He rubbed a hand across his forehead. It was at times like this he wished Clara was still there. They could figure out how to help Holly together, instead of him trying to figure it all out by himself and constantly worrying that he was doing it wrong. He wanted to pull her aside right now and talk to her about everything. But he also didn’t want to make the situation more awkward than it already was for Rachel and Aiden.
Before he could even open his mouth, though, Holly turned to Aiden. “I’m sorry for what I said.”
Aiden tapped a finger on his lip, then smiled and said, “Thanks. Me, too.”
Holly may be a spitfire, but she was always quick to apologize. He’d never been so grateful for that trait of hers.
Quickly after, Rachel got both kids turned around and looking down at the plywood. It lay right in the middle of the mostly open space. Since this was the biggest room in the house and most central, it was where he kept all of his constructionsupplies and tools, but he mostly had them on a tarp near the wall by the fireplace and out of the way.
“So,” Rachel said, “the fireplace is at the bottom, with the mantle about halfway up, right?”
Aiden nodded. “Yep! And we need to cut open the middle part because a kid in our class”—
“Zach S.”—Holly cut in.
“—is going to be Santa Claus, and he needs to come from behind it, like he came down the chimney.”
Rachel grabbed the tape measure from his supplies and sat down on the floor with her legs crossed. “Well, then, it sounds like we need to figure out how tall that opening needs to be for Santa to climb out of it.” She extended the tape a good three feet, then held it measuring from the floor up, and had both kids walk beside it, crouched, so she could measure.
Since the wood they were working with was only four feet wide, the logical width of the opening was two or two and a half feet wide, and if they were doing the mantle halfway up, the logical height of the opening was about three feet high. That would leave enough space to do the faux bricks surrounding it.
They could’ve figured that out even if the kids weren’t present. But Rachel was telling them how many inches high they were as they crouched past the tape, and both of them were going past it time and time again, trying to get lower, the dogs participating right along with them, the kids’ laughter building with each pass.
The sound made his heart happy in a way he hadn’t felt lately. Like a tiny little piece of it was fused back into place.
No, it was more than that. The more he watched, the more he realized the feeling came from knowing a piece ofHolly’sheart was fusing back into place. He knew that leaving their old home was the right choice and that Holly was excited to move close to her grandparents. It was still hard, though. It was the only homeshe’d ever known. It was where her friends were, and she was apprehensive about making new friends.
But he’d assured her that she would. Every day after school over the past two weeks since they’d moved to Mountain Springs, he’d ask if she’d made any friends that day. The only kid he ever heard about was Aiden and how much theyweren’tbecoming friends. Finding out from Holly’s teacher that she was struggling because Clara was gone had just pulled at his already frayed heart.
He studied Rachel as the kids and the dogs went around and around. The smile on her face was open. Full of Joy. Her green eyes sparkled and her dark hair fell in big waves down to her shoulders, framing her face. Watching her help the kids turn from anger to happiness was mesmerizing.Shewas mesmerizing.
Eventually, the kids fell to the floor, exhausted from laughing, but they still managed to laugh and squirm more once the dogs started licking their faces. Rachel turned to him and grinned. “I think three feet will do it.”
“Thank you,” he said, and it was the most genuinethank youhe’d given in a long time.
She smiled back at him, and he had to admit it did something to his stomach. Something rather unexpected.
He and Rachel lifted the piece of plywood onto two saw horses, putting it closer to waist height, and she measured the wood three feet from the bottom in a couple of places, marking each. He placed his framing square against the side of the plywood so he could make sure the line they were making would be perfectly parallel to the base. Then he held it down with his left hand so he could mark the line with his right.
As soon as he put his hand on the square, his ring looked conspicuously absent. At first, he thought that maybe it just looked that way to him, since he’d spent the last nearly eightyears always seeing it there, but Rachel seemed to notice every bit as much.
Enough that it felt like a tangible thing in the air between them, begging for a comment from him. He cleared his throat. “It was time.” He watched as the expression on Rachel’s face changed, but as much as he studied it, he couldn’t guess what she might be thinking.
He hadn’t noticed what Holly was doing, since she was on the floor behind him, playing with the dogs, but she’d apparently had a great vantage point for witnessing the exchange. She reached forward and patted him on the leg.
The perceptive kid had noticed the lack of his ring within moments of seeing him this morning. He’d told her that it was hard to take it off, but that he knew he should. She’d said, “It doesn’t mean you don’t love Mommy still. It just means that you know she’s in heaven, and we need to keep on living here.” He’d been worried about telling her, yet she’d been the one to share wisdom and reassurance with him.
Sometimes it felt like Holly had the insight of someone well beyond her years, then she would show the maturity of someone exactly her age when she played the whole “my dad can beat up your dad” card with Aiden. The girl was a walking dichotomy, and he loved her fiercely.
Before long, he and Rachel had the opening cut. Pretty quickly after that, they’d figured out how to use the two-by-fours to construct a frame on the back of the fireplace to make it freestanding. They’d even had enough wood left over to create the mantle and get it screwed to the plywood. And it had all generated enough small leftover pieces of the two-by-fours that the kids were having a blast using them like building blocks.
It had taken a lot of back-and-forth discussion and lots of measuring and math to decide how to make the piece. He and Rachel stood next to each other, grinning at the very plainfireplace. Both Holly and Aiden crouched down and climbed through the fireplace opening, just to test it.
Rachel turned to him. “We did good work.”
His smile was big as he nodded. “We did.”
Before they started, he’d wished that Clara was there to help him figure it all out, because she’d always been crafty. But what he’d experienced that evening with Rachel had been rather remarkable. Neither of them had known what they were doing when they started, but together, they figured it out just fine and the results were pretty great.Everythinghe was feeling was pretty great. It was nice to experience that specific sense of teamwork again that could only come when two people figured things out together.
