Page 103 of Never Alone
"Cole." It came out almost as a question.
He bent his head.
"Mom!"
Noah's voice came up the stairs ahead of his feet. He hit the landing at a run.
"Cole! They're here!"
A car door slammed in the driveway. Then another. A laugh I knew—Sam's—then Jamie's voice, high and pleased, calling something to a kid.
Cole pulled back. Not fast. The slow way a man pulled back from something he was not done with.
He looked down at Noah, who had skidded to a stop next to him in the hallway and was looking up at us both with the open face of a kid who didn't know he had walked into anything.
"Let's go say hi," Cole said.
"Okay," Noah said.
Cole's eyes came back to me for one count. Then he turned and went down the stairs. Noah followed.
I stayed in the green room and breathed for one count. Two. Three.
Then I went down to host the barbecue.
It was a good day.
That was what I'd remember about it. The crew came in waves. Sam clapped Cole on the shoulder and said the house looked like a house now, and Jamie hugged me the way she hugged me, which was hard and a beat too long, and Ben and Jack went straight into the front room with Noah and disappeared.
Within ten minutes of the first car pulling in, Noah had Jack and Ben by the wrists and was walking them through the house like a man giving a tour of his life's work.
"This is the corner I sanded," he was saying, in the front room, when I came through with a tray. "Cole let me do the whole bottom of it. You can feel it. It's smooth."
Jack ran his hand on the corner. "Yeah, I feel it."
"And the trim on the doorway—see this piece? I held it while Cole hammered. The first time we tried it, I let go too early, and he had to do it again. But the second time, I held it the whole way."
Ben was nodding seriously the way Ben nodded.
Cole was at the grill on the back patio. From where I was, in the kitchen with the screen door propped open, I could see the line of his shoulders. He was talking to Sam and Tyler and turning a piece of chicken with a pair of tongs and not looking at the front room.
He was not looking at the front room the way a man does not look at something he is listening to with everything he has.
I saw him pretend not to watch.
I didn't say anything.
Keith was the one who found me in the kitchen.
I'd met him twice before, briefly—once at the first crew gathering, once when he'd dropped by the apartment with a beer and a roll of plans. Keith was the younger Davis brother, the architect, the one Cole had said had made him widen the kitchen doorway over Cole's argument. Cole had admitted that day that Keith had been right.
Keith had a beer in his hand and was running the other hand along the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room.
"He widened it," he said, more to the doorframe than to me.
"He told me you made him."
"He fought me on it."
