Page 7 of Kept By the Devoted Mountain Man
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Beckett
We’redrivingwhenNoraasks: "Can Miss Tessa come for dinner?"
"No."
Silence. I check the mirror. She's looking out the window. "Why?"
"Because I didn't ask her."
"Youcouldask her."
"I'm driving."
She goes quiet again. The trees go past. The road curves down toward town and the light is gold the way it gets around seven in June, everything tipped sideways with it.
"She likes pasta," Nora says. "Probably."
"You don't know that."
"She seems like a pasta person."
There is no good response to this that doesn't end with me calling a woman I've been trying not to think about and inviting her into my house.
"She tells Kaylee she likes pesto," Nora adds, conversationally. "I heard."
I look at her in the rearview mirror. She is five years old and she has cake in her hair and she is running an operation.
"You heard."
"By accident."
"Mm."
We drive the rest of the way in silence. I pull up to the cabin and get out and get Nora out and she goes up the porch steps without looking at me, the way she does when she's letting me sit with something. I taught her that. I don't know whether to be proud or alarmed.
Pesto. I have pesto.
I think about the way she saysnot right nowwhen I ask if she's moping, like the absence of sadness is a new discovery she hasn't catalogued yet. I think about her hands on the book and Nora's knee pressed against hers and the crayon mark on her wrist.
Thankful I got her number, I text:Nora wants to know if you'll come for dinner. Pasta. Around seven.
I put the phone down. I clean the kitchen. The phone buzzes.
I'll bring bread.
I spend twenty minutes after that doing things that don't need doing. I move the pile of trail survey maps off the table. I find the two mugs Nora has left on the floor by the couch and wash them. I stand in the doorway and look at the living room: the worn couch, the stack of Nora's books, Jace's old jacket still on the hook by the door because I haven't been able to put it away and I try to see it the way a stranger would.
It's fine. It's a cabin. It's lived in.
I go back to cooking.
Nora disappears to her room to change her shirt, which she does without being asked, which means she's putting her best foot forward, which means I'm now running the dinner party of a five-year-old.
The knock comes at seven on the dot.
She's carrying a paper bag from the bakery on Third with the bread, plus a small jar of honey with the comb still in it that Nora will try to eat with a spoon before the evening is out. She's wearing jeans and a yellow shirt and her hair is down and she smiles at Nora, who has opened the door before I can get there and is already talking.
