Her mouth is a round O as she watches me drink. “Thanks,” I say when I’m finished, handing the mug back.
“Is Nicholas feeling well?”
I’m not subjecting him to a pop-in visit from Mommie Dearest and chicken soup cooked by “the woman.” “He’s terrific,” I tell her cheerfully. “Well, I better get back to it. Gotta lotta work to do!”
The rest of the driveway practically shovels itself as I zone out, thinking about Nicholas. Next time he comes over here to shovel, I should tag along to help out. We’ll get it done in half the time.
Whatever muscles aren’t numb are aching when I climb into the Jeep. I’ve been here for two hours. I’m positive it doesn’t take Nicholas longer than an hour to achieve the same, if not better, results. When I pull out of the driveway, I honk twice for good-bye because I imagine that’s what Nicholas probably does.
The journey back home is better than the journey out, since snowplows have cleared the roads. I can’t wait to get home and shower, but I think about Nicholas’s rough night. His coughing fit, and how he’ll wake up hungry and pitiful with no motivation to cook for himself.
Most food joints around here are closed on Sunday mornings, but Blue Tulip Café, the coffee shop Brandy’s sister owns, is thrilled when I pull up. None of the tables have patrons and there are no gaps between pastries in the display case, which means I’m the first customer of the day. This place is going to go the way of the Junk Yard and we all know it, so I buy extra. Breakfast sandwiches, soup, coffee. One of the workers helps me haul it all out to my car.
I make one more stop to restock on cold and flu medicine before heading home. For the first time since we moved, I visualize the house in the woods when I think the word home instead of the white rental on Cole Street.
When the Jeep shivers up the driveway, I can see Nicholas waiting for me behind the screen door. As I start to carry in the food and medicine, he runs out in his slippers.
“Get back inside!” I order.
“You need help.”
“You need to sit down. You’re sick.”
He takes the coffee and soup from me, anyway. I’m amused at the way he keeps gaping at me, completely boggled. Deborah must have called him already with a full report. Hills of snow all over the yard now, she just tossed it anywhere. And then she drank all your hot chocolate! The good kind! “You didn’t have to do that,” he tells me when we get inside. “Shovel my parents’ driveway. Why did you?”
“If nobody showed up to shovel their driveway, your mom might be forced to do it herself. Deborah’s Gucci pantsuits? In this snow?” I chuckle dryly. “What a catastrophe. So I said, ‘Not on my watch, snow.’”
His eyes are huge. If he thought I was a changeling before, I shudder to think what he imagines I am now. I pester him to go wait on the couch and bring him his breakfast, then test his forehead to make sure he doesn’t have a fever. It’s adorable how his hair is sticking out in every direction, and I run my fingers through it. He’s speechless and I’m basically Mrs. Cleaver. I think I could get used to this whole surprising-him-and-making-him-speechless thing. It’s delightful.
“Looks pretty out there,” he manages after a couple bites of his breakfast sandwich, with a nod at the window. His voice is a touch hoarse, probably exacerbated by Deborah making him talk on the phone. It’ll take a century to undo all the damage she’s done to him, but I’ll start with Vicks VapoRub and a humidifier. “All the snow. Like a holiday postcard.”
He would think that, all warm and cozy in his flannel and slippers. I have no positive opinions about snow at the moment. Screw snow. I wish global warming would hurry up and abolish the whole season. I grunt noncommittally and trudge past him, shedding my layers as I go.
“I’m going to take a shower and maybe a quick nap,” I say. “Will you be all right?”
He nods, still stunned. He shouldn’t be this stunned by a nice gesture. It should be a given, but it’s not, and that’s my fault. I’ve been withholding nice gestures to punish him for not giving me enough nice gestures, and just look at how well that attitude’s panned out for us.
I end up napping longer than I intended because my alarm never goes off. Maybe I imagined setting it. When I heave my sore body downstairs, Nicholas cries from another room, “Not yet! Hold on.”
He clamps his hands over my eyes and nudges me into the kitchen, where I’m forced to wait in stupefied silence for ten minutes until he shouts hoarsely, “Okay! You can come in now.”
“You need to save your voice,” I say as I walk toward the sound of his shuffling. I stop dead in the doorway of the drawing room.
He’s rearranged it: taken out the TV and relocated his desk to a different wall. My desk is in here, too, flush with his rather than squashed into a drafty living room corner. It doesn’t resemble his personal office anymore, but a shared space. My shoes stacked beside his. My candles. His model train. His filing cabinet. My bookshelf, with a blend of my fiction and his non, his collection of fountain pens and my menagerie of Junk Yard curiosities. A marriage of personalities.
His eyes track me, absorbing every intricate change of my expression, so he notices when my gaze lands on the fireplace and my throat closes up. I feel a pressure in my sinuses, a punch to the chest.
There’s a nutcracker on the mantel.
I picture him digging through our tubs of Christmas decorations in storage, remembering my throwaway comment, blowing the dust off Mr. Nutcracker’s glossy black hat. How his mouth would kick up at the corner in satisfaction—There you are. What a silly thing to tear up over, a nutcracker. But I do.
“I’m taking tomorrow off work,” he tells me. “We’ll go pick out a sofa to put right here in front of the window, so we can look out at the view.” Then he adds, “If that’s, uh, okay with you?”
My head bobs a yes. It’s my turn to be speechless. He smiles, and I think he likes doing this, too. Shocking me with an act of goodness.
Nicholas is feeling much better by the time evening rolls around, but he decides he doesn’t want to push his luck by going out in this weather, so we cancel dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Rose. I make grilled cheese, he heats up tomato soup, and we sit side by side on the couch to eat and watch The Office. It’s the best meal I’ve ever tasted.
Late that night, I wake up and need to get something to drink. When I pass his door, I reach out on impulse and touch the knob. I turn it—just to check—and find it locked. I’m not sure I’d go inside, if given the chance. I can’t blame him for protecting himself from me because I’ve been doing the same, but right now our system of measure-for-measure doesn’t infuriate or energize me. It disappoints, cutting deeper than any insult.
Rise and Smile is closed on Thanksgiving, which is fortuitous for us because Nicholas and I put off shopping for a centerpiece until the last minute. When Nicholas was in sixth grade his art class made centerpieces out of tissue paper and candy corn, and after that it became a Rose tradition for him to come up with a new Thanksgiving centerpiece every year. He usually goes all out with big, homemade displays, but he’s spent all of November turning himself into the man on packages of Brawny paper towels and forgot.