Page 106

She pats my chest twice on her way down the steps, the way you'd settle a nervous horse, and she doesn't look back once.

The house smells like pine, and the lavender baby wash Lis buys by the case. Mackie is on the den floor with both babies on the yellow quilt, and when she looks up at me, she doesn't reach for a joke or the phone or a reason I should be somewhere else.

"You came in," she says.

"You told me to."

For two hours I do everything I've spent three months doing through a screen, except this time I get to use my hands.

Graham grabs my lip again and refuses to let go of it. Hildie falls asleep on my chest halfway through her last bottle, and I sit without moving for a long time after, because I don't want to move. Mackie bathes them one at a time in the little tub on the bathroom counter while I hold whichever one is dry, and when they're both down in the den, zipped into their sleep sacks with their arms flung up over their heads, she stands beside me at the bassinets and leans into my side like she's been doing it for years.

Then she crosses to the tree and comes back with a flat package wrapped in the worst paper job in Holly Ridge.

"Mom made me swear I wouldn't fix your corners," she says. "It's for you. I just didn't know if I was allowed to give it to you."

I don't need to open it, because I wrapped it. I open it anyway, and the four of us look up at me from Lis's balcony in August, Mackie's head on my shoulder and Graham squinting into the sun.

"I bought the frame in September," she says quietly. “The day before the shit hit the fan, as a matter of fact. I always have impeccable timing.”

I set it on the end table, facing the room, and I have to look at the floor for a second before I trust my voice.

"You told me in the kitchen you moved for them," she says. "Mom told me the same thing. I believe you." Her voice goes short and flat, which I've learned means she's scared of the answer. "Was any of it for me?"

"All of it." I make myself look at her when I say it. "I wanted them more than I wanted the ranch, and I wanted you more than anything I've ever owned. I just didn't think I had any right to say the second part out loud."

"Why didn't you tell me before you sold it?"

"Because you'd have stopped me."

"I would have. The ranch was your everything. You told me that. I didn’t want this,” she waves her hands at the tummy time mat on the floor, the box of diapers, the rockers. “I didn’t want my choice to derail that for you.”

I rub my thumb across the split in my knuckle. “The ranch was my everything, until I met you.”

Her eyes fill, and she doesn't wipe them.

"I thought if I asked you to stay, you'd give it all up, and by the time they could walk, you'd hate me for it."

"There's nothing about this I could hate." I wait until she looks up at me. "And I've been in love with you since you got in my rental car with sand all over you and told me the headline would read Local Woman, Warned Repeatedly."

She doesn't say it back. She looks at me and her mouth opens and nothing comes out of it. I don't push her, because I didn't say it to get it back.

She takes a breath that shakes on the way in.

"I've never asked anybody for anything in my life," she says. "Not one time. So you're going to have to be patient with me while I learn how."

"I've got time."

"Don't go home tonight. We made a standing date last Christmas. We very well can’t let this Christmas go by without honoring it.”

"Wasn't planning on going anywhere," I tell her. "Christmas affair, part two is written on the back of an envelope somewhere in my dresser drawer."

She takes my hand and leads me down the hall. She sets the monitor on her nightstand, turns the lamp down to almost nothing. When she turns around, I kiss her the way I've wanted to since she looked up at me over that hospital rail in August and asked when I was flying back. She kisses me back just as hard, and she has my shirt unbuttoned before I've gotten her sweater over her head.

The shark tooth is lying against her breastbone on its cord. I touch it once with my thumb, and she smiles against my mouth.

I get her down onto the bed and start working my way along her throat, and she stops me with a hand flat on my chest.

"No," she says. "Not tonight."