Page 24 of The Lipstick Flip

And if I needed proof that I never stopped being a jackass, I said, “What?”

I heard the tone as soon as the word left my mouth: a shadow of the cop voice—demanding, authoritative, on the edge of belligerent. Or maybe accusatory.

“Oh my God,” Noah said, and he sounded pleased as fucking punch. And then he laughed. “It’s not a date.”

“I didn’t say it was a date.”

But now the tone was teenagerish, and way too defensive.

“Oh my God,” Noah breathed again.

“Never mind. I don’t fucking care. Do whatever you want.”

“Stop being a baby. My family is making gingerbread houses at the Acadia—the hotel offers a workshop every year, and of course my mom insisted.”

“Doesn’t sound terrible.”

“I’d rather watch you stuff things in holes.”

A laugh broke out of me.

He made a noise that sounded smug and, if I were quoting my grandma, way too big for his britches. But then the silence caved in beneath us, and off in the distance a storm door rattled shut, and I could hear Noah breathing. It was like the nights he’d come home from a shift, and I’d wake up just enough to know he was there. To hear familiar breaths in the dark.

“I’m going to go,” Noah said.

“’kay.”

“Unless—” He stopped again. “Howie, you know if you ever need to talk to someone…”

He let the offer trail off.

“Yeah,” I said.

He waited. And then he said, “Goodnight.”

I stood there for a few more minutes. Then I started for the truck. I’d gone a few yards before I realized it had started to snow.

9

The next day went by in a rush. Two of the contractors Noah had hired came out to the house, which meant I lost time talking to the plumber and the carpenter. Noah must have offered them some kind of bonus because they were both ready to start work, and that meant I had to shift around my own list of things to do because there was always one thing that couldn’t be done until something else was done first. The kitchen walls had to be painted before the carpenter would install the cabinets, which meant calling Noah on his break at work to figure out which color we were going to use, and the call turned into a FaceTime. Noah kept saying, “Fab,” and after a while, the carpenter started looking at me differently.

Since I still needed to paint the kitchen, I sent the carpenter to work on the trim in the front room. I got the plumber set up in the bathroom, and then I realized I didn’t have a roller, so I couldn’t paint, and that meant pushing back the cabinets again, and then the carpenter needed a piece of trim that, of course, I didn’t have.

In between all of that, I found five minutes for my daily call to the hospital to check on Si.

No change.

The chaos wasn’t all that different from when Si and I worked a job. Construction in general—and rehabbing in particular—meant a lot of circular progress. You did one thing, but then you realized you had to do this other thing, and then you discovered this new problem that meant you had to do a third thing. So, even though I was swearing a blue streak and sweating like crazy and running around for about ten hours straight, there was something comfortable about it. This was how it was supposed to be—everything slow, everything fucked up, but moving forward inch by inch.

The plumber knocked off at three. The carpenter left at four because the walls still needed a second coat of paint and he’d finished the trim. I lost an hour fucking around with the pocket doors before finally giving up. I stopped in the kitchen long enough to snap a picture of the first coat of paint and send it to Noah, and then I lost more time trying to figure out why one of the P-traps was leaking.

When I checked my phone again, it was almost six, and Noah hadn’t answered.

Which was…well, not strange. Not exactly. I mean, we’d gone almost two years without talking to each other. But then, I’d thought we were divorced, and that was a pretty solid ending to any conversation.

I finished with the P-trap and cleaned up the water.

Six-fifteen. Still nothing from Noah.