“That was one time, and the visibility was poor,” Moose said with great dignity.
“The fence,” Rico said.
“The visibility?—”
“There was no visibility issue, Moose, it was two in the afternoon?—”
“Can we,” I said, “focus on literally anything else?”
They looked at me, unperturbed. These men had found their entertainment for the afternoon and weren’t giving it up.
“Wrong door,” Moose said contentedly, and that appeared to settle the matter.
I considered what Moose had said. Since before anybody could remember. Which was basically the beginning.
The thing was, I couldn’t argue with the timeline. I’d been telling myself for years that what I felt for Ellie was friendship, and it was. It was genuinely, fully that, and I wasn’t going to pretend it had all been something else dressed up in different clothes. The friendship was real. It was the foundation. But foundations weren’t the whole building, and somewhere along the way I’d built something on top of it that I’d been refusing to examine.
Gus had been looking at it for a decade. Pointing at it with his fork and naming it at every Sunday dinner, and we’d both smiled and deflected, and he’d never once stopped being certain.
I thought about the ring in the Decatur flea market. The way I’d picked it up without knowing why and carried it home and put it in my jacket pocket and left it there for four years. Four years of wearing that jacket to Sunday dinners. Four years of sitting across the table from her while Gus made his case.
I remembered the vows in that hospital room. How I’d started talking and meant every word before I’d finished the first sentence. How none of it had been performance by the time it came out.
I thought about her hands in my shirt and her legs around my hips and to be continued, and Gus and his terrible timing, and the fact that she’d stopped arguing with me in that kitchen and looked at me like she was done being afraid of it.
What if we don’t,I’d said.
And she’d kissed me back like she’d been waiting to do it for years.
Maybe she had been. Maybe we both had. Gus certainly believed that.
I drove home at the end of shift with the windows down and the late October air coming in cold and clean, and I mused about the fact that I was going home. Not to my apartment. Not to a lease through April. Home. To a house with a cat who’d decided I was acceptable and a grandfather-in-law who was ahead of schedule at PT, and a wife who reorganized canned goods when she was panicking and kissed me back like she meant it.
Gus had been right all along.
The idea settled in my chest with the solid, unargued weight of something that had always been true and was only now getting its due.
I pulled into the driveway and sat for a moment with the engine off, looking at the lit windows of the house.
To be continued, I’d said.
I was ready to continue.
SEVENTEEN
ELLIE
The hardware store in late October was a different creature than the rest of the year.
Granger Hardware had never been a seasonal business in the traditional sense. We sold what people needed. What people needed stayed generally consistent across the calendar. Screws and paint and PVC pipe and the particular brand of wood glue that old Mr. Thibodaux had been buying every February for thirty years to repair his dock. That was the backbone of it, and it didn’t change much with the seasons.
But October brought pumpkins.
Grandpa had the idea years ago, back when the grocery store across town had briefly stopped carrying them and left Huckleberry Creek in what he’d described as a decorative crisis. He’d ordered a truckload on a whim, sold out in four days, and never looked back. Now we were the unofficial pumpkin headquarters of the county, which brought in foot traffic that bought pumpkins and also, frequently, the other things they’d been meaning to pick up for months. It was good business, and I genuinely enjoyed the energy of the store in October—the orange and the noise and the families coming through with childrenwho treated the pumpkin selection process with the gravity of a military operation.
It was a good day. In retrospect, that made it worse.
I’d been happy all morning in the uncomplicated, slightly disbelieving way of someone who’d gotten something they hadn’t let themselves want for a long time. Daniel had left an insulated of tea on the counter before his shift, with a note that said only to be continued in his handwriting, and I’d stood in the kitchen reading it with Chairman Meow winding around my ankles and Grandpa’s snoring drifting out from his bedroom and something so uncomplicated and warm slid through my chest that I hadn’t known what to do with it except take the tea and go to work.
