Chapter 19: Eighteen an Hour

Nate's POV

The porch light came on over my head, and the front door opened.

I didn't turn around.

I had been sitting there for two hours with my back against the post, and I had stopped feeling my hands.

"You'll get frostbite," Susannah said.

"I'm fine."

"You're blue."

"I only wanted to be near her." My jaw was too stiff to say it cleanly. "I won't knock. I won't come in. I just wanted to hear if she cried."

"She cried at two."

"I heard."

She came out in socks and a long sweater with a blanket in her arms.

I thought she would throw it at me.

She knelt down on the step behind me instead and put it around my shoulders, and tucked the edge in under my chin.

Her knuckles brushed my jaw.

They were warm, and I felt the whole length of my body go tight.

She felt it too.

I knew because her hands stopped.

For a moment neither of us breathed.

"Sell something else," she said quietly. "Not that. Not your father's truck."

"How did you know?"

"I saw the fob."

"It paid the last of the loan. Thirty-one thousand four hundred." I tried to smile. "It was a good truck. I'm glad it went to a man who'll drive it."

"You should have told me."

"You said no help."

"I said no help from me." Her hand was still against the blanket at my collarbone. "I didn't say you could leave your whole life at a curb."

She took her hand away.

The cold came in where it had been.

"You can stay until it gets light," she said. "On the step. Not in the house."

"Yes."

"And in the morning you go to work."

"I don't have any."

"Then get some."

She went inside.

I sat there under the blanket and smelled the lavender soap she used.

I didn't sleep.

At half past four the gray-mustached foreman pulled up to the curb in a pickup with a stack of lumber under a tarp.

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