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"Still. Here."
The morning after the truck took the bend and the mirror lost her boy, Daisy stood in her kitchen with both palms flat on the table like she was bracing for a storm only she could see on the horizon. The house had his absence folded into it, an unwashed coffee mug by the sink that she didn't touch for three days, a pair of socks that escaped the hamper just to make her laugh and then make her cry, the chair he always half-missed and bumped back into place with his thigh.
The quiet wasn't empty.
It was full of everything she had taught him and everything she hadn't had time to.
She went to church that Sunday and couldn't sit still inside the hymns. By the benediction she had counted pews, faces, and two kinds of hunger. Before the deacon could close his book she was on her feet, head cocked like a woman listening to a whisper only she could hear. "We're fixin' to feed folks," she told him under the stained glass, voice soft as a pledge and hard as a plan.
It started small: a cleared corner in the old Sunday school room that used to smell like paste and crayons. She pushed the folding tables together and named them after the women who'd taught her how to stretch a dollar until it sang: MARLA for the cans, CARLA for the staples, and BECKY for the little luxuries like soap, lotion, and dignity. She wrote lists in a spiral notebook like recipes: two beans, one rice, one green equals four suppers plus one story told at the table. She called the grocer, the bait & tackle that sold jerky and hope, the butcher with the easy laugh, the school cafeteria that threw out more than it should. She did not ask for charity. She asked for partnership, and people are better than they remember being when you ask them like that.
She learned grant forms. The first time she opened the state's food assistance packet, her eyes crossed at "eligibility guidelines" and "fiscal sponsor," but she read them like a recipe card: preheat patience to 375°, sift the acronyms, fold mercy into matching line items. She brought lemonade to the fellowship hall and bribed Cassidy to sit with her two afternoons a week, highlighters marching down the margins like little soldiers. “What’s an EIN?” Cassidy asked, chewing her cap.
"A number that makes men in suits feel safe," Daisy said, and wrote it clean. When the form wanted "proof of need," she stapled the town to it: six names and stories, each granted permission, each a doorbell that had once rung her own house. She drove the packet to the county seat in a dress that made her look expensive and her mother's pearls that made her feel bigger than any office. The clerk looked up, saw how ready she was, and didn't waste her time.
The pantry opened on a Tuesday with no ribbon to cut and no announcements that might make a child feel named in the wrong way. Word traveled as words do in Willow Creek: sideways, quiet, certain. A boy came first, all elbows and hair he cut himself, asking if there was "any peanut butter left" without saying he hadn't had any to begin with. Daisy put two jars in his bag and a long loaf of French bread that made his face go round with gratitude. "Take a second loaf," she said, and then, because she could see how it would be received at home, "Tell your mama I'm testin' the recipe...she owes me a review."
By October she had a cold case salvaged from a shuttered diner and a sign-in sheet that didn't ask for more than a first name and how many mouths. Volunteers rotated with the ease of a porch swing: Carla two days a week after shifts, Marla with her gossip that somehow never cut, Weston's mama with pound cakes wrapped like secrets, the high-schoolers stacking cans in neat pyramids. Daisy kept the doors propped. Folks didn't need permission to come be human.
On the wall she'd taped, written neat in blue ink: Doors, not locks. She touched it every morning with two fingers like a blessing. Sometimes, when she was aligning labels so the room looked less like hunger and more like choice, she'd catch her reflection in the cold case glass and see her son's smile trying on her mouth. "You're all right, baby," she told the ghost and the woman both. "We're all right." Then she checked the grant calendar the way other folks checked the weather and put more beans on to soak.
The first rain of fall hit the tin roof in fat coins, and the pantry filled with the smell of wet earth and coffee. A man stood in the doorway, hat dripping, and didn't step in. Daisy waved him through. "Don't make me mop twice," she said, and when he did, he cried without any sound. She put a towel in his hands and a can of peaches on top of his bag because sweetness isn't frivolous. It's survival. "Eat somethin' good first," she said, and he nodded, his throat working like it had forgot how. Through it all she took Jackson's calls at nine, the road's ritual held her steady, and ended each day the way she started it: fingers to the word on the wall, inventory in her head, love on a loop.
*
Cash lasted sixty-one days after the truck door shut on Jackson's goodbye before he put his fist through the drywall at the Spur. He didn't even remember the kind of nothing the argument had been about, some mouth in a hat with the wrong laugh, some weekend cowboy crowing cruel about Weston until Cash's blood sang. The mirror caught his eyes just before it happened, and what he hated most was how familiar that man looked.
He hit once. The wall gave way. The pain was the good kind, clean, declarative. The silence after wasn't. The bartender pounded the bathroom door with a flat palm. "Dalton," he said, voice tired. "You fix it, or you don't come back."
Cash looked at the hole, at the powder on his knuckles, at the part of himself that would always reach for the quickest certainty. He didn't apologize through the door. He went and got the owner, asked for the cost in lumber numbers, and then went home and wrote it on the back of an envelope like a bill.
By Monday he'd signed up for anger management at the community center, Tuesday nights, fluorescent lighting, chairs that squeaked when men shifted. The facilitator was a woman with silver hair and a voice like a quilt: warm and heavy enough to keep you honest. Cash folded his arms the first week and didn't talk. The second week he talked too much. The third week he said, "Sometimes I think if I don't hit somethin' I'm gonna float clear off this floor," and when the room didn't laugh, he didn't either. "Okay," the woman said. "So what's heavy enough to keep you here?" He couldn't say "Jackson" out loud, so he said "work," and she nodded like she'd heard the name anyway.
He took up carpentry because his hands needed an education his old life hadn't given them. The first lesson was measure twice, cut once. The second was if the board still don't fit, stop blaming the saw. He liked the stubborn honesty of wood. Pine told the truth if you ran your fingers along the grain with respect. Oak demanded patience and paid it back with strength. He learned to love a square corner. He learned the sweet medicine smell of sawdust that clung to him like better weather. He looked down at his forearms at day's end and saw not bruises but work.
In March, Miss Thelma asked if he knew anyone who could fix the porch her late husband had half-promised her for twenty years. "I'll do it," Cash said, before his mouth asked his wallet for permission. He stood in her yard with a pencil behind his ear and a tape on his hip and listened to the house itself, how it sank, what it needed, where it had been let go too long. He jacked the joists slow, talking to the wood like a skittish mare, tied string lines, set posts plumb. When he sank the first lag bolt he felt something inside him catch and hold, a thread tied to a beam no wind could bully.
