Page 113 of Smoke and Roses

She hands me one of the cups.

“Black,” she says. “The way you like it.”

“You always know.”

“You look like a man who takes it black,” she says, and grins, because that’s exactly what she told me the first morning.

Around the corner of the house, where the porch wraps to the front, Nate is sitting on the top step by himself, with Bruno leaning against his leg.

Lindsey looks at him, then at me. “Take him some pie.”

“He brought pie.”

“Take him somebody else’s.”

I cut two slices of Nolene’s pecan in the kitchen and go out the front door. I sit down on the step beside him and hand him one. Bruno sniffs it and sighs.

“Not for you,” Nate tells him.

We eat. The cold comes up off the pond, and the dog leans on both of us.

“You got any memorial ink, Raines?”

“No.” I think about it. “Lindsey’s got a dandelion on her wrist. Little shop down in Ogden did it.”

Nate nods. He looks out past the pond for a while, with his fork resting on his plate.

“I’m thinking about getting one,” he says.

That’s all he says, and I don’t push. I know what it’s like to need somebody to sit there and not ask.

When I come back around the porch, Lindsey hands me my coffee and doesn’t ask either. She leans her head on my shoulder. The first snowflakes of the year start coming down over the Strongs’ pond, big and soft, and they catch in her hair.

She tips her face up to watch them fall.

I watch her instead.

Epilogue

Four Months Later

At four fifty, the alarm on his phone goes off on the nightstand with one soft chime, and Travis reaches over in the dark and shuts it off before it can wake me.

I’m already awake. I’m always awake at this time. I lie there with my eyes closed and listen to him get up. The floor creaks. The bathroom door closes. Then the coffee maker in my kitchen gurgles to life. Our kitchen. He moved in a week before Christmas, and three months later, I still get a little thrill every time I think it.

Our kitchen.

I get up and go down the hall. He’s standing at the counter in sweatpants and nothing else, pouring two cups.

He hands me one without looking and steps over the orange cat yelling at his ankles for breakfast. He brought her home from the shelter in Ogden in January and named her Dolly.

I set my cup down and go to the radio on the windowsill and turn on Dolly Parton at full volume.

Travis closes his eyes.

“Every morning,” he says.

“Every morning,” I agree, and start to sing.