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“It’s the twenty-seventh.”

“Let’s make homemade pizza. I’ll make the dough. Personal ones, everybody builds their own, it’s good with a kid. Bo can put whatever unholy combination he wants on his.”

“You want to cook on your day off, at my house?”

“I like cooking. And I’ve seen your version of dinner. You’d have that boy eating like a bachelor firefighter.”

“You’d fix that fast enough once you move in,” I say. “Three courses a night. Bo wouldn’t know what hit him.”

And then I hear it, half a second behind saying it. Move in. Like it’s a thing we’ve settled. Like it’s on a calendar somewhere instead of just living in the back of my head where I keep the future I want and don’t say out loud.

The line goes silent.

I don’t walk it back. I meant it. If I keep accidentally saying the true thing out loud around this woman, I’m going to have to admit I do it because I want her to hear it.

“You would be eating so good,” she says finally, soft, not touching the move-in part head-on, but not running from it either. “Three courses. Every night.”

“Good thing they run me through those grueling workouts at the station.”

She laughs, and the moment loosens, and she takes the exit I left her. “Isn’t that the cliché? Firefighters with the big bellies to go with the mustaches?”

“I’ve got the mustache, I’m trying to avoid the belly. No promises if you’re cooking like that every night.”

I could talk to her until the sun comes up. But she’s got a full day of clients tomorrow and I’ve got a kid who wakes at six regardless of the season, so we say goodnight, and I sit in my dark kitchen another minute next to a faucet that finally doesn’t drip.

Chapter 25

Luke

Christmas came and went while Olivia was in Houston, so we’re doing ours two days late. The three of us.

She got back this afternoon, looking wrung out and blaming the stretch with her folks. I’ve learned her family isn’t a wound so much as a room with the heat set too low. She warmed up the second Bo hit her at the door, and by the time she had an apron on she was herself again.

The tree’s still up in the corner, dropping needles, a little lopsided because Bo decorated the bottom third himself and Dottie and I decided to leave it be. Christmas music low on the counter, the station that plays it into January. Dottie kissed us all and went to a thing with Ruth and Carol at the assisted living center.

Three of us. In my kitchen. Making a mess on purpose.

Right now the mess is Bo’s, and it’s ambitious. He’s got pizza sauce on his shirt, a stripe of it across one cheek, and a vision.

“Everybody gets a personal pizza,” he announces from the kitchen chair he dragged over without asking, “but I’m making all of them. That’s the rule.”

“That’s a new rule,” I say.

“I made it up just now. It’s still a rule.”

Olivia, beside him with her sleeves pushed up, doesn’t argue. She slides him the bowl of dough she portioned into balls an hour ago. “Okay. But the chef washes his hands first. That’s my rule, and mine’s older than yours.”

Bo washes his hands.

He would not have done that for me. I have been trying to get that kid to wash his hands since he was four, and it took Olivia one sentence and a claim of seniority.

Bo builds the pizzas like a man defusing bombs, slowly and with total authority. Mine gets pepperoni in a spiral. Olivia’s gets three different cheeses, which is what she asked for. His own gets pepperoni, pineapple, extra cheese, and three olives placed in an arrangement he will not explain.

“That’s a lot going on,” I say.

“It’s a system, Dad.”

“What’s the system?”