He built it wide enough for three rockers and a gossip bench. He put the steps off to the side because Thelma's knees didn't deserve straight-on. When the first rain came, thick as new grief, he lay down on those boards in his damp shirt and listened to the gutter talk and the roof answer. He slept there a little while, cheek to pine, body cooling. In the morning Thelma left a thermos of coffee by his boot and a note that said, You made me a front row seat to my whole life. Bless you, boy.
He fixed the Spur's hole the same week. He patched clean, floated compound like butter, and sanded the edges until the wall forgot where the wound had been. The bartender watched him work without comment and then handed him a free beer he didn't drink. Cash left it sweating on the bar and walked home, palms smelling like dust and primer, heart a little less set to detonate.
Some nights he failed, anger like a sudden dog snapping, mouth too quick, old ghosts pacing. He called Cassidy or Daisy when he could feel it coming. "Name it early," Daisy told him over the pantry counter while she filled sacks. "Storms're easier to hold when they're babies." He wrote that on masking tape and stuck it to the inside of his truck: STORMS ARE EASIER WHEN THEY'RE BABIES. He repeated it into his fist until his fist unclenched.
On the Fourth of July, he set the last spindle on Thelma's railing and painted it a white that would yellow sweet with time. He sat on the top step with his boots two rungs down and let the town pass like a slow parade. When the fireworks went off beyond the ball field, he didn't flinch. He counted cadence and named the colors out loud. Red, white, blue, gold. Porch, roof, sky, home.
*
The first time Weston and Levi sat for coffee that wasn't "just friends," the whole town made it a stage without meaning to. It was a Tuesday, late enough that the diner's lunch rush had run off and early enough that the supper crowd hadn't come to flirt with the meatloaf. Levi came in still in scrubs, cardinals on the pocket bright as if they'd landed there to rest. Weston had meant to wear something braver than a plain denim jacket. He wore it anyway and sat by the window because he liked a fight he could see coming.
Levi brought the coffee to the booth himself like he'd earned the right to serve what he wanted to drink with the man he wanted to look at. "Cream?" he asked.
"I like it honest," Weston said, and then flushed because that sounded more naked than he'd planned.
"Same," Levi said, and he let the cup find the table before he sat across, not beside. He glanced at the window, at the town reflected in it, a double exposure of now and the day that still walked the same streets in Weston's head. "We can talk about anything," he said, "or nothin'."
Weston nodded. His cane leaned against the bench, flaming decal chipped to a gentler flicker. "Nothin' sounds safest."
"Okay," Levi said, and twirled the spoon like a baton. "Then let me tell you about Mrs. Sims who tried to smuggle a chihuahua into the hospital and claimed it was an emotional support slipper."
Weston snorted coffee through his nose and had to steal a napkin from the dispenser. The waitress smiled at them without making it worse. They talked chihuahuas, casseroles, and Cassidy's latest crusade, some bake sale for the band uniforms that somehow involved sequins and righteous fury. The conversation found a gait that didn't trip, a rhythm like walking past a yard with a good dog who doesn't bark.
Then Levi said, too casual to be anything but deliberate, "How's the river look in your head today?"
Weston's throat tightened. He took a sip that didn't help. "Fast."
"You wanna go look at it till it slows down?"
Weston glanced at the glass where the street ran through his reflection. He felt his hand find the cane. He felt the old fear do its numbers, one to ten, ten to one. "I ain't walked it since."
"I know," Levi said. "We can go as far as you want. We can turn around before we get there and still call it a win."
"Okay," Weston said, and the word had two kinds of shake in it.
They paid like two men who didn't let the other reach first, a choreography they'd learn and unlearn a dozen times. Outside, the late sun had the kindness to be gentle. Willow Creek's river wasn't much, a brown ribbon that looked lazy until it remembered rain, but it had its own stubborn beauty. Sycamores peeling themselves white, a heron that used to belong to old Mr. Peabody and now belonged to nobody, a rope swing that had dragged a generation into courage and out again.
They walked with half a sidewalk between them. Levi kept his hands visible, his pace steady, his mouth shut except when a hello needed sending toward a porch. Weston's jaw set and loosened, set and loosened, like a hand that couldn't decide on a door. When they came to the bend where the path met water, his chest hit a wall that was not there. He stopped.
"We can turn back," Levi said without offering turning back like an out. He looked at the water like it was a third person they might as well be polite to. "You want me to go first?"
"I want you to stay right there," Weston said, and lifted the cane like he was about to bless something or strike it. He stepped forward one, two. The world did not break. He stepped three, four. The sound in his ears was his own body being brave.
The river kept being a river, flat where it was flat, quick where it remembered a rock. Weston stood at the edge and let the roar inside his head and the whisper in the water argue it out. He leaned the cane against his thigh and crouched, fingers to the surface, until cold numbed heat. He cupped water and let it leave on its own. His breath came out ragged, and then he made a better choice.
Levi stayed back like a shadow with manners. "You want my hand?" he asked finally.
"Not yet," Weston said, and then, quieter, "Maybe in a minute."
They stayed there long enough for a dragonfly to approve of them and land on the cane's handle like it had been invited. When Weston stood, Levi didn't cheer. He didn't take a picture. He offered his arm for balance, casual, unboastful. Weston took it for three steps and then let go.
On the walk back, they talked about anything again. Levi said, "I make a mean gumbo." Weston said, "You ain't from Louisiana." Levi said, "Gumbo is a state of mind." Weston said, "Prove it," and Levi said, "Saturday," and then shut up so the promise could take its own root.
At his door that night, Weston leaned his forehead to the wood and let out a sound that wasn't a sob so much as a hinge uncreaking. He called Daisy just to tell her he'd walked. She didn't make a sermon out of it. "I'm proud of you, baby," she said, as if he'd brought her an empty pan back clean. "You want pound cake or chess pie?" He asked for both and meant it.
After he hung up, he texted Levi one word. Still.
Levi answered with one word back. Here.
*
(A Year Later)
By next spring, Daisy had outgrown the corners and card tables of the church basement. Hunger had manners, but it also had a crowd. She took the same legal pad she'd used for grant forms and drew a house, square, simple, with a long table running right through the middle. Then she wrote a name above the roofline in block letters like a headline: Willow House.
"Not a shelter," she told the deacon gently, palms open over the sketch. "A warm kitchen. One night a week to start. Folks sit. Eat. Ask what they can't ask in a doorway."
He studied the drawing like it had to pass theology. "Who's payin' for the chicken?"
"Same one who paid for the loaves and fishes," she said, then added the line items he'd need anyway: donated produce from the farmer's market after close. Day-old bread from Pruitt's. Casseroles from the Wednesday Circle with a sign-up that made them competitive, like "Betty, you bring that squash thing and I'll see your onions and raise you cheese". A tiny grant from the county's "Community Cohesion Fund".
