Page 127 of On His Mind
“Mm,” she hums.
I run my fingers along her hair. “But if I were,” I say, “I’d think God sent you to me.”
She doesn’t respond right away. Instead, she echoes what I said earlier. “Your angel?”
I chuckle. “Yeah, my angel.”
She laughs, low and pleased. She tucks her head back down under my jaw, and we lie there while the sun climbs the wall. The radiator’s off for the season. Somewhere outside, a bird’s going. She traces something absent on my chest with one finger, a shape, a floor plan maybe, she does it in her sleep sometimes, and I hold still and let her.My angel.
I could get up. There’s coffee. There’s the whole day. I don’t get up. I stay in the warm and the light with her drawing nothing on my chest, and I let the first morning of the summer take as long as it wants.
We go to the lake on the first Sunday I’m not working. It’s a small one, twenty minutes out, the kind nobody goes to, and in the summer with the students gone, it’s dead empty — a couple of families at the far end, a guy fishing off the dock, nobody who knows us, nobody who’d care if they did. Penelope’s the kind of person who packs a whole bag — food in containers, a blanket, sunscreen she makes me put on because I never would, two books, one of which she knows I won’t read.
We lay the blanket in the grass up from the water, where there’s a little shade coming off a tree, and she sets everything out with the exactness she does everything, the food arranged, the corners of the blanket squared, and I lie back on it and watch her fuss and don’t help because watching her is better.
“You could help,” she says.
“I could.”
She nudges me, but I catch her arm and pull her on top of me.
“What are you doing?” she asks, falling onto me.
“Kissing you,” I answer, wrapping my fingers behind her neck and kissing her mouth.
She pushes off me and says, “Alright. I’m almost done.”
The sun’s high, the water’s flat, and there’s a breeze coming off it. We eat the food she made, and she talks — about her internship, about a stair detail on the mill that’s been fighting her for a week, about Ivory and London and the coat she’s already bought for a country she hasn’t moved to yet. I don’t say much. I just listen, the way I always listen to her.
After a while, she lies back next to me and puts her head on my chest and goes quiet. The sun moves. The guy on the dock catches a fish and lets it go. Her breathing slows, and slows, and then she’s asleep on me in the grass with the light coming through the leaves, and I put my arm around her and lie there and don’t move for an hour.
I’ve never had an hour like it. A whole hour with nowhere to be, no one to watch for, and a beautiful girl asleep on my chest in the sun. I look at the water, the trees, the back of her head. A year and a half ago, I couldn’t sleep four hours straight and didn’t own anything I couldn’t fit in a bag. Now there’s a girl asleep on my chest in the sun, and nowhere either of us has to be. I keep my hand on the small of her back, and I don’t try to figure out how I got here. I just let it be an hour.
She finally wakes up when the sun shifts off her face, blinking, a crease on her cheek from my shirt.
“How long was I out?”
I grin, not minding it. “A while.”
“You should’ve woken me.”
“No,” I say. “You looked beautiful, Penelope.”
She looks at me for a second, and something soft crosses her face.
“Peaceful.” I lift my brows and sigh. “And I have plans for you tonight.”
“You do?”
“Nothing crazy,” I say. “It includes not sleeping.”
She pinches me, and I don’t flinch. Then she just settles back down against me, her hand finding mine, and we stay until the light goes long and gold, and it’s finally time to fold the blanket and drive home to the house on Hawthorne Street that’s ours.
She teaches me to cook on a Tuesday because she’s decided I can’t live on the restaurant’s mistakes forever.
“One thing,” she says, standing at the Hawthorne stove with a pan. “You’re going to learn to make one thing well, and then you’ll always have it. Everybody should have one thing.”
“I’ve got the juice.”
