Through the screen door I can hear three alphas failing to set a table under her supervision.
And I am happy. Stupidly, wholly happy, in a way I've started to think of as a symptom, like a low fever I keep forgetting to be alarmed about.
“Not that drawer, sweetheart, the good forks are in the sideboard.” That's Cynthia, running the room the way she runs her salon, everybody busy, nobody sure when they agreed to it. “Hudson, honey, you're a guest, sit down. Logan, you can carry the roast, you've got the arms for it. Finn, stop hovering, you're making the salad nervous.”
“The salad's fine, Mom.”
“The salad can feel your energy.”
I laugh into the potato salad, alone, where nobody can see me do it.
Last time I stood on this doorstep it was just me and Finn, and I was so scared of Cynthia catching the seam that I nearly threw up in her hydrangeas. That was two weeks and a whole lifetime ago. This time there are four of us, and the seam is somewhere I never thought to guard it, and I brought a better potato salad.
I go in.
Logan's the first thing I see, because Logan is holding something out to Cynthia with both hands, ears already red. A cutting board. Walnut, sanded to the point of indecency, the grain doing something gold in the kitchen light.
“I made you this,” he says. “For the roast. So you're not carving on the good counter.”
Cynthia goes still. Then she takes it like it's made of weather, turns it over, runs a thumb along the edge, and looks up at this enormous shy alpha in her kitchen with her whole face open.
“Youmadethis.”
“It's just offcuts.”
“Wait until Marie hears,” Cynthia says, to nobody, to the room, to the universe, because Marie Hartley isn't here and that has never once stopped Cynthia from addressing her. “Hemademe a board.” And she sets it in pride of place by the stove and does not use it once all night, because it's already an heirloom, and I have to look at the ceiling for a second and think about baseball.
This is what a real pack dinner looks like, in case you've never wrecked your own life badly enough to find out.
Logan carries the roast to the table with the grave focus of a man defusing it, and Cynthia beams at his forearms like she commissioned them personally. “Careful, honey, it's heavy?—”
“Got it.”
“There's a trivet?—”
“Got it, Mrs. Morrow.”
“Cynthia. You call me Cynthia, you're carrying my roast.” She's already moving on, snapping a napkin into her lap. “Hudson, you were saying. The bear.”
“Theallegedbear.” Hudson leans in, because Hudson has never once in his life left a story unfinished. “Man comes into the shop last week, wants to return a two-hundred-dollar tent. Used. Filthy. Claw marks down one whole side. And he goes, dead serious, 'this tent attracted a bear.'“
“It did not attract a bear,” Finn says.
“That's what I said. I said, sir, the tent is not a picnic basket. Bears do not read the tag and go, ooh,ripstop nylon.”
“Did you take it back,” Gemma says, not looking up.
“I gave him store credit, because he had his kid with him and the kid was crying, and I am, at my core, a soft touch.” Hudson points the roll at Finn. “Unlike some.”
“I'd have kept the tent,” Finn agrees.
“You'd have kept the tent and made the kid write an incident report.”
“They pitched it in bear country with food in the vestibule. That's not the tent's fault. That's a teachable moment.”
“The boy's eight, Finn.”
“Eight's old enough to hang a bear bag. His dad should've shown him.”
