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She weighed that and looked at Cole.
“Don’t look at me. Your dad’s the authority on cheese.”
“You’re both the authority.” She delivered it as a correction and went back to her pasta. Cole’s face did something fast and quiet at both. Then he reached for the water, and Ford let him have it.
Charlotte talked through dinner, with detours. Tonight it was the class hamster. His name was Sergeant Whiskers. He had escaped his cage twice, and he had once eaten a permission slip.
“The second time he got behind the bookshelf,” she said. “Mrs. Pruett had to move the whole bookshelf.”
“How’s he getting out?” Cole said.
“Nobody knows.”
Cole asked her what she thought, and he listened to the answer like the hamster’s escape route mattered to him. Ford ate and let it happen. He’d been in the house two hours and hadn’t asked Charlotte one thing about her day.
Cole passed the bread. Ford’s hand brushed his as he reached for it, and they let the contact hold a second before they pulled apart. Charlotte didn’t notice. She was building a tower out of bread crusts.
“She’s not going to eat those,” Ford said.
“She’s not eating them. She’s building.” Cole tipped his head at it. “That’s structural.”
Ford reached past her for the empty bowl. “It’s going to end up on the floor.”
“Then she’ll learn something about engineering.” Cole sat back and let her keep building.
“It’s not going to fall,” Charlotte said, without looking up.
Ford started clearing. He got two plates to the sink before it fell.
Cole laughed, loud enough that Charlotte laughed too without knowing what at. Ford stood at the sink with a plate in each hand and let himself have it.
Charlotte came back down from upstairs with her hands behind her back.
“Big Cole, I made you something. You have to close your eyes.”
Cole closed his eyes. She set a rolled-up piece of green construction paper in his hands and kept one fist on it until she was sure he had it.
“Okay. Open.”
Cole unrolled it slowly, holding both edges so it wouldn’t curl back. There was marker, an unsurvivable amount of glitter, and three dinosaur stickers that had nothing to do with anything else on the page. Four figures stood in a row: a tall one with brown hair, a shorter one in a goalie mask, a small one with a crooked ponytail, and a dog.
“That’s you.” Charlotte pointed at the tall one. “And Daddy, and me. And that’s Biscuit. Mommy’s getting him.”
“Since when?” Ford said.
“Since she said maybe. He’s going to come here on my days. He has to because he’d miss me.”
Ford didn’t correct any part of that.
Cole looked at the drawing a long time. From the sink, Ford watched his hands go still on the edges of the paper, watched him swallow, watched the seconds it took him to find his voice.
Cole cleared his throat. “This is the best thing anyone’s ever made me.”
Charlotte checked his face, decided he was fine, and went back to her backpack.
“I made it at free choice.” She hauled the week’s papers out in fistfuls. “Mrs. Pruett said we could do anything we wanted, and Owen did a truck. But I did us. I had to guess about Biscuit because Mommy hasn’t picked him out yet, so he might not look exactly like that.”
“Understood,” Cole said.
