Page 64 of Never Alone
"Thank you."
I said it quietly. I had to. There wasn't a bigger version of it that wouldn't have come apart in my mouth.
He nodded once. Picked the dish towel back up.
"It's nothing."
"It's not nothing."
"It's something I want to do."
I stood at the sink with my hands in the soapy water and didn't move. He went back to drying.
After a while, I got back to the dishes.
Noah was at school. Cole was on his day off. We started right after I got back from the drop-off.
We started with Noah's new room. Cole had cleared out his clothes the night before and stacked them on the chair in the bigger room. The walls of the small room had been bare since we'd moved in—Cole hadn't bothered with art, hadn't bothered with anything that required a nail. The room held a bed, a dresser, a small table by the window. Noah's stuff would fit. We just had to move it.
Cole did the heavy lifting. I did the boxes.
I took Noah's clothes out of our shared dresser one drawer at a time and ferried them across the hall to the small dresser in his new room. Cole moved the smaller bookshelf from our room into his—ducked through the doorway with it, set it against the wall opposite the bed, leveled it with a folded piece of cardboard he'd pulled out of the recycling. He lined Noah's books on it the way Noah liked them—series together, tallest on the left, theLightning Thiefpaperback always in front. He'd noticed how Noah lined them.
I watched him do it from the doorway with an empty box in my hands.
Noah's lamp went on the bedside table. The picture of him and his class from third grade went up over the bed with a small nail Cole drove in with the heel of his palm. The sleeping bag we'd been keeping in the hall closet went on the high shelf, in case Noah ever wanted a fort.
Then we did the bigger room.
That was the slower work.
Cole's clothes were already stacked on the chair in piles he'd made the night before. He carried armfuls to the closet and started hanging. I stood at the dresser, sorting which of my drawers were going where.
The closet was a single one. It wasn't big.
I came in with a stack of his shirts and reached up to put them on the high shelf. The shelf was about two inches higher than I could comfortably reach. I went up on my toes. The stack started to slide.
A hand came under my elbow, steadying me. Another hand came over my hands and caught the shirts.
Cole was right behind me. Close enough that I could feel the heat of him through the back of my sweater. He didn't move.
"I've got it," he said. Quietly.
I let go of the shirts, and he set them on the high shelf with the kind of ease that came from having two more inches of reach. He stayed for a half-second before he stepped back.
I came down off my toes. I didn't look at him. My face was warmer than it had been a minute ago.
"Sorry," I said.
"Don't."
He went back to the chair for another armful.
The closet was not the only thing.
We met at the dresser, both of us reaching for the same hanger that had ended up in the wrong stack—his fingers closed around the wood at the same second mine did. I let go first. He didn't say anything. He took the hanger and went back to his side.
We met at the doorway when I came out with a box, and he was coming in with a box. The doorway was narrow enough that I had to tilt sideways to let him pass, and he had to tilt the other way, and for a beat, we were both standing in the doorway together, not breathing.
