Page 53 of Never Alone
"The court wants Noah to have a stable male figure who can provide for him. What does it look like if anybody finds out I'm asking you to pay half the bills when I'm clearly the higher earner?"
He said it the way he said most things. Like he had already worked it through. The reasoning was sound. I could not argue against it.
"I have to do something."
"You already are. You just have to keep being a good mother to Noah."
He went back to the paperwork.
Cole had been picking Noah up from school on his off-shifts.
He’d asked me at the start of the week if it would help. I said yes. He didn't make a thing of it.
A few days back, he'd come home from a shift with a bag from a hobby store. He set it on the table without ceremony and told Noah it was a beginner kit if Noah wanted to try. They built it that night, and the next night, and the night after that. Building with Cole was Noah's favorite part of the day.
At some point in there, Cole told Noah about the house. I walked in one evening to find them at the kitchen table with a pencil and a half-drawn floor plan on the back of an envelope, Noah asking questions about load-bearing walls, Cole answering them like the answers mattered. I didn't interrupt.
Today was a Saturday. Cole didn't ask. He just said, “I want to show you both something and put the truck keys on the counter.”
The house was on Ashford Street. A small two-story with a porch that needed a new floor and a front door that needed paint. The lock on it, I noticed, was new.
Cole let us in with the key from his keychain. The inside smelled like fresh-cut wood and old plaster. The front room had been stripped down to the studs on one wall, drywall stackedagainst the other. There was a saw on a workhorse and a bin of nails on the floor. The light came in through windows that didn't have curtains yet.
Noah stopped in the doorway and looked around like he was waiting for permission to step inside.
"Go on," Cole said.
Noah went in.
He moved through the front room slowly. He stopped at the workhorse. He stopped at the saw. He stopped at the bin of nails, not to touch it, just to look at it. Then he went into the kitchen.
I stood with Cole in the doorway and watched my son walk through what was, very obviously, a place that someone was building.
"Why this house?" I asked.
Cole was watching Noah. "Cheaper to fix up myself."
"That's the whole reason?"
He was quiet for a beat. "It's the answer that makes sense out loud."
I didn't ask what the rest of it was.
We went into the kitchen. Cole had taken the cabinets down and hadn't put new ones up yet. The counter was a sheet of plywood on workhorses. The sink was plumbed. The stove was not.
Noah was crouched by a wall with a long pencil mark on it.
"What's this for?"
"That's where the new island goes," Cole said. "Once I get the floor down."
"Can I help?"
It came out small. The kind of asking Noah did when he was not sure what answer he was going to get.
Cole put down what he was carrying. He went over to where Noah was crouched, and he crouched down, too, so he was at Noah's level.
"Yeah," he said. "Come over here."
