After the Season

The little boy at the glass had been looking for the snake for almost ten minutes.

“It’s hiding,” he announced to his dads, with the indignation of a customer who’d been sold an empty box.

Avery crouched beside him and pointed halfway up the enclosure. A slender green snake rested along a stem, almost impossible to see until you found the tiny bend in the leaves where its head stuck out.

“Look for the eye,” Avery said.

The boy rose up onto his toes. His whole face changed.

“Dad. Dad! It was right there.”

Both dads came over, and he explained the discovery to them in great detail. Avery stayed crouched until all three of them could see it. When the boy’s family finally left, he waved. Avery waved back. The boy did it again from the next window, then once more from the path to the entrance.

Avery answered every single one.

I stood there with two paper cups of bad hot chocolate and thought, with sudden and embarrassing certainty, that he’d be a lovely dad.

The thought followed me to the bench he’d picked out behind the ferns. The greenhouse was beginning to empty. We sat side by side with our cups balanced on our knees, listening to rain hit the glass. I watched Avery turn his cup until the seam in the lid was lined up exactly where he wanted it.

I could have told him what I was thinking. I very nearly did.

“Once breeding season’s over,” I said instead, “you’ll probably stop planning that far ahead.”

The cup in his hands stopped turning.

“Do you want me to stop bringing up kids?”

I looked at him. In all the time since breakfast, he hadn’t brought them up once.

“I didn’t mean—”

He waited. I had the strange feeling he would have sat there for as long as I needed, which made it worse that I couldn’t get the rest of the sentence out.

He put his cup down beside his shoe. “I know I asked you too much at once.”

“You asked me to breakfast.”

“After the other thing.”

I could still see the boy’s hand waving around the corner. I’d been so startled by how badly I wanted to tell Avery that I’d hidden behind the first joke I could think of. Now I watched him give me all the room in the world to laugh it off, and I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

We walked back under the same umbrella. He held it too far over my side, the way he always did. By the time we reached my cottage, the shoulder of his jacket had gone dark with rain.

Inside, he carried the violet off the windowsill and set it on the table. The wind blew straight through the sill when it came from the west. I’d forgotten again.

“If you just want what we’ve got right now,” he said, touching the rim of the pot, “I’d be happy with that, Noah.”

I believed him. I could see how much care it took him to say it without asking anything back.

He went home. I stood in my quiet room and looked at the two circles our cups had left on the windowsill the night before. I had wiped the kitchen counter twice that morning and somehow gone right around those marks.

Every night, Avery came to my door and asked whether he could stay. I had a door I could go to, too.

I grabbed my pillow. Then I went back for the good blanket.