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Tobey MacLeod realized that at some point, the baby he had been holding had fallen asleep. She wasn’t a newborn, probably closer to a year. Her legs were long enough to dangle down to his hips, and her slender arms were tucked under her chest. Her head rested on Tobey’s shoulder, and he could feel her even breaths barely tickling his neck. He tightened his right arm around her back and readjusted her padded butt under his left. She turned her head with a sniffle so her black hair wisped against his chin. She smelled like farts and lavender lotion.
“I keep forgetting to ask, what’s her name?” Tobey asked softly, so as not to wake her up.
Emmett looked up from the hot water running into the wide sink basin. “Uh, Kate.”
“Kate. She’s asleep.”
“Good job. You’re a natural with babies.”
Tobey gave a little chuckle. “Not really. This is actually my first time holding one.”
“Wow. Really?” Emmett said.
“Yeah, well, nobody looks at a gruff army vet like me and thinks, ‘There’s the perfect man to hold my baby.’”
“You have a kid,” Emmett said.
Tobey looked away. He didn’t like to get into it, even with people he knew well.
“But I guess he was a baby a long time ago,” Emmett said.
“Right,” Tobey said, clearing his throat. “Do you want me to put Kate down somewhere?”
“Uh, yeah, sure.” Emmett turned off the water and twisted his head around the kitchen as if searching for a real answer. “Uh. Her crib. It’s upstairs. First door on the left.”
“Got it.” Very slowly, as if he were carrying a very expensive, very heavy television, Tobey crept backward out of the kitchen, through the maze of Duplos and toy cars in the hallway, and up the narrow, carpeted staircase. The landing was dim, but the Mickey Mouse nightlight under the side table illuminated just enough for him to make out the doors. He nudged open the first door with his toe.
Even in the dark Tobey could tell this wasn’t supposed to be a child’s bedroom. File boxes were stacked almost waist high across the long wall, while opposite was a piano keyboard and a drum kit. The wooden crib was shoved under the small window. Tobey’s feet found a few piles of diapers and onesies as he crossed the room. He held his breath as he lifted Kate off his shoulder and eased her into the crib.
Wasn’t there some rule about how babies were to be placed to sleep? They could choke or suffocate one way or the other? Was it up or down? Left side? Right side? No sides? Curled up or stretched out? He contemplated yelling down to Emmett for advice but wasn’t sure he would know either, and he didn’t want to risk waking her up.
He set her down on her left side. She rolled over onto her stomach and tucked her knees under so her butt stuck up. Tobey ran a scarred thumb across her temple, and she made a noise like earlier, like a happy sigh.
He let out his breath and left the room as quickly as he could.
As he closed the door behind him, he could hear muffled shooting sounds and curses from down the hall. Cosmo must have found a fellow video game enthusiast. Tobey thought about going and checking on Cosmo when there was a large crash from the kitchen.
He took the stairs two at a time.
Emmett stood halfway between the sink and the stove, his face frozen in shock and his rubber-gloved hands outstretched to save the broken dish. On the floor lay shards of white-and-blue porcelain. A few moments ago it had been an old casserole dish just like Tobey’s great-aunt would save leftovers in.
“I...It just...slipped...” Emmett began.
Tobey very carefully picked his way across the linoleum, grateful he had never found the time to take off his shoes. “Broom?”
Emmett was still frozen, so Tobey found the broom by himself, rather quickly, in the pantry. It was a stiff, straw one; Tobey didn’t even know you could buy something this primitive anymore. He swept around Emmett’s socked feet, pushing the porcelain toward the far edge of the room.
Cosmo and Benny peeked around the corner.
Cosmo was a miniature version of Tobey and getting less miniature by the day: sandy hair; round, brown eyes; square chin. Emmett’s daughter Benny was shorter than Cosmo by a few inches; she had straight, black hair just past her shoulders and golden-brown eyes behind thick-rimmed glasses that gave her a perpetually skeptical look.
“Stay out,” Tobey warned them.
“We’re not stupid,” Cosmo retorted.
Tobey decided now was not the time to criticize Cosmo’s attitude.
“Benny, do you think you can help your dad to his room, maybe help him get in bed?”
“Huh?” Benny asked.
“I think your dad needs some rest. I’m going to get him out of the kitchen, and you’re going to take him to bed.”