They took the vacant storefront by the barber shop, front windows clouded with the dust of a dozen failed notions, and scrubbed it to bones. Daisy insisted on mismatched plates and real forks. "Paper is for picnics and shame. We're dealin' in dignity." She strung thrift-store lamps down the middle like low stars and laid oilcloths patterned with lemons and gingham. A white board went up by the door with two columns: Hot Food and Hot Leads. Under Leads she taped index cards in Daisy script.
"Henderson's Hardware — 2 PT stockers (afternoons)."
"Miss Alma needs sitter T/Th (call before 8 p.m.)."
"Earl & Ruth's crew hiring rookie (no experience; will train; steady back & good heart)."
Opening night, the town arrived sideways the way they do when they don't yet know if a place is permission or charity. Daisy posted herself at the end of the buffet with a ladle and a welcome that made the second plate easier than the first. Casserole steam turned the windows soft. Fried okra snapped like punctuation. "Two ears, one mouth," she'd told the volunteers during prep. "Use 'em in that ratio."
She learned to ask quiet questions like recipes: how many nights you sleepin'? whose name on the light bill? who do I call if you don't show next week? Some answers came in a single swallow. Some on a whole plate. She made space for both. When a woman with a toddler and a brave chin whispered, "He's back," Daisy didn't say leave, and she didn't say stay. She wrote a name and two numbers on a sticky note and pressed it into the woman's palm like communion. "You call. Or I'll call with you. Doors, not locks," she said, touching the little sign she'd hung over the serving window.
On week three, Willow House got noisy in the right way: a barber moving through the room with a folding chair offering free trims, a teacher who swore she wasn't recruiting but somehow every kid left with a flyer for night GED, a man who'd been sleeping in his truck leaving with a Tuesday-morning drywall job and a sack lunch Daisy slid to him on his way out. The Job Board turned into a bulletin with tear-offs. Daisy pretended not to notice how many folks slid two cards into their pockets "for a cousin."
Between the casseroles and the quiet, Daisy ran her new kitchen like a dispatch center: one text to the nurse at the clinic who'd see a man without a card, one email to the county clerk who "just happened" to find a way to backdate a fee, three grant portals open on her phone, each with a password nobody but Cassidy could make sense of. At 8:45 she stepped into the alley with a mug and called her boy. If he couldn't answer, she left him the weather: "Crowd good. Collards gone first. Weston told Levi that cane looks like a preacher, but he kept it anyway." She never cried in the alley. She saved that for the rides home when the dashboard light made her mean and tender at once.
By Christmas, Willow House had regulars and a rhythm. Volunteers dropped the word they for we without thinking. A man brought a bus tub of pears because his tree had surprised him. The deacon stopped asking who was paying for the chicken and started asking whether he should bring a second roaster. Daisy kept the rule pinned over the sink with a magnet shaped like a peach: Doors, not locks. When the heater broke on the coldest night, three handymen "just happened" to be passing. Cash installed the new thermostat by dessert and left the invoice blank where "labor" ought to be.
Every week, Daisy wiped the last table, clicked off the lamps one by one, and stood in the doorway while the room cooled. She listened to what had been said, what had been eaten, and what had been held back for next time. Then she locked the door, pressed two fingers to the glass where her handprint made a foggy oval, and said to the house and to herself, "We'll be here."
And they were.
*
Cash hired on with Earl & Ruth's Restoration when the heat still hummed from the asphalt and stayed when the cold tried to chase good sense indoors. The crew rebuilt what other men had let rot: sills, frames, true lines, pride. Earl taught by not talking until something needed to be said. Ruth measured and made men braver by not fixing what they ought to fix themselves. They put Cash on doors.
"Plumb first," Earl said, knuckles tapping the level like it could hear better that way. "Everything else is lie if your bubble ain't home."
Cash learned hinges by heart, layout, score, chisel, and mortise flat enough to make a preacher smile. He learned to shim a frame and pull the shims back out because leaving them in was lazy. He learned strike plates, reveals, the soft clack of a leaf dropping clean into a pocket you chiseled with patience instead of force. "A door that ain't honest will tell on you every time," Ruth said, and Cash wrote it down.
He kept a pocket notebook with a cover the color of old denim and a title in Sharpie: Fix, don't fight. The first pages were measurements and hinge sizes and opposite-hand notes. Then the entries started to bend into something else.
Door sticks? Plane the edge. Don't shoulder it. (Breathe.)
If hinge squeals, oil the pin, not the whole damn world. (Drink water.)
Hold the screw straight; it'll hold you back. (Call Cass.)
When wood splits, you drilled too close to the end. Back up. (Walk.)
On a courthouse job, a hundred-year-old entry door sagged like it had been carrying the county's sins too long. Cash jacked it inch by inch, cut new wedges, and reset the threshold with a bead of sealant so neat it looked store-bought. When he drove the last brass screw and the leaf swung true, he felt the smallest, cleanest mercy slide under his tongue. He stood a long time with his palm on the panel.
His anger didn't disappear.
It learned manners.
When it came, it came like weather he could name. He'd feel it walk up his arm and he'd say out loud, "Storm's a baby. Don't make it grown." He learned to leave rooms before his mouth got there. He sanded first, spoke second.
One afternoon at Willow House, a man slurred something ugly about Weston under his breath and at the wrong volume. Cash's shoulders rolled, old lightning waking. He looked down at his hands, at the new scars that had tidy reasons, and he took out the notebook like a flask. Fix, don't fight. He walked to Daisy, picked up a dish tub, and moved beans without heroic flourish until the storm passed. Later he wrote in the margin: When a fool rattles, check the hinges on your temper. Tighten' em.
He built two more porches, three screened doors with magnets strong enough to keep cats honest, and a custom jamb for a shotgun house. In December he stayed late at the shop to help Earl plane a painted door that came from somebody's granddaddy's mill and had been swollen with grief and weather both. "Let it pass," Earl said, palm at the push, and Cash realized the man was talking about more than wood.
On New Year's Eve, Cash sat on Miss Thelma's porch steps with a thermos of coffee, listening to the town throw its small fireworks at the cold. He opened his notebook and, in clear, deliberate letters, wrote a rule on the inside cover.
If it's worth keepin', keep it straight. If it sticks, don't kick it. Work it true.
He closed the book.
