from me except my hands and my ability to lift things.
A man in flannel—one of Rhett's dad's friends from the mill—needed help moving a folding table from the garage. We hauled it through the snow, set it up in the living room, and covered it with a plastic tablecloth.
"You play for the Storm?" he asked.
"Yeah."
"Thought I recognized you. Hell of a game last Thursday."
"Thanks."
He clapped my shoulder and moved on.
I kept moving. Every few minutes, I looked for Rhett. He moved from the corner by the stairs to the kitchen doorway, still trapped in conversations that made his jaw tight.
His mother appeared at my elbow. In her exhaustion, she'd forgotten meeting me three days ago. "You're Hog," she said.
"Connor. Yeah."
"Thank you for—" She gestured vaguely at the room. "For helping."
