She responded by gently taking my entire hand in her mouth—not biting, just holding it there like she was making a point about who really ran things around here, and what shecoulddo if I got out of line.
“See?” Mrs. Chen cackled. “She’s got you wrapped around her little paw.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Cuddles had grown beyond a daily chore. She was a friend, someone I looked forward to seeing, even when she bared her teeth and pretended to hate me, just for the fun of it.
But what I hadn’t expected was how much I would grow to look forward to conversations with Mrs. Chen herself. She had a way of cutting through bullshit that I found at once terrifying and refreshing, and she’d taken it upon herself to become my unofficial relationship advisor.
“So,” she said one morning while I refilled Cuddles’s water bowl, “when are you going to make an honest man out of that librarian?”
I nearly dropped the bowl. “Mrs. Chen—”
“Don’t ‘Mrs. Chen’ me, young man. I’ve got eyes. You’ve been floating around here like a man in love for weeks, and every evening you practically skip across the street to see them.”
“I don’t skip.”
“You skip like Dorothy on crack,” she said definitively. “Yesterday you were humming.Humming, Jeremiah. Grown men don’t hum unless they’re either utterly insane or completely smitten.”
Heat crept up my neck. “We’re taking things slow. He has a lot on his plate.”
“Taking things slow is fine when you’re learning to drive or recovering from surgery. When you’re in love with a good man who has a child who already calls you daddy, you missed slow and swerved right over to the fast lane.”
Why had I told her about that? Why?
The word “daddy” still made something flutter in my chest every time Debbie used it, which had become increasingly frequent. Last night she informed me—very seriously—that I needed to learn how to braid hair because “daddies should know how to do braids for their daughters.”
I spent an hour on YouTube after she went to sleep, practicing on one of her dolls.
Theo laughed and teased the entire time, claiming my “worked-out sausage fingers” would never be able to handle anything as delicate as Debbie’s locks. That only made me want to learn it faster, to do it better than he ever could.
Sausage fingers. Fuck that. I was her daddy, too.
The certainty with which that thought rattled around my head froze every part of my body, mid-braid, and I wondered if I would ever be able to move again without fearing the end of everything I’d ever known.
“It’s . . . complicated,” I said weakly.
“No, Jeremiah, love isn’t complicated.Peoplemake it complicated.” Mrs. Chen braced herself with a cane I’d bought her from the local drugstore and stood up with careful movements that reminded me she was still recovering, no matter how much stronger she seemed. “That man looks at you like you hung the moon, and you look at him like he painted the stars. The only complicated part is you both being too chickenshit to admit it.”
“Mrs. Chen! Language, please,” I said, a toothy grin belying my reprimand.
“Fuck that,” she said, waving the cane. “Youarechickenshit—both of you.”
Foul mouth or no, she had a point, though I wasn’t about to give her the satisfaction of admitting it.
My evening routine became even more precious to me than the mornings.
After finishing my delivery route, I’d stop by Mrs. Chen’s house, usually with dinner from whatever restaurant had caught my attention during the day. She claimed she was perfectly capable of cooking for herself now, but I’d learned that “perfectly capable” and “actually doing it” were two very different things where wounded warriors were concerned.
“Thai food again?” she asked one evening, eyeing the containers I’d brought with obvious approval.
“You said you liked thepad Thaifrom that place on Ponce.”
“You listened. That’s a hell of a lot more than I can say for most men I’ve known,” she snarked as she settled into her kitchen chair with far more agility than she’d shown the week before. “You know, you don’t have to keep doing this. I’m not an invalid.”
“I know,” I said, dividing the food between two plates. “But . . . I like eating with you. Plus, Cuddles gives better table conversation than most humans.”
As if summoned, Cuddles appeared at my elbow, tail wagging hopefully as she assessed the potential for dropped food. She likedpad Thaieven more than Mrs. Chen, though I was careful to keep the onions away from her greedy mouth.