*
Levi put in for a transfer to the regional hospital after a winter of hard choices and longer hallways. "More hours. Better pay. Nights sometimes," he told Daisy at Willow House, stirring gumbo he'd smuggled into the menu. "But I'll still be here. You ain't rid of me." Daisy kissed his cheek with a wooden spoon and told him to quit lying to her pot.
Weston didn't say he was afraid of the distance. He'd already learned that "still" and "here" traveled well if you made room for them. The first week of Levi's new schedule, they practiced phone calls like medicine, ten minutes at midnight, brief and warm, small as a hand on a shoulder. Weston cleared the end table by the couch and made a space for Levi's badge and keys, because men like to set their work down where it will be there when they reach again.
On a Saturday between shifts, Levi came by with a long paper package that looked like flowers for a very tall woman. "Before you fuss," he said, excitement making his smile crooked, "I saw it and it...it felt like you."
Weston slid the paper down and something red caught the light. The cane's handle had been carved into a cardinal's head, beak sharp, crown proud, grain warm beneath the paint. The shaft was straight as a truth you could lean on. He laughed, full-body, surprised. "You ain't subtle."
"Subtlety's for cowards," Levi said, mock-offended. "And you already got the flame cane. Consider this your Sunday stick."
Weston weighed it, testing balance the way you test a word before you say it in public. He liked the feel of the beak under his palm, firm, bright, an idea you could grip. "I'm keepin' it," he said, and then, quieter, "Thank you."
They walked to the diner for pie, Weston with the new cane doing a small, defiant punctuation at the end of each step. Heads turned. Some out of habit. Some out of malice. Most because people in small towns always look up when the door dings and then go back to their eggs. Levi let the looks pass over him. At the booth, he slid in on Weston's side, their shoulders booking the space like reservations. The waitress didn't blink. "New cane looks sharp, baby," she said, topping coffee without spilling. "You boys want apple or pecan?"
At Willow House, Weston's cane became a mascot.
Kids touched the cardinal's crown with reverence. Old men nodded like the bird had brought good hunting. Weston started plating at the serving line one night a week, standing between Daisy and Cassidy, learning the choreography of food and kindness, one spoon of beans, one smile, one look that says I see you. Levi arrived sweaty and late from the highway, scrub top untucked, cardinal badge reel flashing when he moved too fast. He washed hands like a surgeon and started wiping tables as if that were a sacrament he'd invented.
On their evenings, they walked the river without warning it in advance. The water and the fear both behaved better. Weston kept his old flame cane by the back door and the cardinal by the front, a private joke about exits and entries. Twice a month he rode the bus to the regional hospital's cafeteria at 3 a.m. with a foil-wrapped plate from Willow House. He sat under the TV that never slept and waited for Levi's break. When Levi finally slid into the chair with those ridiculous red birds pecking at his pocket, Weston unwrapped the cornbread like it was a gift.
"You tired?" Weston asked.
"Bone," Levi said, head thunking to Weston's shoulder for exactly three breaths. "But I'm here."
"Still," Weston answered.
In late summer, they stood on Daisy's new Willow House stoop after a meal so good it made tempers sweet. Levi traced the Doors, Not Locks sign with the back of his knuckle. "That's a rule?" he asked.
"Yes," Daisy said, slipping past with a tray of cornbread. "Now fetch me that ice, Cardinal Boy."
Levi saluted with the cane. Weston laughed, the sound easy in his mouth, the way it hadn't been in years. The weather had changed, yes. Some days, it still blew cold. But the barometer didn't boss them like it used to. They had keys to places that kept the lights on. They had shifts and stoops and birds that always found their way back.
And when the phone buzzed at nine with a voice from a road far off, they answered like people who knew how to set a table for absence and still eat well.
*
(One Year Later)
By now, the town knew how to find the long table at Willow House with its lemon oilcloth and casserole steam, but Daisy had been dreaming past supper for a year. She kept a second sketch on the back of her grant clipboard: a rectangle labeled WORKSHOP with arrows that said resumes, childcare corner, carpentry basics, sewing plus alterations, old PCs that still type, know-your-rights night. When she slid the paper to Carla over coffee, Carla touched the square for skills like a woman testing a stove already warm.
"We feed bellies in the front," Daisy said. "We feed futures in the back."
Carla nodded slow, eyes bright with a kind of tired joy. "And we don't ask a soul to earn it."
They lifted the roll-up door in the old print shop behind Willow House and let dust and history fuss out into the alley. The space smelled like ink and lives that hadn't quite made it to paper. Cash hung pegboard along one wall and stenciled TOOLS RETURN HOME in block letters. A retired shop teacher donated clamps the size of a man's certainty. Daisy scrounged five mismatched laptops that could still find the cursor. Cassidy scrounged teenagers who knew how to make them behave. Carla found a seamstress who'd hem a pair of interview pants in the time it took you to tell your story once.
They called it Willow House & Workshop and opened on a Thursday so nobody would confuse it with church. Meals up front, plates warm, eyes kind. Out back, the sound of a sander lying down and getting to work, a needle catching its rhythm, the click of a mouse, the pencil tick of someone drafting a different version of themselves.
Daisy said yes to every mother with a bag and a bruise. She had a way of moving toward pain that didn't make it flinch. "You come when you're ready, baby," she'd say, stepping aside so the door could stay a door. "You need a lock for a spell, we'll find one. But when you need a door again, this one swings sweet."
She learned the grant language so well that she started translating it back into human: deliverables became people fed. Capacity-building became Tommy learned to plane a board true, and now he can't stop grinning. Community partners became Earl lets us steal his shop one Saturday a month for women who want to swing a hammer without an audience. On Friday nights, she and Carla sat hip-to-hip at the long table with two clipboards and a pie between them, writing names and needs like recipes, trading pens when one ran dry.
In the workshop, Cash taught Door Day for a classroom of women and one polite grandfather who'd never admit he wanted to keep pace with his granddaughter. He set a level against the jamb and said, "Bubble finds home." He ran a chisel true and said, "Sharp tools don't fight." The first time a hinge leaf dropped into a mortise without fuss, the room made a sound people usually save for Sunday morning. Later, Miss Thelma brought a basket of biscuits and stood in the doorway wiping her eyes with an unapologetic wrist. "I was promised doors, not locks," she said. "I didn't know it'd be literal."
Daisy kept the kettle on. She kept the lights soft. "You can cry out back," she told the room the first week. "You can cuss out back. You can start over out back." She pointed at the sign over the sink, handwritten, blue ink, taped lopsided as ever: Doors, not locks. In the ledger she still carried around like a clutch, she ticked off a different kind of inventory: four casseroles, two job leads, one restraining order served, six hinge mortises, and seventeen laughs that started scared and ended brave.
