Chapter 17: Sunday Again

Tristan's whole face changed.

It started at his eyes and went all the way down.

He took one step down toward me.

I put a hand flat on his chest.

"Rule one," I said. "Ask."

He stopped. He swallowed.

"May I hold you?"

"Yes."

He held me hard, with his chin against my hair, and his heart was going fast under my palm.

"I'm still angry," I said into his shirt.

"I know."

"You'll sleep on the couch."

"That's fair."

"Four nights."

"Why four?"

"It's how long it takes to be angry at a man I want."

He laughed once, low, into my neck. I felt it in my knees.

I pulled back and pointed up the stairs.

"Go."

On Sunday we drove to his mother's in one car, in silence, with a casserole dish on my lap.

Four nights on a couch had made him very polite.

Margot opened the door in an apron with a lemon-yellow stain on the front. She looked at him, then at me.

"I want it known," she said, "that the best thing my son ever did was marry you."

"Mom," Tristan said.

"Come in. You two can peel."

She put me at the sink with a bag of potatoes and put Tristan in the backyard with my father.

Through the window I watched Stanley lay four boards across two sawhorses.

He had driven over that morning with a truck bed of cedar. He had not told anyone why.

"He's building something," Margot said, cutting a lemon, "and he will tell you it's a shelf."

"Is it a shelf?"

"It's a bench. I asked what for. He said, 'Porch.' We don't have a porch bench problem."

I peeled a potato, badly.

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