Page 106 of Smoke and Roses

“You’re really big,” she says.

“I eat my vegetables,” Travis tells her. Then he bends down and says in my ear, “Damn, she looks just like her mom.”

She giggles. Then she looks back at me, very serious.

“Mom says you sing to flowers,” she says. “Do they like it?”

“They love it,” I say. “It makes them grow.”

“Can I come sing to them?”

I look up at Danielle. She’s standing with Hank on one side and her mom on the other, watching me crouch on the airport floor with her daughter, and she’s crying all over again.

“Yeah, baby,” I tell little Lindsey. “You can come sing to them anytime.”

It takes two cars to get everybody home. Ben rents a minivan and takes Carol, Hank and the baby. Travis drives his truck, with Danielle and me in the back seat of the crew cab and little Lindsey in her booster seat on the other side, right behind Travis. She informed us at the curb that she had to sit behind the firefighter, and Travis looked at her for a second and said, “Yes, ma’am.”

She falls asleep before Farmington with her mouth open and a fruit snack stuck to her cheek.

Danielle and I hold hands for the drive up the canyon.

We talk the way we used to talk lying on the hood of her Civic, over each other and out of order. Her nursing school roommate who stole her shampoo for two years. Grandma North’s hip, and the Christmas I flooded the shop. Ben’s terrible singing. The winter we tried to skate on Pineview in our sneakers. Brett’s name comes up once, and she squeezes my hand hard, and we let it pass and keep going.

“Your boyfriend drives like a grandpa,” she whispers at one point.

“He’s got your kid in his truck.”

“He’s doing fifty-two in a sixty-five.”

“I can hear you,” Travis says from the front.

“Holy crap,” Danielle says to me. “He talks.”

“When it matters,” I say. In the rearview mirror, his eyes crinkle at the corners.

Coming up past Pineview, with the reservoir going pink and gold in the last of the light, she puts her head on my shoulder the way she used to in Algebra II, when she was supposed to be listening and I was supposed to be taking notes for both of us.

“Linds,” she says. “Can I tell you something dumb?”

“You always could.”

“I was so scared you’d hate Portland Danny. The one with the minivan and the scrubs and the 401k. I kept thinking you were waiting for the girl who left.”

I laugh, because of course she was scared of that. We both were.

“I told Cassia and Tara the exact same thing,” I say. “Except I was scared you’d hate Eden Lindsey. The one who never left.”

She lifts her head and looks at me.

“That’s so stupid,” she says.

“So stupid.”

“We’re idiots.”

“Total idiots.”

She puts her head back down on my shoulder. We hold hands across the back seat of Travis’s truck like we’re fourteen again. On the other side of the seat, little Lindsey snores, and Travis turns the radio on low.