“Uh, okay,” Benny said.
Tobey took Emmett by the shoulders and propelled him around the unswept places. Benny waited at the threshold where the linoleum became carpet.
“Wait, no, I can’t go to bed,” Emmett said. “Who will watch the kids?”
“I will,” Tobey said. “Remember, Kate is already in bed. Benny is fine for now. You go on. Don’t worry about us.”
Benny took Emmett’s hand. “Come on, Dad.”
“Megan’s grandmother gave us that Pyrex for our wedding,” Emmett finally managed to get out. “It had a booklet of family recipes in it. Megan used it every Sunday.”
Tobey felt a pang of guilt that he was sweeping aside the pieces of a significant part of their relationship and was about to throw it in the garbage along with a stinky diaper. But what else could he do? He couldn’t put the casserole dish back together any more than he could bring back Emmett’s dead wife.
With Emmett safely out of the way, Tobey could finish sweeping. Cosmo still stood in the hallway. “Uh, Tobey?”
“Yes, Cos?” Not looking up.
“How long are we going to stay here?”
“As long as we are needed,” Tobey replied.
“I mean, like, are we going to go back to the motel tonight, or—”
“We stay as long as we are needed,” Tobey repeated. “Never leave a job half finished.”
Cosmo sighed and shook his head. He’d heard that one before. “And when are you going to tell them who we are and what we’re doing here?”
Tobey shook his head. “I don’t know. When I get around to it. Soon.”
“You know, you could have brought it up at any point in the past like six hours we’ve been here.”
Cosmo was right of course, but the day had gotten away from him. Tobey had no idea when he knocked on the door of this unassuming country house of the chaos that lay within. They had only stopped to ask for directions. The maps app on Cosmo’s phone had marked up these back roads completely wrong, and they had been lost for an hour. Benny had answered their query through a closed front door, explaining that she was home alone and her dad would be back in a couple hours, and then a piercing scream from the baby had sent Tobey running inside.
The baby had gotten her head stuck in the stair railing.
Now Tobey and Cosmo were in the middle of Emmett Tran’s kitchen—and life—without having ever found their original destination.
“You go on up and play with Benny. I’ll finish up here, and then we’ll regroup,” Tobey said.
“Yes, sir,” Cosmo said.
Tobey turned back to sweeping. With Emmett shut in his room and the kids now upstairs, the kitchen was eerily quiet except for the humming of the fridge and the gentle swish and clink of his current chore. After the Pyrex was cleaned up, Tobey sat down for a moment at the kitchen table. It was scuffed and covered with crayon marks. He didn’t have time to rest. The rest of the dinner dishes were still in the sink, needing to be washed.
There had been plates, cups, silverware, and other various dirty items scattered across the kitchen counters, and a few rooms throughout the house, when Tobey and Cosmo had arrived. The dishwasher was broken, Benny had explained, and her dad, Emmett, didn’t have time to call a repairman, let alone have time to wash them by hand. Tobey had gotten to work on the dishes as soon as he had helped Benny fix her bicycle chain. It had seemed like a simple thing to do to help out, short of fixing the dishwasher itself, and he didn’t have the parts for that.
Then, while Cosmo dried the dishes and Benny told him which cabinets they went in, Tobey had moved on to replacing burnt out lights, tightening a tap in the upstairs bathroom, and finding wood glue in the shed to repair a wobbly rocking horse.
And then Emmett had gotten home from work and wondered why a strange handyman was cobbling together a casserole from various ingredients in the pantry. But he hadn’t stopped Tobey. It was the first home-cooked meal their family had eaten in months.
The fridge was yellow, but not with age; it must have been installed in the seventies. It had a few magnets on it, but no pictures or artwork. No grocery list or reminder Post-its. Tobey realized that there was little personalization in this kitchen at all, other than the crayon marks. He wondered if there was beer in that fridge. He hadn’t seen any earlier, but, damn, he could use a drink.
His head tilted back, and with a jolt he realized he had fallen asleep at the table. He shook himself, rubbed his hand across his eyes and then up to his stubble of hair.
“Hey.”
Tobey glanced up. “Oh, hey, I think I fell asleep. Sorry.”
“I did too. Thanks, by the way. I feel a lot better.”
“No problem.”
