We walked back toward the house. The farmhouse was still yellow, still cheerful. The heat worked. The hot water worked. Everything worked, because I’d spent five years making sure of it, and because the woman who lived there had finally let someone help her keep the place standing.
I came around the side of the barn and saw her.
Lark was on the porch in one of the rocking chairs with a coffee mug in her hand that said WORLD’S OKAYEST RANCHER, which Beckett had given her, and she refused to drink from anything else. Her hair was twisted up in the same knot that had never once in five years stayed where she put it, and the morning light caught the auburn and turned it copper.
My wife still took my breath away. I’d stopped being surprised by that somewhere around year two and had just accepted it as a permanent condition. She’d be wringing out a mop or arguing with the vet on the phone or covered in mud upto her elbows, and my chest would do the same thing it had done in the coffee shop when she’d laughed at her own chaos and handed me a flyer.
Our Reid was on her hip, two years old and built like a small, determined tank.
He had Lark’s green eyes and my jaw and an opinion about everything that he expressed at full volume whether or not anyone was listening. He was currently telling Lark something urgent about the chickens. I caught the wordchickenthree times andnotwice, which was the general shape of most of his speeches.
Lark looked up and saw me. The smile started slow, the way it always did when she spotted me across a distance, building from something private into something that reached her whole face.
“Your son has complaints about the chickens,” she called.
“He’s your son when he has complaints. He’s my son when he does something impressive.”
“Well,yourson put his boot in the toilet this morning.”
“And he did it impressively.”
She laughed. Reid looked at me and pointed at something only he could see and said a word that might have beenhorseor might have beenmudor might have been something he’d learned from Clarence that we’d be dealing with later.
I climbed the porch steps. Leaned down and kissed Lark, coffee and morning air and the faint smell of the lavender soap she’d been using since before I knew her. Reid grabbed my ear, which was his version of a greeting. I took him from her and settled him on my hip, and he immediately began explaining the chicken situation to me with the same intensity and hand gestures his mother used when she was making a point she considered important, which was all of them.
Tova climbed the porch steps behind me, walked to her spot beside the rocking chair, and lowered herself down with a long exhale.
I stood on the porch of a cheerful yellow farmhouse with my son in my arms and my dog at my feet and the woman I loved reaching for my hand, and the morning stretched out ahead of us the same way it had yesterday and would tomorrow, ordinary and extraordinary and entirely ours.
I’d driven into this town with a duffel bag and no plan and a noise in my head that never stopped. A woman had handed me a flyer and a purpose and a dog I didn’t ask for, and I’d spent five years building something I didn’t know I was allowed to have.
I was home.
•••
