Page 77 of Never Alone
"Where's Will?” I asked, remembering her partner's name.
"Pulling another thirty,” Quinn said. “You'll meet him next time, I promise."
After that, the afternoon happened around me.
I lost track of names. I lost track of how many times I saidthank youand how many times someone saidwe've been wanting to meet you. They asked what I did. They asked where I was from. They asked how I was settling in—not the way questions came from people positioning you, but the way they came from people who wanted to know.
Eight months, going on nine, my family in this town had been Mrs. Thompson, Benjie, and the small ring of people who nodded at me at the grocery store. I had been careful. I had let it be small.
This was bigger. It was overwhelming, the kind of good I had not been ready for. They pulled me into conversations and didn't drop me out of them. They asked about the bakery and listened the whole way through the answer. They refilled my drink without asking.
I caught myself laughing at things. I had not laughed like that in a long time.
From time to time, I would glance up across the yard to find Cole.
He was at the grill. The picnic table. Leaning against the fence. The crew gave him grief in a running rotation. He noddedat whatever they were saying—monosyllabic, two-word. The way he was with me.
One of those times, when I looked, he was already looking at me.
He didn't look away.
The heat went up my throat and into my face. I smiled at nothing in particular and turned back to the women I was standing with.
Jamie had caught it. She didn't say anything. She just smiled at her shoe and refilled my drink.
At one point, Aunt Jenna pulled a chair next to mine and sat down. She wasn't looking at me.
"He's a good kid," she said.
"He is."
"My Cole was just like that at his age. Polite. Watchful. Didn't go anywhere without checking back."
I didn't know what to say to that. She didn't need me to say anything.
A few minutes later, she got up, walked over to where the boys were starting their soccer game, and sat down on the grass beside Noah. She said something to him. He nodded politely. She pressed something into his hand. She put a hand on the top of his head.
He came over to me later with what she'd given him—a flat river stone painted with a fox, neat, copper, and white.
“Aunt Jenna had been painting them,” he said. She'd given him the one she'd been working on this morning. "She said it's for keeping."
"Then we'll keep it."
He ran back to the boys.
People started saying goodbye around five, in waves—no one wanting to be the first to leave, and then everyone leaving at once. Aunt Jenna held both my hands and told me to bring Noah by the house. Quinn hugged me again and made me promise to come to dinner. The crew lifted beers at me from across the yard. I gathered Noah from where he had collapsed in the grass with Jack and Ben.
Jamie walked us to the truck with her arm through mine, the way she had walked me into the yard at the start. At the curb, while Cole was getting Noah buckled in, she squeezed my elbow and told me Noah was welcome over for playdates with Jack and Ben anytime.
“I'll take him for a week. Drop him off. Sam will teach him how to throw a curveball.”
"Thank you, Jamie."
"Don't thank me. They needed a third."
She kissed my cheek and stood at the curb until we pulled away.
Cole drove us home in the dark. Noah fell asleep against the door before we hit the bridge—the juice box empty in his fist, the painted fox tucked into his other hand.
