Page 47 of Crowe
Jackson checked his watch. “I have to get out to the range.” He looked at me, then at Wyatt, with the expression of a man making a calculation. “You staying here?”
“Sure,” Wyatt said, already pulling out the chair across from me. “Go do your thing. We’ll be fine.”
Jackson looked at me.
“Go,” I said. “I’ll be here.”
He leaned down and kissed the top of my head on his way out, which made Wyatt’s expression do something extremely smug that I chose not to acknowledge.
He stalked to the front door, but before he left, he pointed at Wyatt. “You behave, and don’t be telling him embarrassing stories about me.”
“Oh, don’t listen to him,” I said. “I want all the embarrassing stories.”
Jackson sighed and shook his head as he walked out the door. The door closed behind him, and Wyatt sat down. He wrapped both hands around his mug and looked at the puzzle with genuine assessment. “Botanical?”
“It’s a peony.”
“How far along?”
“I just started it. I’m still searching for edge pieces.”
He reached out and picked up a piece, studied it, and slotted it into one of the edge pieces I’d set aside. “I’m good at puzzles. It’s a cop thing. Pattern recognition.”
“Then you’re hired,” I said. “I have about nine hundred and ninety-nine pieces to go.”
He smiled, and it occurred to me then that I’d been wrong the other day when I said they didn’t look much alike. They had the same bones, the same eye shape, just in different colors, and Wyatt had that same way of paying attention that Jackson had.
“So,” Wyatt said, sorting a section of pieces by color with quick, practiced movements. “How are you doing? Actually doing, not the version you tell people so they’ll stop worrying.”
I looked at him. “You don’t waste time.”
“I’m only here for one day.”
Fair enough. “Better than I was,” I said. “I’m still working on it.”
He nodded, no performance in it. “That’s the right answer. The people who say they’re fine are the ones you worry about.” He set a piece in place.
“That sounds like something Jackson would say.”
“Well, we were raised by the same people.”
“Good people, it sounds like. Sorry you lost your mom so young.”
“He told you about our mother?” Wyatt looked up from the puzzle.
“He did.”
Something in his expression settled. “Good,” he said. “That’s good.”
We worked in companionable quiet for a while, the puzzle taking shape between us.
“He called me from the cabin,” Wyatt said after a while. “The night you got there. He didn’t say much. He never does, but I could hear it.”
“Hear what?”
“That something had shifted.” He fitted two pieces together and set them in place. “Jackson’s been taking care of things his whole life. Our grandfather, then our dad, then the people he worked with, then this camp. He’s good at it, and he doesn’t complain, but he’s been doing it alone for a long time.”
I looked at the puzzle. At the emerging shape of the peony, the petals coming together one piece at a time.