Some nights, when the roll-up clicked shut and the alley held its breath, Daisy stood between front and back and listened for what the town remembered in the walls.
Then she checked the clock, wiped her hands, and made her nine o'clock call from the threshold between rooms, a mother standing inside a house she was still building.
*
The storm came in sideways, peeling shingles and pride, lifting sheet metal like it was paper and setting it down where gossip would find it. At First Missionary, the wind shouldered the front door until the top hinge went oval. On Monday, the pastor called Earl, and Earl sent Cash.
The door was a century of hands thick, heart pine, panels floated, stile joints stubborn as deacons. Cash set his palm to it and felt the weight the way a man shakes another man's hand and learns more than the biography. "We ain't replacing," he told the pastor. "We're bringing it back."
The jamb had sagged. The hinge screws had chewed their holes into confession. Cash pulled the pins, lifted the door with a grunt, and laid it across horses like a sick colt on a clean blanket. He chased the hinge mortises square again, score, chisel, pare, patient as rain. He dutchman-patched the chewed-out screw pockets with slivers of oak and glue. He planed the proud edge with shavings that curled to the floor like ribbon candy. He reset the strike so the latch could be believed. He sharpened between passes, because dull tools lie.
Folks began gathering on the steps.
Miss Alma brought sweet tea in a gallon pickle jar and told him to mind his knuckles. Little kids asked if they could keep the curls of pine. Cash stuck a couple behind his ears and said, "You're ordained." The pastor stood quietly until the hinge leaves sat flush. Then he asked softly if he might bless the door when it was done. "She's been takin' our knocks a long time," he said. "She deserves a word."
When Cash swung the leaf back up and set the pins, the door moved on its new hinge line like it had never known a storm. He stepped back, not grinning, just settled. The pastor laid a hand where a hundred hands always did and said a thanks that named the wood, the men, and the wind that had tried to make a fool of them.
Cash listened with his hat off.
Before he packed the chisels, he took a fine scribe and, on the inside of the top hinge leaf where nobody would see unless they were bent right over with a screwdriver, he wrote C.D. and the date, small and neat and certain. Not a signature for pride. A receipt. A promise that if the door ever sagged again, the man who set it true had a way to find his way back.
He closed his notebook on the hood of his truck and added one more line to the list.
A good door forgives a storm but still remembers it. (So do you.)
*
Weston had become Daisy's favorite translator, transforming grants from stone into bread and rules into mercy. "Make the sentence say what the money means, not what it says," she'd tell him, sliding her legal pad over with coffee and a cookie that always turned into two.
In June, he brought an idea folded twice. He spread it on the Willow House counter between a pan of macaroni and a cooling sheet cake. The flyer wore a border of hydrangeas, big-headed, blue and pink, the shade you get when soil forgets itself and chooses joy.
HYDRANGEA SOCIAL — SATURDAY 4 p.m.
Lemonade. Lawn chairs. Music. Stories. Neighbors. Come as you are; leave with more.
— Hosted on the church lawn. Families welcome.
— Wear a flower if you want to be found by your people.
Daisy read it twice, mouth soft with pride. "Hydrangeas do what they like," she said. "So will we." She set a palm in the middle of the paper, left the faintest print, and then began the logistics: ice chest assignations, song list negotiations because she remembered Mr. Peabody swore he could play anything as long as it was Hank, pronoun practice for ushers who had never thought of themselves as ushers, an extra trash station because she'd be damned if the deacon blamed the rainbow for litter.
Weston printed fifty on the school's copier he "borrowed" with a smile and tacked them where people already read with affection: the feed store corkboard, the barber mirror, the Willow House whiteboard under HOT LEADS, the Spur men's room because swords belong both places. He told Levi he was terrified. Levi kissed his forehead under the pretense of swatting a gnat and said, "Hydrangeas don't ask permission from July. They just bloom."
The day came overheated and benevolent. The church lawn filled with a crowd that looked like Willow Creek had run its hands through its hair and decided to be handsome. Kids raced the magnolia roots and lost. Teens lounged in piles, practicing being seen. Miss Alma brought a bowl of flowers that looked like a small planet. The barber gave free pride fades even to boys who insisted they didn't want a flag shaved into their heads and then asked if it could be very small.
Daisy and Carla worked the lemonade table like queens with soft scepters. Cash set up the extra shade with a line of blue tarps that made the grass look like water. The preacher stood on the steps with his hands in his pockets, face doing that thing it does when a man's theology meets his people and remembers which one he's ordained to love. He nodded at Weston, which meant, I see you. I'll learn.
There were side-eyes.
There was a mutter from a man whose heart had been hard too long. Daisy handed him a fan before his mouth got brave and he fanned himself into silence. A patrol car slowed twice and then drove on because the officer's niece was under the tarp getting glitter on her cheeks from Cassidy, who had appointed herself Commissioner of Shine. Mr. Peabody and his guitar found the old songs that belonged to everybody and made room for one new one that sounded like a river remembering its first turn.
Weston stood stiff at first, cane planted, hydrangea pinned to his denim jacket like a dare he'd finally accepted. The first laugh he let out surprised him. Levi leaned close. "Still?"
"Here," Weston said, and then, because the point of a lawn is to be crossed, they walked it together.
Somebody started a circle dance that wasn't a dance so much as a slow-moving knot of people who wanted to be touching something kind. A teenage boy took a teenage girl's hand and she squeezed back exactly as hard as his courage needed. An old woman with a Bible tucked into her purse hugged a young man with a ring in his nose and said, "I like your shoes."
Nobody died.
*
(Nine Months Later)
By April, the river had settled into its soft, brown, unhurried summer voice, and Cash tried to match it. He bought a used bike off a man who swore it had only ever known Sundays. It was a big, steel thing the color of faded tomatoes with a bell that worked and a chain that fussed every third turn. Cash tuned it in the yard with oil and patience, knees smudged, the smell of metal polish mixing with cut grass. When he swung a leg over and the frame took him, his body remembered a childhood without engines. He aimed himself down Magnolia, past Miss Thelma's porch, paint curing sweet, past the school where the flag hung lazy, past the crossing where he'd once revved his truck and dared the horn.
He didn't race trains anymore. When he heard one far off, he put a foot to the ground and watched the cars go, a blur of rust and graffiti, corn dust leaking like light. The whistle found its old way into his chest and did not detonate anything. He breathed with it. "Fix, don't fight," he said, under his breath, under the bell.
Work was steady and stubborn. Earl set him on old houses that sagged like county maps. But the job that stitched itself into him was the screen porch he built for Carla.
