Page 32 of Rhodes

"She'd have had it out of both of us in about ninety seconds."

I turn the glass in my hand. "There was this one time I remember I had gotten in trouble with your dad for something I did with Cooper. I can't remember now what it was, but I remember how she handled me at dinner that night. She asked me why I was so quiet, and before I could figure out an answer, she put another piece of chicken on my plate and told me to stop being polite and eat." The ice in my glass sweats against my palm. "I was, what, eight or nine, I think."

"That was my mama, for you."

"I know it now. Didn't appreciate it then. Your house already had a full table, and she just kept setting places like the number didn't matter. Never once made me feel like I wasn't part of your family." The corner of my mouth goes up. "Woman fed me like she was scared nobody at my house would remember to."

Tallulah laughs.

“She ordered me around like I was one of hers, too. "Take the trash out. Get your shoes off the good rug. Call your daddy and tell him you're staying for supper,” I say in a high-pitched voice.

I let that last one sit a second. She used to hand it to me, same as the rest, like there was somebody at my house waiting on that call, and there really wasn't. She knew it better than anybody. I've always wondered if she did it on purpose, so I'd feel like a kid who was expected home.

I turn the glass in my hand and look at the yard a second before I trust my voice.

"She was something," I say.

Tallulah doesn't try to smooth it over. She lost the same woman and doesn't need me to explain why the empty chair still catches me sideways. "She certainly was."

For once I don't have to translate it into a joke to make it fit in the room.

We sit there, the fire crackling in the silence, and the lack of words in the moment isn't something either of us is guarding against.

The pot's still soaking when I go back in, so I roll up my sleeves and get after it. The rice cooked down onto the bottom in a hard skin, and it takes a scrubber and some patience to make a dent in it. I work it in circles, water running warm, when Tallulah comes in and puts the leftover jambalaya in a container in the fridge.

Once she finishes putting everything else around me away, she packs up her stuff at the table into her backpack. The living room lamp's the only real light going, and it throws everything gold. For the first time since she hauled her boxes through my door, the house doesn't feel split down a line I have to walk carefully around.

I open the drawer for the good spatula to finish scraping the stubborn stuff stuck on the bottom. It's not in the good spatula spot. Neither is anything else.

"Where'd the spatula go?”

"Second drawer." She doesn't look up. "By the stove. Where a person would actually use it."

"It lived by the sink for two years."

"And you had to walk across the kitchen dripping every time you flipped an egg." She zips up her bag and tosses it over her shoulder. "You're welcome."

The kitchen's gone quiet behind me once she disappears down the hall. It's a different quiet than this morning. Nothing between us got fixed tonight, not really, but for the first time since she moved in, I'm not braced for the next round.

TEN

Tilly

Raising a House: A New Orleans house lifted off its piers rides on a field of jacks turned a quarter turn at a time, all of them together. Any single jack turned faster than the rest cracks the very thing it was brought in to save.

"Morning," Rhodes says as I walk into the kitchen. It smells like coffee and apples.

"Hey." I drop my backpack on the chair at the kitchen table and pull out my phone, thumb going to the tide chart even though I have it memorized. Friday, low tide at six forty, and the permit window closes at the end of the month.

He's at the counter cutting an apple with a pocketknife, which is a thing he does like a person raised in a barn.

"I need to ask you a favor," I say. "Work thing."

He sets the knife down. "Okay."

I keep my attention on the phone so I don't have to watch his face while I do this. I hate asking for help more than I hate going to the dentist.

"We've got a batch of cured shell bags that have to go in for the living shoreline Jo and I have been working on. We're building a sill along a marsh edge that's washing out."