He turned and looked at me. He looked very tired and very awake at the same time, the way people look on Christmas morning after a night shift, and there was snow on the shoulders of his jacket, and his nose was red. "My mother put the picture in the album," he said. "Last night. Hen sent me a photo of the page."
"Did she take out the Reserved card?"
"No. She put it next to the card." He smiled a little. "She says she's keeping her options open."
"That's very wise of her."
"She also says the rule is two," Oren said. "That's always been the rule. Me and Hen. But she says that she's been thinking about it, and she doesn't think anywhere in the rule does it say it can't be three."
I stood there on the end of my parents' dock on Lake Coeur d'Alene, in nine degrees, in the steam coming off the water, and looked at this tall tired man in an orange hat who had caught the thing I dropped and had given it back and had then asked, for the first time in what was clearly a long time, to be let in. I thought about Truett saying, I'll see about the door. I thought about the A below middle C, how you move the pin a hair, and the beating slows, and stops, and the note opens.
I took one step toward him. This time, I took it.
He kissed me the way he had caught the box, soft, unhurried, with an open hand at the side of my face, like a man who had learned to assess each thing that came at him and had decided about this one. His lips were cold and he tasted like peppermint and bad hospital coffee. Somewhere up the hill, a door banged open, and a small voice yelled, "AUNT GRETA, MOM SAYS THE ROLLS ARE DONE," and then, at a higher pitch, "OH," and then the door banged shut again.
We stood there a while longer anyway.
I don't know what happens next. I really don't. He works nights and I work days, and he is bad at being given things and I am bad at not throwing them, and I have spent the last two weeks driving back and forth to Coeur d'Alene on weekends to help my brother tear down a showroom, and Oren has come twice, and once he stayed until dinner and lost to my father at chess in nineteen moves and was so delighted about it that my father has decided he likes him. I have tuned his abuela's spinet. It took four hours and two broken strings and it will never be a good piano, but when he sat down at it and picked out the first line of Silent Night with one finger, the note held, and opened, and breathed. He sat there for a long time afterward with his hand on the keys, not playing, just listening to it ring out.
The Santa picture is back on my refrigerator, under the grand piano magnet, with my eyes shut and my hand over my pocket and Truett laughing and Oren reaching for his falling hat. Every time I look at it I see something new. This morning I noticed that his hand, the one stretched out toward the snowdrift, is not actually reaching for the hat at all. The hat is already past it, already falling into the batting, where in a moment it will scoop up a white knight and carry it, unbeknownst to anyone, for thirty hours. His hand is open, and his palm is up, and it is turned toward me.
It looks, honestly, like he's waiting to catch something.
Next December, Hen says, she's bringing the twins, and she's bringing a bucket. Truett says he'll be there; he says he'll be there till they carry him out. Bryn has already told me that if I'm with him, I'm with him, and I can't go back and forth. I told her I understand the rules. Flanking position only. I'll stand on the left.