Page 39 of Handful

Owen grinned. First time I’d seen him do that with someone new. It landed somewhere I wasn’t ready for. He took off toward the backyard with Finn chasing him, and Austen stood up and looked at me.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to.

Mark came out of the kitchen while Austen was in the backyard with the boys. He had a coffee and the grin he saved for when he had something on me.

“So that’s her.”

“That’s her.”

He looked to where Austen was running a drill with Owen — side to side, the ball between them, Finn circling as a defender. She was faster than Owen expected and he was loving it. Mark watched for a moment.

Then he looked at Austen the way I’d looked at a thousand women in my life.

The sweep. Quick, practiced, top to bottom. Not even conscious — just the automatic inventory of a man clocking a woman in his field of vision. His eyes came back to mine. He grinned. “You’ve done all right for yourself.”

I didn’t grin back.

It took him a second. “What?”

“Don’t look at her like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like that.”

Mark stared at me. He genuinely didn’t know what I was talking about. That was the thing — neither had I, for a long time.

“I was just—”

“Yeah.” I picked up my coffee. “I know.”

Something crossed his face — confusion, then the edge of something harder, pride maybe, the defensive twitch of a man who’d been told he’d done something wrong without being told what. He opened his mouth. Closed it. Looked at me a second longer than he needed to.

“Okay,” he said. “Sure.” He went back inside.

On the porch, Heather’s cup was at her lips. She’d heard it. She looked at me — not the assessment she’d given Austen, not the polite look she kept for me. Something I hadn’t seen from her before. Respect.

The boys loved Austen. Owen showed her the dirt bike. She asked real questions — engine size, suspension, how the throttle worked — and he answered every one with the focus of a kid who’d been waiting for an adult to care about these things. Finn sat beside her and walked her through his gloves in exhaustive detail: the velcro, the padded knuckles, the scuff on the right palm from the time the back tire slid.

I sat on the porch with Heather and watched.

“Where did you meet her?” she asked.

“She kicked me out of her bar.”

Heather looked at me. Not a smile — Heather didn’t do smiles for me. Something behind the eyes. Guarded approval.

“Good for her,” she said.

❧

Heather walked us to the bike at four. Usually I’d stay until after dinner — ten in the morning to six at night — but we had a three-hour ride home and it was a big day for Austen so I’d cut it short today.

The boys came too — Finn hugged Austen goodbye while Owen shook her hand. “You should come back.” He looked at me. “She should come back.”

“Yeah,” I said. “She should.”

Mark was in the doorway. He raised a hand. “Good to meet you. Sorry about the—” He trailed off.