She called it in June. "I want summer without gnats," she said, half-laughing. "That against God or just good sense?"
"Good sense," he said. "I'll bring a tape."
They laid it out together in the yard so the magnolia fit in the frame of her view. He set proper posts, dug them deep enough to find the old stories the yard kept. He cut the beam lines true, rafter tails neat as a haircut. He stretched screen like a drum, stapled it clean, hid the edges behind cedar batten so no critter with ambition could find purchase. He built a low rail for coffee cups and elbows and the evenings that would need both. Cassidy painted the ceiling haint blue so bad luck would look up and go elsewhere. Carla stood barefoot in the doorway and touched the trim the way a woman checks the fever on her household. "Lord, that's pretty," she said, as if pretty were a sacrament. "How much I owe?"
He took her hand and set it on the latch. "You pay me by sittin' in it."
The first storm of July rattled the screen like a drummer testing a song. The porch held. After the thunder lifted its weight, Cash brought two rockers he'd rescued from a church rummage and re-caned on the shop bench, seats tight as drumheads. He sat with Carla as the yard steamed and the light got honey-thick.
"You look quieter," Carla said, pouring tea cold from a chipped pitcher.
"Tryin' to match the river," he said, watching a wren boss a dragonfly. "Turns out I ain't a train."
"No," she said, smiling into her glass. "You're a door. Stands, swings, tells the truth if the bubble's right."
He grinned, looked at his hands, and rubbed a fleck of dried paint off his thumb. The notebook in his pocket pressed a small square against his ribs. Later, under the porch light, he opened it and added a line:
A screen keeps out what bites and lets in what sings. Build your days like that.
At night, he rode the tomato-red bike down to the Spur and leaned it against the side wall, where he could see it through the window.
Sometimes he went in, sometimes he didn't.
Sometimes he just sat on Carla's porch with the fan turning slow and watched summer behave itself inside the shade he'd made with his hands.
*
Levi had found his stride at the hospital, cardinals bobbing on his pocket, gait quick, voice a good weight in the worst rooms. Weston came sometimes to sit in the cafeteria, cane across his knees, and watch Levi cross the tile.
That was why the complaint bit so hard.
A nurse named nobody to their faces and everybody to the board: inappropriate display, unprofessional conduct, creating discomfort, all the words that wear a suit and mean "I saw two men loving each other and mistook it for violence." When Levi showed it to Weston, the paper made a noise like a lie, a thin hiss, a file folder whisper. Weston traced the line with his thumb like a splinter and said, "You want me mean or careful?"
"Careful," Levi said, jaw hard with the thing that comes up when you've been too careful your whole life. "But bring your mean in your pocket."
Daisy asked for the meeting time and turned up like weather you pray for, Tupperware under one arm, a manila folder under the other. She stopped by security and fed him a square of chicken and rice. She set the casserole on the long table in the board room without waiting for permission, clicked the lid off with the authority of church ladies and mayors. The room smelled like something other than toner for once. "Eat," she said, smiling in a way that could lift or level. "Y'all can't decide a soul's life on an empty stomach."
The chair cleared his throat. "Ms. Bell, we..."
"Honey," Daisy said, easing into a seat, crossing her ankles. "I'm Ms. Bell when you're on my porch. In here I'm the woman who read your policy so hard it jumped right into my pocket. This folder's got your nondiscrimination statement. Your patient outcomes. A half-dozen testimonials from folks whose lives got better when Levi showed up on shift. And a letter from the county that says Willow House & Workshop has increased your discharge success 'cause we feed folks before the paperwork expires. Also a pie chart. I ain't proud of that part, but I was told y'all like pictures."
She slid pages across like cards, friendly dealer, stacked deck. Weston sat at her left, cardinal-headed cane leaned just so, not for menace, for memory. He had written three of the testimonials in a tone so plain it cut:
He held my hand when the pain barned up.
He said my name first and my chart second.
I am alive and less afraid.
The chair read, eyes moving sideways to see if other eyes were moving.
Daisy let the silence simmer to flavor. Then she lifted another sheet. "Here's policy," she said, tapping with a gentle fingernail. "Title, number, signature. Says your staff may not be disciplined or harassed for lawful, consensual relationships or expressions that do not impede patient care. Levi's worked here a year with compliments you had to start a folder to hold. Weston's eaten more Jell-O in that cafeteria than any straight man you know and y'all ain't filed a single flavor complaint." She smiled again, softer, almost fond. "Now, if this is about a nurse's feelings, I can get us tea and an hour. If it's about a rule, I brought the rule."
The board attorney opened his mouth to say the thing attorneys say when they want to recess. Daisy slid the casserole closer to him. "Be a dear and fix yourself a plate. We can recess long enough to decide to do the right thing."
Levi sat very still, the kind of still that's half-braced, half-prayer. Weston didn't touch his hand. He let his knee find Levi's under the table. The chair glanced at the policy, at the pie chart he would deny later had helped, at the casserole steam curling up like Sunday. He looked tired and human. "We'll...respond to the complaint internally," he said at last, searching for the right side of his own language. "No action on the employee. We appreciate the...community partnership."
"Bless your heart," Daisy said. She snapped the folder shut, not triumph, tidy. "Y'all need sweet tea to wash down that backbone you just ate?"
After, in the parking lot, she handed the Tupperware to Levi. "Take the rest to night shift," she said. "Feed 'em before they eat each other."
Levi laughed, the kind with relief in it. "Yes, ma'am."
Weston leaned his cane against his collarbone and looked at Daisy like a man who had watched someone lasso a bull with paper and kindness. "You're somethin' else, Miss Daisy."
Daisy winked, tucking a curl behind her ear. "Go on now."
The complaint evaporated into the paperwork weather. The moral: Some storms you outrun, and some you feed until they calm down.
And in the quiet between, strained but holding, the town kept doing what it had learned.
Fix, don't fight.
Feed, don't shame.
Build shade.
*
(Four Months Later)
The email came at 6:17 a.m., subject line dry as a saltine: Award Notification. Daisy read it twice in the blue light of the kitchen, thumb poised over the screen like she could stir more zeros into the figure if she found the right angle. She set the phone on the counter, stared a heartbeat, then let out a laugh that startled the kettle into boiling. "Carla!" she hollered through the house like a girl. "Put your good slippers on, we goin' to the funny store."
The "funny store" was the office-supply place in Vicksburg where happiness came in bulk: clipboards that closed with a satisfying snap, legal pads the color of butter, boxes big enough to hide a winter inside. They bought a new laser printer, a rolling cart for the Workshop laptops, and a label maker. Daisy immediately turned on herself like a child with face paint. DRY GOODS on the pantry bin. GRANTS (ACTIVE) on the first manila stack. PRAYIN' ON IT on the next. COFFEE. STRONG. Carla, weeping with laughter, labeled the pecan pie MEDICAL so Daisy would leave it alone until supper.
