hand over and put it on the back of her neck, under her hair. He kissed her a little, then pulled away and said, “Wait. I don’t have to make out with you in the car. I’m not sixteen. I can make out with you in the house.”
“You can,” she said. “That’s very true.” Even in the car, she managed a sassy hand on the hip. “Do you want to see my room? It’s got all my cool posters and Trapper Keepers and stuff.”
“Of course.”
They got out of the truck and met up again by his door, closest to the house, where she kissed him again. Here were the irregular gray paving stones that Tim had picked out during their landscaping project after he told her the terra-cotta bricks looked “ordinary.” Here were the steps he’d rebuilt with a buddy in the crushing heat of summer while he was going through a “handy” phase, which lasted as long as it took for him to realize he was too accustomed to being good at everything to start over as a novice who couldn’t make a corner perfectly square.
Here was the front door she had opened, laughing, while being carried into the house on the day of the closing. Then the wood floor she’d once scratched with her suitcase wheel, for which he called her “so damn careless.” Here was the wide doorway into the kitchen, where on one occasion Tim had kissed her with unexpected urgency, pushing his hand under her shirt while she tried to scratch his shoulder enough to prove she, too, was trying. Here was the kitchen table where they’d agreed that they’d just have a baby if they had a baby, and they wouldn’t try one way or the other, which was a terrible lie since a doctor would know what it meant when, from time to time, she’d say, “Rain check?” Here was the sink where she had once put a rose down the garbage disposal—given too late for a birthday Tim forgot, which he’d made up for the next day by having six dozen fresh roses delivered to the house.
Here were the stairs where she had slipped two weeks before Tim died and put a big bruise on her hip. She fell; she wasn’t pushed. She wasn’t hit, she wasn’t punched. But she was hurrying down the stairs in her socks on the way to her hideout only because she was so tired of listening to him yell, so, as she said only to herself, you tell me.
And in the bedroom, here was the dresser that had carefully been coaxed through the door. It would later play a central role in the first of the fights she was sure would be their worst until another proved her wrong.
Why am I upset? I’m upset because you pushed me into the dresser, Tim.
I absolutely did not.
You did this with your shoulder, like this, and you knocked me into the dresser. I’m going to have a bruise. You want to see it tomorrow?
I was leaving the room so you could calm down. What did you step in front of me for?
I didn’t.
Evvie, you don’t need to be so dramatic, okay? We need to get going. My parents are going to wonder why we’re late.
This had been six months after they moved into the house. She had indeed had a bruise on her back the next day, where she’d fallen—fallen?—against the edge of the dresser. She’d told nobody, and when Tim had noticed it on her back when she was undressing a couple of days later, he’d said, “Ouch, how’d you get that?” She wasn’t sure if he honestly didn’t know, but she’d said, “Playing freeze tag,” and even though she thought it sounded sarcastic enough not to miss, he just nodded and kept looking at his phone.
And here was the bed where they had sex, but not very often, and not very well, and not for very long. She’d hardly ever regretted that her best friend was a man, but part of her mourned the fact that she’d never felt comfortable disclosing to Andy how precisely she could clock sex with her husband at nine minutes. If it started at 9:51, she’d be able to watch Halls of Power, and she never missed the beginning.
And now, here was Dean, tall and broad and slow-moving as he lay next to her in his jeans and bare feet. He always smelled like freshly mowed grass, and she wasn’t