see it coming. Every time I try, I just binge on it the next day. They can’t stop me from doing that, and neither can I.”
I touched his shoulder, but he shrugged my hand off. “Maybe they have an inpatient program,” I said.
“Detox, you mean?”
“Maybe.”
He chuckled. “Put it on my tombstone,” he said, and drew a hand slowly in front of him as if envisioning the sign. “‘This man was a shitbag. May he rest in peace.’”
“Elias, come on. You’d hardly be the first veteran to deal with that. They can’t all be shitbags.”
He shook his head again, and I sighed. “Eli,” I said, “would you like to hold the baby?”
“Sure.”
I handed TJ to him. He took him easily, nestling him into his arm, and looked down at his face. At first it surprised me how easily he handled the baby, but then I remembered he had been here through the births of all three of Candy’s sons.
“He looks just like Cade,” he said.
“Yeah, I think so, too.”
“Got that arrogant li’l mouth.” He leaned back against the chair, looked out at the yard again, and rocked.
“You want me to take him back?”
“No, he’s fine.”
I walked off to get some lunch, pleased for the opportunity to eat without having to keep an eye or a hand on the baby. And when I came out to the porch to take TJ again, he was still asleep in the crook of Elias’s arm, and Elias, for all that his face was ever unreadable, looked almost content.
* * *
That night Dodge and Scooter joined the rest of the family for supper before hiking out into the woods to sit in their hunting spot. Elias happened to be awake, so he joined everyone, too, then returned to his room. The house was quiet and cool, and when Cade came in to undress for bed, he glanced at TJ asleep in the laundry basket and threw me a pleading look. We made love for the first time since the birth, very carefully. Cade seemed almost apologetic, and grateful; only afterward did I realize how much we had needed it to take away the feeling that as a couple we were fragmenting, becoming two employees of the same baby rather than a man and a woman irresistibly attracted to each other.
TJ slept well that night. Not until two o’clock in the morning did I awake to the muted report of a gunshot from outside that I realized must be Dodge and Scooter having finally crossed paths with a bear. The noise woke TJ, and regretfully I pulled myself away from Cade’s warm bare chest and lifted the baby from his basket.
I pulled him to my breast and eased back into bed, arranging the covers over myself and the lower half of TJ’s body. Cade had left the door ajar, and the night-light from the bathroom was the only illumination in the darkness. The baby’s nursing was slow and rhythmic, and I closed my eyes in deep fatigue. When I opened them, Elias was standing in the doorway, looking at me with his plain, unreadable eyes.
I pulled up the edge of the quilt immediately, self-conscious to be caught nursing the baby bare chested in front of him. When he didn’t react, I held up a finger to let him know I would be with him in a minute. I looked down at the baby, and when I glanced up again, Elias was gone.
After a while TJ fell back asleep at my breast, and I laid him softly in the basket. I pulled on one of Cade’s T-shirts and a pair of pajama pants and tiptoed down the stairs. The entire house was dark; both televisions were off, and the lamp that always burned beside Elias’s chair when he was awake had been snapped off, as well. I checked the porch rocker and found it empty, then headed back up to my room. Only then did I notice Elias’s door was closed, and I knew he must have grown tired of waiting for me to finish nursing the baby and had gone off to bed. For that, I felt a little sorry. Elias and I needed to talk. He had put his arms out to me. That was progress. If he would do that much, maybe he would open up to me about how the rest of us could help him, too. And we could all move forward.
I slipped back under the covers and slept until four-thirty, when TJ