Emmett Tran sidled into the kitchen. He was a slight man with Asian features, wide cheekbones and forehead, his black hair almost as long as his daughter’s. He had one section of hair that fell loose of the others and swept across his eyes. He was still wearing his white button-up shirt and navy slacks, both heavily wrinkled. “Tobey, right?”
Tobey nodded. “MacLeod.”
“It’s probably way too late to ask, but what are you doing here?”
“I’m not sure,” Tobey said. He stood up and stretched, then moved to the sink. The water had gone cold and the bubbles had dissipated. He pulled the stopper to start again.
“Don’t worry about that,” Emmett said. “I’ll do it in the morning.”
“Will you, though?” Tobey asked, raising an eyebrow. “I mean, everybody has a right to leave their dishes until the next day, or next week, or whenever, but don’t make promises you can’t keep.”
“Pretty sure I don’t need to hold myself accountable to a strange man who just wandered into my house today,” Emmett said, but the corner of his mouth was curling up like he wasn’t actually mad.
“Sorry about that, really,” Tobey said. “I see a mess, and all my army training kicks in.”
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Emmett said. He seemed much more put together than before, his eyes bright and his stance straighter. “But really, leave the dishes. You’ve done enough.”
Tobey raised his hands in defeat and backed away from the sink. “Well, then, I guess my work here is done. Thanks for not calling the cops on me.”
“Thanks for...” Emmett gestured around him.
“No problem. I’ll just collect Cosmo and go.”
“Cosmo, your son? About thirteen, likes video games as much as my daughter does?”
“That’s the one.”
“He’s asleep,” Emmett said. “He and Benny passed out.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll go—”
“No, it’s fine,” Emmett said quickly. “In fact, you should probably just leave them. Did you know it’s one o’clock?”
“A.M.?”
“Yeah.”
Tobey shook his head, the anxiety kicking in. He thought he had just dozed off for a few minutes. He patted his pockets for his keys and wallet. “This is so rude of us. We have to go. The motel is—”
“Ten miles of dark back roads and then five more miles in town, past three different bars. You’re liable to hit a deer or get hit by a drunk driver. I’d recommend you stay here.”
“No, we couldn’t possibly,” Tobey said.
“Yeah, you totally could,” Emmett said, and his lips twitched upward again. “I’ll get you some bedding for the couch.”
Tobey closed his eyes and took some deep breaths. There was nothing attacking him. Emmett wasn’t mad. He could calm down. In. Out.
Tobey crept upstairs to peek in on the children. He could hear Kate’s steady breathing in her room. Two more steps led him to Benny’s room. The house felt bigger in the stillness of the midnight hours, but Tobey remembered from the afternoon that it was almost as cramped as his and Cosmo’s two-bedroom apartment in Chicago. He flipped on the hall light to look in on Benny and Cosmo. Benny’s room barely fit her double bed and dresser with the television and Playstation console on top. The small strip of floor left was covered in clothes, books, and video game cases.
Cosmo and Benny looked like they had just closed their eyes and fallen over sideways. It looked like Emmett had taken the Playstation controllers out of their limp hands and set them aside and turned off the game.
Tobey turned the light back off and navigated his way downstairs with the Mickey Mouse light.
He found Emmett in the living room, sitting on a microfiber couch that sagged in the middle. It was wedged between a side table with coffee stains and a short bookshelf literally overflowing with coloring books and other craft supplies.
Emmett’s almost-smile had been erased from his face. “I realized that we don’t have any extra bedding. If we do, I have no idea where it is.”
“That’s fine,” Tobey said. “It’s almost summer. I’ll be warm enough without blankets.”
“And this couch smells like old milk and dog,” Emmett said.
“You have a dog?”
“No.”
“Um, okay. That’s a little weird.” Tobey sat down beside Emmett.
“You can take my bed,” Emmett said. “I usually sleep on the couch anyway. Tonight has been...an anomaly.”
“I feel like that’s an understatement,” Tobey said with an awkward laugh. “Look, you take your bed, you deserve a good night’s sleep. I spent fifteen months in Afghanistan. I can handle one night on your smelly, ugly-ass couch.”
Emmett opened his mouth, closed it again, nodded. “Good night, then, Tobey.”
“Good night, Emmett.”
Tobey didn’t think he could possibly fall back asleep. But he took a few more minutes to calm any anxious thoughts, and soon he was breathing as evenly as baby Kate upstairs.