Page 159 of Never Alone
Tessa's car pulled into the driveway at four-thirty.
I heard it before I saw it. Noah was getting out of the back with a small wooden box in his hands—the destroyer model he and I had started last weekend, which he had been carrying with him to the house for the last three Saturdays because he liked finishing it here. He had asked me last weekend if he could keep it on the shelf when it was done.
I had told him yes.
Noah came up the walk first. He saw me at the window. He waved.
Tessa was behind him with two grocery bags. She had been baking Mrs. Thompson's lemon tart all week. Mrs. Thompson had handed her the recipe out of the box on Wednesday, and Tessa had been a quiet kind of devastated about it for half an evening before she had started baking.
I went to the front door.
I had the door open before they hit the porch. The cold came in first. Then the smell of lemon from the bag Tessa was carrying. Then Noah, his cheeks bright from the walk up from the car, his hands cupped carefully around the small wooden box he had not let me carry on the ride over.
Noah came in first.
"Cole."
"Bud."
He had the careful walk he used in this house when something fragile was in his hands. The walk that said he had a job to do, and he was the man for it.
He held up the destroyer.
The gray of the hull was the gray we had mixed at the basement bench three Saturdays ago, a drop of black at a time. He had used the brush the way I had shown him. Steady. Slow. The destroyer in his hands looked like a thing that had been made on purpose by a person who knew what he was making.
"I want to glue the propeller. Can I do it here? I want it to be done before everyone gets here."
He was looking up at me. He had Tessa's seriousness about him today, the seriousness she got when a thing mattered to her.
"Yeah. Workbench is set up in the basement."
He nodded once. He turned and went down the hall the careful way, the destroyer held in both hands in front of him like he was carrying a candle that could not be set down.
He went down the stairs.
Tessa came in with the bags.
She closed the door behind her with her hip. She had the small pink at the tops of her cheeks that she got when the air outside was colder than she had dressed for. Her hair was up in the loose knot she had been wearing since the oven. The bags were heavy. She was not letting them be.
"He's going to be down there for an hour."
"Yeah."
I had not moved from the doorway. She'd noticed it. She was choosing not to ask yet.
"Jack and Ben are coming with Sam and Jamie at five."
"Yeah."
She'd given me the start time. She'd given me the prep window. She was waiting for me to either join her at the counter or tell her why I wasn't.
She set the bags on the counter.
She turned around.
She looked at me.
"You're not in the kitchen helping me."
