“I don’t know yet,” he said. “Am I?”
“Give me a little time,” I said. “Maybe I can put a lid on it. Without beheading anyone.” I swallowed and barely managed to say, “There’s been enough blood spilled in my town.”
He stared at me for a long moment. Then he shrugged a shoulder. “I’m the regional commander, but there are a lot of eyes on this. You could have a hundred Wardens or the Blackstaff himself at your door if something goes south. And there wouldn’t be a thing I could do about it. I hope you know what you’re doing, Harry.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I hope so, too.”
Chapter
Twenty-One
“Bear!” screamed Maggie as she came pelting out Michael’s door toward us, wearing a Sunday dress. “Dad!”
I scooped her up and tossed her in the air and caught her again and started tickling her on the way down. She let out a squealing peal of giggles.
Mouse came rushing up in Maggie’s wake, bounding in stiff-legged excited leaps in a circle around us. He threw himself against Bear’s legs, all but knocking even her massive form down, and then barreled into me the second I’d set Maggie down on the Carpenters’ leaf-strewn front lawn. I went down laughing, with the huge grey dog nuzzling my face while his great tail swooshed back and forth. Maggie shouted something about an atomic elbow and then threw herself onto the pile.
And.
Oh.
My.
God.
That felt good.
It was like stepping out into the sun after a long, cold night.
There are moments in your life that are perfect. You know they won’t last long, you know they’re rare, you know that they might not ever come again. If you pay attention, you can feel those moments happening to you.
I sank my teeth into it. I inhaled every scent, felt every burst oflaughter rise out of my stomach, filed away every single sound of Maggie’s delight, of Mouse’s whuffling affection, of the crinkle of late autumn leaves under us, felt the crisp cold of the oncoming winter bite affectionately at exposed skin. I wrestled my dog and my little girl and filed that moment away in my heart and my head, because I knew I’d need moments like this one—both now and in the future.
And I felt something ease in my chest and belly.
“Okay, okay!” I burst out finally, with a little over three hundred pounds of love essentially pinning me to the ground. “I yield! Don’t crush me!”
Mouse chuffed cheerfully, gave my face a couple of truly viscous kisses, and rose off of me. Maggie didn’t. She just grabbed onto my chest and hugged me. I got to my feet and she didn’t stop, clinging to me like a limpet. So I just carried her inside that way, with Mouse walking happily with his shoulder pressed against my leg, looking up at us with a huge doggy smile on his face.
I looked up onto the house’s porch to see Michael and Molly standing there waiting for us. Both of them were smiling widely, and Molly was holding her father’s hand.
And that was how we started Thanksgiving at the Carpenter house.
—
Michael’s wife, Charity, puts on a feast for Thanksgiving, let me tell you. If I hadn’t been losing so much weight, I’d have had to unbutton my pants. Not everyone was there. Matthew had become a volunteer nurse for Doctors Without Borders and was in South America. Alicia had gotten engaged and was spending the holiday with her fiancé’s family.
I still remembered them as a bunch of kids spilling out of a minivan.
And that would happen with Maggie, too. None of us own our children. We have a little while to hold them in trust, before we turn them over to the adults we’ve been waiting a couple of decades to meet. I needed to start arranging more time with her.
After the meal and some football (Michael had temporarily mounted a TV outside the living room’s picture window, and the house’s threshold, so that my magic wouldn’t screw up the big game), I went outside to the expansive front porch to sit down.
Michael, wrapped in a cardigan against the evening chill, joined me and passed me a cup of hot coffee. We sat together in companionable silence for a while, rocking on separate chairs.
“You really don’t get cold, do you?” Michael noted.
I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt in forty degrees with a little breeze. “Not so much,” I said.
