Page 34 of Devoured

CHAPTER TWELVE

John Royston came home on a Friday, in the front seat of his son's truck, with Remi in the back leaning up between the seats, and he cussed about the wheelchair the whole way up the drive.

"I don't need the chair, Dean."

"Elena's orders. Chair to the door."

"Elena's thirty years old."

"Elena's your doctor, and she put it in writing so I couldn't argue with you about it."

"Elena," John said, "is barely more than a child.”

He had his color back, mostly — three weeks of hospital food and decaf had left him meaner than the stroke had, which Dean took as the best sign yet — and he got the door open before Dean had the truck in park and put both boots on his own gravel and stood up out of the seat under his own power, swaying a little, gripping the door, furious and upright and home.

"There," John said, to nobody, to the whole ranch laid out gold in front of him. "Walked in on my own legs." He looked at it a while, the house and the barns and the land running off past all of it, the way a man looks at a thing he wasn't sure he'd see again and won't admit it. Then, gruff, because he'd let it show for a second: "Get my bag. And don't let Helen see that chair or I'll never hear the end of it."

The house had been waiting for him all day and lost its mind when he came through the door.

Remi got to him first, out of the truck before Dean, around to the passenger side, hair down and already crying and swearing she wasn't, getting a shoulder under her father's arm the second his boots hit the gravel whether he wanted the help or not. John held onto his only daughter a moment longer than the steadying needed, eyes shut, one big hand spread on the back of her head, and said, "All right. All right, now," in the voice he'd used on all of them at one time or another, and Remi said something wet and furious into his collar that made him almost smile.

Then it was all of them at once, the way it always was. Chase, gripping his father's hand and his shoulder both, saying little, which was Chase. Jett, in off a shift, clean shirt, the easy mouth working overtime to cover whatever was under it, folding the old man into a hug and cracking that the hospital should've kept him another month for the sake of everyone's eardrums, and John telling him where he could put that, and the two of them grinning at each other with something raw under it neither would name. Helen hovering with her hands full of nothing, already gone teary, fussing about the downstairs room being ready and was he hungry and she'd make whatever he wanted. And the kids, the kids hit him low, Levi wrapped around one leg and Giana pressed into his side under his arm, and John Royston stood in his own front hall buried in his grandchildren and his children and looked, for the first time in three weeks, like himself.

Dean set the bag down and stood back and let them have him. It was its own kind of medicine, watching it. The house full and loud and right.

And then John, over the top of all the heads, found the one person in the room who was standing back the way Dean was, at the edge of the kitchen doorway, a dish towel in her hands, giving the family its moment, not sure yet whether she was inside the circle or holding the door for it.

"You'll be Lara," John said.

The room quieted a notch. Lara came forward, composed, that level pleasant steadiness she wore, but Dean had learned to read what was under it now and there was something careful in it tonight, because this was the man whose name was on her paychecks and whose books she'd been keeping and whose grandkids she'd been raising, and they had never once been in a room together.

"Mr. Royston. I'm glad you're home." She put her hand out. "I've heard a great deal about you. Most of it from my files."

A beat. Then John barked a laugh. The first big sound Dean had heard out of him since the south pasture. Then he took her hand in both of his.

"My file." He looked at her, sharp under the white eyebrows, the look Dean had grown up under, the one that took your measure and let you feel it being taken. "You're the one's been holding it all together while I was flat on my back letting strangers feed me applesauce."

"I balanced your books," Lara said. "Your son held it together. I just made sure the lights stayed on while he did."

"Mm." John kept hold of her hand a second longer, and his eyes went over her face the way old men's eyes did when they'd stopped being shy about looking, reading something there, and whatever he found made the sharp look soften at the edges into something Dean couldn't quite name and wasn't sure he wanted to. "Kelly would've liked you," John said, which stopped the whole room cold, because John Royston did not say his wife's name, had not said it easy in front of his children in years — and he said it plain and unbothered, like a man too lately reminded of his own mortality to keep dancing around the dead. "She ran these same books for thirty years. Hated every minute of the filing and never let one bill go late." He let go of Lara's hand. "Sit down to supper with us. That's not a request. You did a sight more for this family than the job you were hired for, the least we can do is put a plate in front of you."

And that was that. Lara looked, for one unguarded second, like she might cry, or might bolt, and then put it away, the way she did, and said, "I'd like that," and Dean stood at the edge of his own full kitchen and felt the thing in his chest he'd been losing the fight with for weeks tip another degree toward gone.

Supper was loud and long and the best meal that house had served in a year, and Dean spent most of it pretending to watch his father and actually watching her.

She'd been folded in without ceremony. Remi on one side of her keeping up a running commentary, Levi on the other narrating his food, Giana across from her settling a dispute about the salt by handing it to Lara like she was the obvious adjudicator. John at the head of his own table again, holding court, color in his face, telling a story about a bull in 1987 that got longer every year. And Lara in the middle of all of it, laughing at the right places, drawn in, fitting, the dimple coming and going across the table from a man who'd sworn off looking at it and was looking anyway.

It went on like that, warm and easy, until it began to thin out the way Friday nights did.

Jett went first, clean shirt, somewhere to be, kissing Remi's head and gripping Dean's shoulder and telling John he'd come by tomorrow, gone in his truck toward whatever Friday Jett had lined up. Then Remi, who'd been texting under the table, announced she was meeting Elena and some others in town and would not be lectured about it, kissed her father, threatened her brothers generally, and took herself off. Chase stayed long enough to help his father down the hall to the new room and then headed for his own cabin with a nod. Helen put the kids to bed over Levi's strenuous objection and then turned in herself.

And Lara stayed. She shouldn't have — it was late, and the workday was a memory — but there were dishes from a supper for nine and she was the kind of person who could not leave a kitchen like that for Helen to find at dawn, and so she rolled her sleeves up at the sink while the house emptied around her, and Dean, who should have walked her to her car an hour ago, found he couldn’t make himself send her home.

"Go see to your dad," she said, not turning from the sink, reading him the way she'd started to. "I've got this. I'm not leaving Helen a mountain of it."

So he went.

He found his father still up, in the new chair in the new room, in the dark, not ready to be put to bed in a strange room on his first night home.