At least not right now.
“I didn’t know you smoked.”
He looked over his shoulder. Then he bunny-eared the cigarette and exhaled. “I un-quit today.”
“I can’t say as I blame you.”
“I won’t do it inside, and this is not, like, I’m not forever with this.”
“My grandfather smoked a pipe. More fragrant, but not that different.” Lydia sat down on the back steps. “Was stopping part of your health kick?”
“That and the drinking. I was never into drugs—but I got a little too fond of Jack Daniel’s. That I will never un-quit.”
“I’m glad you got things under control there.”
“Me, too. Not a road I’m going down again.”
Out on the county road, a car approached and kept going, the headlights white, the taillights red.
“I’m sorry you’re mixed up in all this.” She took her hair out of its tie and rubbed her scalp as if she were trying to relieve a headache. “You came for a job, and now—”
“I have a job.”
“Well, technically, that’s just an eight-thirty to four-thirty kind of thing. So you’re working overtime and not getting paid here.”
Daniel exhaled over his shoulder even though the wind would have carried the smoke off anyway. “I’m not staying with you for work. We’re … friends. I’m here because a friend needs my help.”
“Friends.”
“Yup.” He tapped the cigarette. “Unless you have a better word for it.”
“English is my second language. I wouldn’t know.”
“Wow, you sound like a native speaker to me.” He looked around again at the lawn, the drive, the house. “No accent. Good vocabulary. If there were another word, I think you’d know it.”
“I guess … friends it is.”
Daniel nodded, licked his fingertips, and crushed what was glowing orange—
“Ow!” she said as she jumped forward. But she stopped herself before she touched him, falling back into her sit. “Didn’t that hurt.”
“Pain is in the mind.” He tapped the side of his head. “All up here.”
“I thought that was fear.”
“Pain, fear, anxiety. The mind game is everything in life.”
“What about joy, love, happiness? Are they just in the mind, too?”
“Yup, exactly. It’s all an illusion, I’m afraid. Made manifest by a fruit salad of sensory receptors and bundles of neurons firing under your skull.”
“Wow, that is remarkably …”
“Biological,” he pointed out.
“Cynical.”
Daniel shrugged and finished undoing his saddlebags. “It’s the truth and you know it. You’re a behaviorist. Just because an emotion is felt deeply doesn’t mean it’s any more powerful than what it actually is—which is ephemeral. Intensity doesn’t change its nature, and all feelings fade over time.”
There was a length of silence.
“You know”—she looked at the sky—“I might be inclined to see your argument. If I hadn’t walked in on a good man just moments after he’d shot himself in the face this morning.”
Daniel swung the saddlebags up on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I don’t need to be spouting my shit right now.”
“It’s okay.” She got to her feet. “Besides, you either don’t really believe your theory or you’re not as good at detachment as you think you are. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have taken up your old habit again today, would you.”
YOU ’RE ABSOLUTELY RIGHT. The ketchup is everything.”
As Daniel Heinz’d his full plate of suomen makaronilaatikko, Lydia nodded at her houseguest across her little kitchen table.
“My grandfather always had it with lingonberry sauce, but ketchup works for me. And it freezes beautifully. Just like in Steel Magnolias.”
“Huh?” he said as he recapped the bottle.
“Yeah, that movie’s probably not in your collection. Annelle wants to give Maline’s family something that ‘freezes beautifully’ before the kidney transplant. I always think of that line when I make a big batch of this.”
“Classic comfort food.”
They fell silent, nothing but forks on plates making any sound. And then he was getting himself another mug of coffee and helping with the almost nonexistent cleanup.
“I can’t keep my eyes open.” She covered a yawn with the back of her hand. “I need to lie down.”
“Let’s go upstairs.”
He went across and checked the locks, and then as they walked around to the stairwell, he made sure the front dead bolt was engaged—and something about the care he took made her realize how much she’d been doing on her own.
Her legs were wobbly on the ascend, and when she got to the top landing, she said something to him about fresh sheets being on the guest bed, and her needing to take a shower, and that she hoped she didn’t snore. Chatter, chatter, chatter.
Then again, he was the first man she’d had in this house.
In any house she’d lived in, actually. Well, apart from her grandfather and he didn’t count in this situation.
“You’re going to be okay,” Daniel murmured. “It’s just going to take some time. If you need me, I’m here.”
He brushed her cheek, and then he went into the guest room and shut the door halfway.
Down in her bedroom, she undressed over the laundry basket, dumping everything she had on in it, and then she got her robe. When she reemerged into the hallway, she looked both ways like it was a busy intersection, and tiptoed over the bare wood to the loo. Just before she pushed her way in, she told herself not to look over to Daniel’s—