Page 110 of The Best Shot

My smile dropped the moment she disappeared into her bedroom to pack, the phone still ringing in my hand when I switched the whole fucking thing off.

I’d wanted her under my roof, where the world had to come through me first, and I’d gotten my wish. For a few days, it had been her and me and nothing else. I thought I was doing all right by her.

But now she was pissed at me, and fuck if I knew why.

I kept replaying the week, trying to find the seam.

Saturday morning. We’d stayed in bed long past any reasonable hour, both of us reading. Me, a biography I’d been working through for a couple weeks. Her, lost in a dark novel with a one-word title. Her feet wedged under my calf for warmth. Coffee going cold on the nightstand.

At some point she reached for her camera.

“Don’t,” I said.

Click.

She was grinning behind the lens like she’d caught me naked. I didn’t tell her how much I loved it, but I had a feeling she already knew.

Then the ducks.

Her crouching by the pond in my oversized rain boots, waiting patiently while they floated in a trailing line across the water. They ignored her completely. She took pictures anyway.

“What are their names?”

“They don’t have names.”

She looked at me the way she looked at Dolores when Dolores was being difficult. “C’mon. They need names.”

“Fine,” I said. “Big one’s Peking. Brown one’s Confit.”

Her eyes went wide with immediate moral outrage.

I kept going. “Or Honey Soy and Five-Spice. Orange Glaze if you wanna go fancy.”

“You’re unhinged.” She turned back to the ducks. “Hi, Martin. Hi, Gina.”

The ducks kept moving, deeply unconcerned with their christening. “Yeah,” I said. “That’s probably better.”

Sunday afternoon I was reading in the study when she appeared in the doorway.

“How do you turn on your chainsaw?”

I answered on autopilot, realized what she’d said, and was halfway down the hall in the next breath. Found her balanced on the kitchen counter, half her body hanging out the window. “What the hell are you doing?”

“There’s a branch,” she said, voice muffled. “It’s blocking the light.”

Twenty minutes later I was up a ladder with the chainsaw and she was on the ground, squinting up at me.

The branch came down. Light poured in. She’d stood at the window for a long time after, just looking.

Wednesday, the coop.

“Dolores deserves better,” she said, and I didn’t argue. I was learning not to argue about that damn chicken. I’d told her to work on the relationship and she was taking me at my word.

So hardware store. Paint aisle. Two swatches in her hand.

“Morning Songbird or Buttercup Dreams?”

I considered. One slightly orange, one slightly gold.