Page 89 of Never Alone
I sat with the man I'd been married off to in my head a hundred times these last two weeks. The man who picked Noah up from school on his off-shifts. The man who'd kissed me back in a hardware store an hour ago, like he'd been waiting since the lawn at the fire. I sat with the texture I hadn't had before. For thirty-four years, this man had been alone on purpose. He hadn't told me what for. I hadn't yet asked.
"Cole Weston."
"Yeah."
"Are you gay?"
He laughed. Not the almost version this time. A real laugh—short, low, surprised.
"I am very much not gay."
He saidnotlike it didn't have a weight he didn't usually let it carry.
The heat hit my face all the way up.
I made myself look out the window.
"It's just," he said, quieter. "If I get into a relationship, I want to get into something real. Something like Sam and Jamie."
I didn't say anything.
I couldn't think of anything to say that wouldn't land.
He didn't seem to need anything said.
He drove.
The Ashford house sat at the end of a quiet street on a corner lot, the porch holding new boards Cole hadn't yet painted. He pulled into the gravel drive and put the truck in park.
He took the heavier paint cans. I took the bag of nails, the swatch he'd picked, and a small box of brushes from the floor of the cab. He unlocked the front door, held it open, and let me go in first.
The house smelled like fresh wood and turpentine. A stretch of refinished oak ran from the front door into the living room—work that hadn't been there in the spring. The walls were primed but not yet painted. A sawhorse stood in one corner with a level laid across it. The stairs went up to the second floor on my left. Somewhere up there was the room Cole had been building for my son. I didn't let myself go look. I was carrying enough already.
I walked through to the kitchen. The cabinets were new. The counters were unfinished butcher block, sanded smooth. I held the yellow swatch up to the wall by the window where the morning light would land.
It looked the way I'd thought it would.
"That's the one," I said.
"I figured."
He brought in the rest of the supplies. I helped him stack the cans against the wall. We worked in silence—the same silence we'd driven in for the last twenty minutes, the same silence we had worked in over the dishes the night before. It wasn't unfriendly.
When the truck was empty, I stayed in the kitchen for a moment longer.
If I get into a relationship, he had said in the cab,I want to get into something real.
The line had stayed in his voice in my head all the way over here. Like the line about my eyes had stayed in his voice in my head for two days last November, in the bakery before Thanksgiving, when neither of us had known what we were going to be to each other yet.
I had been telling myself, for two weeks, that what we were doing was an arrangement. The word had been doing work. The word had let me sleep in the same room with him without thinking about what sleeping in the same room with him meant. The word had let me kiss him in front of Sean an hour ago and tell myself, for an hour afterward, that it had been a performance.
The word had stopped being a word somewhere I hadn't been watching.
What I was wondering now, for the first time, here in his kitchen with a yellow swatch in my hand, was whether it had stopped being a word for him, too.
Whether he had been waiting for me.
Whethersomething real, something like Sam and Jamie,was the way he had been letting himself think about us when he was not letting himself think about us.