On the way back they stopped at the Catholic supply store on the highway, not for doctrine but for talismans. St. Christopher, patron of travelers, hung tiny and solemn in their glass case, silver faces waiting like coins at a toll. "How many you want?" the clerk asked.
"Baby," Daisy said, handing over a sheaf of grant money like it was tithe, "we'll take the box."
By Friday, a bowl of medals sat beside the Willow House sign-in sheet, keyrings shining like fish in a bright pail. Daisy pressed them into palms the way other people press cash, quiet, specific, as if every hand had a name.
For the boy catching the bus to Baton Rouge for a dishwash job.
For the woman driving to night shift with two tires past their temper.
For Weston, who insisted he didn't need anything else to hold and took one anyway, turning it over in his palm like a river stone.
Daisy didn't promise protection.
She offered presence.
"Clip it to your keys," she said. "If you get lost, he's good with maps."
The grant wasn't just saints and paper. It was sinks that didn't leak and refrigerators that would survive summer. It was a stipend for childcare on Workshop nights and a stipend for Cash when he taught Hinge 101 to women whose hands had learned to fight before they learned to fix. It was a second oven. It was lights that didn't flicker like nerves. It was a lock on the back door that only made the place safer because everything else inside it made the place free.
Daisy filed her first quarterly report with the same satisfaction as a clean kitchen: numbers like stacks of plates, narratives like recipes that actually finish in time for supper. She tucked a St. Christopher into the printer tray for luck.
When the nine o'clock call buzzed, she palmed her own medal, looked at the Doors, not locks sign above the sink, and told her boy what mattered: "We're open, baby. We're still open."
*
He hung the shingle himself on a day so clear the sun felt new. DOOR & LIGHT CARPENTRY in hand-painted letters, the ampersand fat and friendly. Underneath, smaller: Fix, Don't Fight. He stood on the sidewalk with the brush in his teeth, squinting at the way the words held together. It looked like something an honest man would be willing to try.
The shop was narrow as a hymn and twice as useful: bench down the left wall, vises that gripped like a good handshake, planes tuned sweet, chisels honed to the kind of sharp that made wood eager. The far wall wore pegboard neat enough to make a schoolteacher clap. In the window, a door he'd rescued from a condemned shotgun house stood in a frame he'd built new, half sanded, half old paint, truth right down the middle. Ask about hinge mortises in chalk, because he'd found that women loved the word mortise once they said it out loud.
His first weeks were a parade of small penances turned into pride: a screen door mended so it clicked instead of sulked. A toddler gate that finally refused to be outsmarted by a large dog. Three sash cords replaced so a bedroom window could be believed again. Two thresholds reset where weather had got ideas. A library display case rehung so the town's Confederate cookbook could be looked at and argued with without falling on a docent's foot.
Then came the commission that made him stand up a little taller: First Missionary's side door. The storm two years back had spared his front, and Cash's hinge still swung sweet, but the side leaf had weather-checked and bowed like a stubborn man who'd learned too late. "Full rebuild?" the pastor asked, more hope than budget.
"We'll save what's worth savin'," Cash said, palm to panel, ear to grain. He broke it down to bones and coaxed each piece back true, a resurrection with clamps. He let the old wood speak where it could. He spliced in new where it was needed. He cut the hinge pockets square as scripture. On install morning, the door breathed into its jamb like it had found home after trying other addresses too long. Congregants clapped without meaning to. Cash rubbed the back of his neck and smiled easier than he used to.
Before he packed the truck, he signed this hinge, too. On the inside, small: C.D. Not ego. A breadcrumb trail for the future he was betting on. He whispered, half-joke, half vow. "I'll come back if you call."
At dusk he'd pull the tomato-red bike to the curb outside Door & Light, sit on the threshold with a soda, and watch the town trade heat for shade. Daisy's new Willow House & Workshop sat two doors down. He could hear the table laughter when they propped the street door open for breeze. Folks started coming by the shop to talk about projects and weather and sorrow like they were all things a person could hand to a man with good tools.
By now, Cash found his face had forgotten how to scowl by default.
And that, finally, the notebook in his pocket had more measurements than apologies.
*
On a plain Thursday without excuse, Weston and Levi put on their best ordinary and went to the Spur together.
Not for a statement, though statements have a way of happening when the right men share a door, but to see if the place that had kept a story about them was ready for a revision.
The Spur on a weeknight was softer around the corners: old boys working at darts, the jukebox practicing Patsy and somebody newer, the bartender who'd forgiven Cash long ago giving nods like communion wafers. Weston left the cane at the booth. He could walk far enough without it to prove a point and bring it back if the point got tired. Levi ordered one beer, then a second, because a dance asked for lube even when two men already knew how to move.
A two-step took shape around them without malice. Levi held Weston's hand like he was carrying a lit match through a wind, carefully, without apology. They moved small, clean, boot to boot, letting the bar breathe before they asked it for anything. There was side-eye. There was also a woman in her sixties who clapped off-beat for them and said, "My boys," like she'd always meant to.
They survived it with a two-step and a tab. Weston laughed at something Levi said that wasn't funny and made it so. The bartender set down a free plate of fries like peace in snack form. When they signed the receipt, Weston's hand didn't shake. "Still?" Levi asked. "Here," Weston said, the word certain enough to stand out loud in a bar.
They turned toward the door just as it opened and let in three men and a draft of night.
First through, the sheriff, the same one who'd come to Daisy's porch years ago and taken off his hat when he told them Weston had been found by the river.
Behind him, Colton. Mouth already shaped into the trouble of a sneer. He saw Weston and smirked first, then blinked once like he was maybe considering trying another life. He didn't.
The third man was thin and tan and unimportant.
To anyone who hadn't woken in a hospital with bruises mapping a night shaped by cruelty.
He had a scar on his jaw and a sweet chewing-tobacco smell under cheap cologne. He had the wrong laugh. The sound wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. It immediately set off a reel in Weston's head: the river's grit, the gloved hand, a boot toe he had memorized because his body had chosen one thing to live on while the rest went dark.
The air shrank. Weston's chest locked like a bad latch. The music fell into a tunnel. He swallowed but the throat kept being someone else's. Levi's voice found him as if from the other end of the tin can string they'd kept between them all year. "Hey. Hey, look at me."
