Page 25 of The Last Road Trip

I’m halfway through the second KITCHEN box when the knock comes. I get up off my knees, utility knife still in hand, and open the door. Kwemby is carrying two boxes stacked against his chest, chin resting on the top one to keep it steady. Maren is behind him with one box held in both arms, her face flushed from the stairs. Coris is last, her box already listing to one side, her phone somehow also in her right hand.

“Hi,” I say.

Coris drops her box on the floor inside the door and wraps both arms around me before I’ve had time to step back. Her chin digs into my shoulder.

“Okay,” I say, laughing. “I’m glad to see you too.”

Maren sets her box down with more care, then catches my hand and squeezes once. “The truck’s almost empty,” she says. “Three more loads.”

Kwemby edges past us both, boxes still balanced against his chest, and sets them in the kitchen doorway with a careful lowering of his arms. He straightens and takes a slow look around the living room, eyes tracking from the couch to the table to the double windows to the stack of flattened boxes I’ve already emptied. Then he turns to me.

“Where do you want to start?” he asks.

Excited by my official fresh new start, I teasingly say, “I want us to start in the bedroom.” Then I send him an obvious wink.

“Ew, Mom!” Coris says while Kwemby winks back.

“Normally I’d say your wish is my command,” he starts, “But I want to save my tricks for when we’re alone.”

“Fair enough.” I chuckle. “Let’s finish the kitchen and go from there.”

We fall into a rhythm after that. Kwemby takes the heavy loads. Maren grabs the smaller boxes. Coris stays and helps me inside. Every now and then she shouts questions about where to place things.

“Where do the glasses go?”

“The cabinet directly above the sink.”

“All of them?”

“Yes. Plates will go to the left and bowls to the right.”

A minute later I’m attempting to move the couch a few feet to the left when Kwemby comes back with the last load. I’ve got the back frame in both hands, tugging as hard as I can. He crosses the living room and says, “I’ve got it, babe.” Wedging his hands beneath the base frame, he lifts the weight with a single, fluid shift of his body and sets it flat against the wall.

Swoon.

Coris appears in the kitchen doorway with a mug in each hand, one blue, one white. “Which one do you want on the counter?”

Kwemby has moved on to carrying the boxes inside to their proper places. With a box for my bedroom, he says, without stopping, without even fully turning his head, “The blue one. Left of the coffee maker.” Then he’s around the corner and into the bedroom.

Coris holds the mugs mid-air, her brows lifting as she looks at me. I hold her gaze, a sudden warmth prickling behind my ears. He knows my morning routine down to the inch.

After meeting her in the doorway to the kitchen, I take the blue mug from Coris’s hand and carry it before setting it to the left of the coffee maker.

I go back to the living room.

The afternoon light has shifted while we’ve been working, moving off the center of the floor and climbing the far wall. The armchair sits in the corner at an angle Kwemby adjusted without being asked, so it catches the window light while I’m reading with my tea. The last of the stacked boxes is thinning along the wall.

“Rug,” Coris announces from the couch, where she’s collapsed with her shoes still on. “This place needs a rug.”

“Shoes off,” I say, unable to help myself.

“Sorry.” She unties them and takes them off.

Maren comes in from the truck with the final box—BOOKS—and sets it down beside the bookshelf. “That’s the last of it,” she says, pressing her hands into the small of her back and stretching.

“Thank you,” I say to the room in general.

“Don’t thank us yet,” Maren says. “You still owe us dinner.”