“I don’t think there was a line in the first place, so how did we cross it? Who made the rules? How can we know if we’re following them or not?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything, Emmett. I just didn’t want you to think I was, like…trying to take advantage of…anything.”
“Ridiculous. I could say the same thing, couldn’t I? Because I definitely don’t want you to think I was trying to take advantage of anything, either.”
“I don’t feel that way at all.”
“Neither do I. Are you upset with me?”
“No! I’m not upset with you! Are you upset with me?” she asked.
“Do I seem upset with you? Did I seem upset in your bedroom?”
“Did I seem upset in my bedroom?”
“Okay, well, we could do this all morning,” he said, smiling at the absurdity of their circled conversation.
“You’re sure you want to come to the hospital with me? I want you to,” she asked.
“Of course I do. I’d like to know Lionel is okay. And I’ll leave later today.”
“Going?”
“To my parents’。 I sold my house.”
“You changed your mind about going back there?”
“I guess. I’ll stop by, but that doesn’t mean I’m staying.”
“Right. Well, thank you for making breakfast with your poor hands,” she said, putting her plate in the sink. They’d eaten sleepily, standing at the counter.
“Will you take a picture of yourself for me? You look pretty,” Emmett said.
“Wow.” Tallie covered her face, shy. “Thank you. And enough of that.”
“So yes?” he asked, lifting her phone off the counter and handing it to her. She held her mug, tilted her head a little, smiled, took the photo. Then took a picture of them together like puppied teenagers, their heads touching. “Send it to me?”
“You have to give me your number.”
“Obviously,” he said before smirking and telling her. He imagined the turned-off phone in his backpack receiving the message, saving it for later.
Tallie put their coffees in travel mugs, and Emmett’s heart clicked as he prepared to leave her house for the last time. He got on his knees to stroke the cats with the part of his hands that stung the least, to tell them thanks for letting him hang out with them over the weekend.
*
Tallie stopped on the porch and abruptly said, “Yeah, I don’t own a gun. I only told you that on Thursday so you wouldn’t mess with me.”
“Well, I believed you. And maybe you should get one. People are crazy,” Emmett told her. He used his energy to focus on not tearing up as he followed her off the porch, taking one last look at the gutters he’d cleaned and the cheery pumpkins on her steps, like little suns.
*
Holidays were difficult, but Christine had loved decorating for Halloween, draping their shrubs in fake spiderwebs and putting pumpkins on the porch. And she’d loved their house from the moment they’d seen it. The color: honeybee yellow.
She called it their Honeybee House, wanting to name it after his grandmother’s beekeeper occupation, the same way the characters in the old-timey books she liked to read named their vast estates. “Let’s go back to the Honeybee House,” she’d said when they were out in the world and she’d had enough. Emmett held the image of their Honeybee House in his mind and put Tallie’s house right there beside it.
*
Zora, no longer in her Halloween costume, sat in the hospital hallway, texting. After greeting Tallie and Emmett, she launched into the details, telling them where Lionel’s second-and third-degree burns were. His arm, torso, and leg. There would be more than one skin-graft surgery in his future. He’d been admitted to a room in the burn unit with a two-visitor-maximum rule; Gus and Glory were in there with him.
“It’s less than fifteen percent of his body, and apparently fifteen percent is the scary number, so that’s a relief. He’s still knocked out,” Zora said, taking a deep breath.
“Oh, wow. Thank You, Jesus,” Tallie said.
“My parents are bringing River by later.”
“I can hang out with him if you need me to,” Tallie said.
“River would love that. You know he’s crazy about Auntie Lulah,” Zora said before turning to Emmett and adding, “Lionel was asking if you were okay.”
“Me?” Emmett asked.
Zora nodded. “He worried you’d gotten burned trying to help him.”