Weston tried. He got as far as Levi's collarbone. The cardinal badge reel pulsed red, small as a heart. "Back," Weston said. "Please. Back door."
Levi didn't ask if he was sure, and he didn't turn to check who. He took Weston's hand low and moved. "Left of the pool table," he said, his voice steady as a hallway light. "Through the service door, two steps down. Watch your foot."
They ghosted the wall. The sheriff's nod deepened, eyes squinting. Colton's mouth twitched, then went slack when Levi looked at him without fear. The third man hadn't even learned their faces yet. It didn't matter.
Outside, Levi leaned his back to the brick and set Weston's palm flat to it, skin to rough until the panic had something real to push against. "In," he said. "Two. Three. Out. One. Two."
"Sorry," Weston got out, stupid. "I'm..."
"It's okay," Levi said.
Weston nodded, a jerky hinge finding its line. He looked at Levi's mouth because Levi's mouth had never lied to him. "I think I...I remembered...his laugh..." The words didn't line up. He pressed the St. Christopher Daisy had given him into his palm until the edges registered. He let his body finish saying what it had to say: two more shudders, one small sob that sounded like a broken machine finally powering down and doing its job.
They stood there until the music inside moved on, and the night put a soft hand on both their shoulders. Levi kissed the place behind Weston's ear where fear goes to hide. "Back to Daisy's?" he asked.
"Yeah," Weston said. He wiped his face with the hem of his jacket like a child who has learned to be kind to himself.
*
Cash was half-asleep on the couch, box fan turning like a slow sermon, when the phone buzzed against his ribs. He thumbed it on before it could slip to voicemail.
"Yeah?" Voice rough. Sleep and sawdust still in it.
Silence. Not empty. Breathing. A map he knew by sound.
Cash sat up. The fan's shadow crawled across the ceiling. His heart went straight to the top of his throat and stayed there. More breathing. The kind that says a man is holding himself together with both hands and one of them's losing its grip.
"You know I can hear you breathin'," Cash said, softer.
Nothing. The quiet got close, put its hand on his neck.
"You all right?"
A ragged little inhale. "I don't..." Then, nothing again.
"Okay," he said, and leaned his head back, closing his eyes so the room would quit distracting him with shape.
His free hand slid down his shirt, found the button of his jeans like a blind man finds a doorjamb. Not hurry. Just contact. The ache had been there the whole year, honest as a bruise that learned manners. He pressed his palm and breathed with the line, his chest answering Jackson's half-second late, like an echo from a church with the doors propped.
The pool-sound on Jackson's end was a hush like rain behind glass. Chlorine under night flowers. Cash could see him without trying: stretched long on some plastic sunbed, thumb white on that phone like he could squeeze a word out of it.
"Say somethin'," Cash murmured.
"I miss you," Jackson said. Fell right out, naked as a first truth.
Cash shut his eyes harder. The hand at his waist fisted once, just to make the body behave.
"I ain't..." A swallow, audible. "I ain't lonely."
"Yeah...you are," Cash said. No sting on it. Just a name laid down like a tool in the right place. "You with him?"
"Yeah."
"You safe?"
"Yeah."
"All right." He breathed. Counted his own, then counted for both.
A beat. The fan clicked through its turn like a lazy metronome. "Cash," Jackson said, small.
"What?"
Silence again, then the match-head scrape of courage. "You remember our kiss?"
As if there'd been a day he didn't carry it around like a lit coal cupped in both hands.
"How could I forget," Cash said. The words came up from someplace old and clean.
"Tell me," Jackson said. "Please."
Cash let his head fall to the couch back, throat open, voice lower than he meant. "I remember...hay in the air. Dust risin' up. Lamp hummin'. Your mouth...You came in like you was askin' permission. Shakin' a little, then not. I put my hand right here..." His fingers found his jaw, the notch where he'd held Jackson gently as reins. "We was...salt where a man's soft, and warm where winter lives."
On the line, a small sound broke loose. Not dramatic. Mean little slip of a sob a man tries to swallow and can't. Cash's hand left his jeans and pressed flat to his own chest like he could keep the break from widening by weight alone.
"Hey," he said, steady. "Stretch your hand out."
"What?" Wet laugh, ruined and better for it.
"Off the side a' that chair you're layin' on," he said, already doing it himself, letting his fingers fall off the couch cushion into the cool between couch and floor. He splayed them, palm open to dark. "Let it fall down there. Where I can get to it."
Jackson breathed like a man waking from deep water.
In Cash's head, another room lit up: a boy on a floor mattress, another on a twin bed, their hands reaching into the night gap because that was what they had. He pushed his fingers deeper into the air until his shoulder complained and smiled in spite of it. "You feel it?" Cash asked, softer still. "You feel my hand?"
A nod on the line you could hear, somehow. "Yeah."
"Good," Cash said. We can just breathe now, if that's what you got." His voice had gone to that ragged thread he only used with one person on earth. "Can you feel it?" he asked, because the question belonged to that old room, and he wanted to call the past to heel like a good dog.
"Yeah," Jackson said. Broke meeker this time. "Yeah."
The ache in Cash's hips had gone from nuisance to weather. He slid his palm back down and cupped himself through denim, letting pressure be the thing, not motion.
Jackson's breath hitched. Stalled. Came uneven. "I'm sorry," Jackson said, ridiculous as a child caught crying in church. "I'm..."
"Don't apologize to me for your body rememberin' what's good," Cash said. Voice firmer than the rest of him felt. "That's just...good wiring."
They were quiet a while. Not empty. Breathing. Cash slid his hand up under his shirt, palm to stomach, and let the heat of it settle him. He could hear the pool lights in Jackson's pause, the way water sings when nobody's fighting it.
"I'm here," Cash said, finally, because the boy on the bed used to need it named, and the man by the pool still did.
"Say it again," Jackson whispered.
"I'm here."
A breath caught. "Say it like..." He cut himself off, saved the word, let it turn to something else.
"I'm here," Cash said, once more. Then, softer, the truth that had lived right under his tongue for five years. "And...I still want you."
He waited for the crack in himself. But it didn't come. It was just a door swinging on the hinge he'd set true a long time back. Quiet. Honest. The kind of sound a man can live with.
"Cash...?" Jackson whispered.
"Jacks...?" Cash echoed right back.
"I..." Jackson started. Stopped. Breath again, like cloth tugged through a tight place. "I love you."
Cash stretched his arm deeper, fingers reaching into the little dark, and imagined the sunbed's plastic under Jackson's knuckles, the blue pool ghosting the air. He settled his other hand where the ache was and let it be ache.
"I love you, too."
(To be continued...)
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