Gus taking the downstairs bedroom meant I was no longer in the downstairs bedroom.
There was only one other bedroom in Ellie’s house. One other bed.
I stood at the window with the parking lot spread out below me, gray and ordinary and unhelpful, and let that fact arrange itself in my head.
I had no one to blame but myself.
I had proposed this plan. We had sat at her kitchen table that early morning, the day after his stroke, with the logic of it clicking into place the way logistics did when you needed something to do with your hands and your head. I’d essentially said let me fix it, and she’d said okay, and this—Gus, alive and improving and coming home on Friday, Ellie’s smile doing that complicated thing across the room—this was the direct, if not entirely foreseeable consequence of that. I didn’t regret it. I wanted to be clear with myself, standing at this window, that I did not regret a single part of it. Not the plan. Not the last two weeks. Not any of it.
I was, however, beginning to understand that fixing things had a way of creating new things that also needed fixing, and that some of those new things were a lot harder to get ahead of than a hospital discharge and a list of home modifications.
Sandra left. Gus was talking about what he wanted for his first dinner home, which was a question he’d given a great deal of thought to. He had detailed opinions. Ellie was listening, nodding, and making the sounds of a woman who was completely present in the conversation and not also doing the same math I’d just done.
She was absolutely doing the same math I’d just done.
I knew, because I knew her, and because she’d glanced at me only once in the last ten minutes, briefly and sideways, with alook I didn’t need to interpret. I’d read that look since we were nine years old.
I looked back at Gus, who was now deep into the specific question of whether cornbread was an acceptable accompaniment to the meal he wanted, and I felt the full, complicated weight of the moment settle across my shoulders.
This man. This stubborn, scheming, thoroughly lovable man, who had pointed his fork between us for a decade and refused to let it go, who had gotten himself sick enough to end up in a hospital bed and somehow turned it into the most effective matchmaking operation Huckleberry Creek had ever seen, was coming home. He was going to sit in his armchair—or I guess maybe mine—and eat whatever Ellie made him and watch his granddaughter move around the kitchen he’d helped her refinish in the fixer upper she called home, and he was going to do all of it with the serene satisfaction of a man whose work was done.
I was glad. I was genuinely, uncomplicated-ly glad, in a way that sat clean and separate from everything else.
Everything else could be complicated on its own.
Ellie caught my eye across the room, and this time the look lasted a breath longer, and it said, plainly and with no particular drama: one bed.
I gave her the smallest possible nod.
I know.
Gus settled on pot roast, for the record. With cornbread. And he wanted the good butter, not the stuff from the tub.
“I’ll make a list,” Ellie said.
THIRTEEN
ELLIE
Getting Grandpa settled took the better part of the afternoon.
The room looked different with the blend of furniture. Before Daniel, it had been part home office, part guest room with a twin-size bed. A catch-all for whatever stuff I hadn’t gotten around to dealing with. I’d cleared out what I could to make room for Daniel, so he wouldn’t feel like he was being shoehorned into a space that didn’t have room for his stuff. We’d moved my desk into a corner of my bedroom upstairs and shifted Daniel’s chair into the room so Grandpa would have somewhere comfortable to sit. He’d have to fight Chairman Meow for it, but I figured my cantankerous cat would be fine with Grandpa’s lap while they both napped. With Daniel’s nightstand and the bookcase, the room actually looked cozy.
The rest of the house was a bit of a disaster. Daniel had inconveniently been scheduled for work Wednesday night until Thursday night, which had stretched into the wee hours Friday morning when a fire call kept him out late, so I’d been on my own making room for his stuff in my room, stuffing all my out of season clothes that usually lived on the top rod in the closet into bins that fit beneath the bed that was now on risers. He’dhad just enough time to move all his stuff again Friday morning, after he’d caught a few hours of sleep. Then it was time to bring Grandpa home.
Grandpa walked through the front door on his own two feet, which he had apparently decided was non-negotiable and which had required a brief, pointed conversation with both Daniel and the discharge nurse. He made it to the armchair we’d requisitioned from his house. Chairman Meow had already claimed it as sovereign territory, but he moved in a hurry when Grandpa sat down with the careful deliberateness of a man who was not going to let anyone see how much the walk from the car had cost him.
“Home.” The word came out with a weight that made my throat close.
“Home,” I agreed, from somewhere I hoped sounded normal.
Daniel had made the pot roast. Like most of his firefighter brethren, he’d learned to cook over the years. He’d started it in the crock pot this morning, while I’d been checking in on the store. The whole house smelled of it by the time we got home. Grandpa inhaled once through the front door and looked at Daniel with the expression of a man receiving confirmation of something he’d always believed.
“Good man,” he said.
“Don’t tell him that,” I said. “He’s already insufferable about the cast iron.”
“She’s not wrong,” Daniel said.
