You Deserve Each Other(64)

My throat burns. My fingers curl around the piece of trash, preserved in this drawer like a precious treasure. I hear a fit of coughing from downstairs and return the straw wrapper bracelet to where I found it, then hurry from the room.

When I descend the stairs, I find Nicholas sprawled on the couch, coughing in his sleep. Used tissues clump on the coffee table and floor. He’s twisted up in the blankets like he’s been tossing and turning, shirt riding up to expose a gap of stomach. His hair’s a mess and his glasses are askew on his face. He looks young and flushed and sweet.

I carefully remove his glasses and put them on the coffee table, then feel his forehead. He’s clammy, but no fever. He doesn’t know I’m watching him, which gives me free rein to have a closer look. His bone structure is so elegant, I almost hate him for it. He swerved all of Harold’s genes while developing as an embryo and he’s only going to get more distinguished-looking as he ages.

The tissue box is empty, so I go pull down a fresh one from a closet. Then I see he’s had quite a night down here by himself, drugstore paraphernalia scattered all over the counter under the cabinet where we keep antacids and allergy tablets and the like. There’s a plastic medicine cup in the sink with a drop of cherry-red liquid in it. It hits me that he probably slept downstairs so that his coughing wouldn’t wake me up, and my heart makes a little tick, rolling over.

I root through the cabinets and come up with a bag of cough drops, so I leave those on the table for him, too.

“Just had to get that canoe, didn’t you,” I murmur to myself, padding into the drawing room. I sneak behind his desk to look outside and almost gasp.

It’s a wonderland out there. A good four inches of shimmering white covers everything, even the pond, which means that canoe isn’t going anywhere. It’s stranded in the middle, surrounded by ice. The forest is breathtakingly beautiful with sunrise glowing up over the edge of the world, coloring the spaces between branches like stained glass.

I wish Nicholas were awake to see this, but then again, snow isn’t as magical to him as it is to me. For him, snow means he has to go and—

Oh, crap.

My joy explodes to dust. Nicholas once left me in a bookstore to drive to his parents’ house and carry groceries in from Deborah’s trunk in the pouring rain. He did this because she called and asked him to. He mows their grass and fixes things around their house and worries about their memories and medical appointments and finances. He’s incurably concerned, and will baby them for as long as he lives even if they don’t necessarily need it.

I stare at his miserable form on the couch, back convulsing off the cushions with each coughing jag. He’s so exhausted, the coughing doesn’t even wake him up. This man is sick, but that’s not going to stop him from going over to his parents’ house this morning and shoveling their driveway. That’s just Nicholas. He’s That Guy.

I glance outside again at the snow, at the thermometer on the other side of the window that declares it’s nineteen degrees, and I think with a vehemence that jolts me: No.

No way in hell.

There’s only one way to stop him, so that’s the way I’ve got to go. I reach for my coat and hat in the closet but see his coveralls and raise an eyebrow in consideration. It might not be a bad idea to wear something a little more heavy-duty. After I tug my Ghostbuster gear on and roll up the pant legs about a mile until the cuffs no longer drag, I decide to go the whole hog and grab his hideous earflap hat, too. It smells like him, which is oddly comforting even though he’s right here, and the fleece is so soft and comfortable.

I need to get me one of these.

Once I’m all bundled up, I grab the keys to his Jeep and throw three different shovels into the back. Three shovels, because they’re different sizes and I’m ashamed to say I’ve never shoveled snow before so I don’t know which I’ll want to use. Nicholas does all our shoveling. I don’t think that’s a fact I’ve appreciated until now: he always shoveled a pathway from our porch to my car when we lived at the old house. He never asked me to do it instead, not even once.

As a matter of fact, he scraped ice off my doors and wind-shields, too. He did it before he left for work, before I woke up.

Shame burns my face. When’s the last time I thanked him for that? When’s the last time I noticed he even did these little things for me and didn’t simply take them for granted? I’ve been so hung up on him doing this for his mom and dad that I kind of forgot he does it for us, too.

I drive very, very slowly to Mr. and Mrs. Rose’s house on Sycamore Lane. Only the main road has been visited by a salt truck, but the Jeep is a total champ and never slides. I am behind the wheel of Nicholas’s Jeep that he bought without telling me and have entirely too much time alone with the disturbing revelation that I’m an asshole.

The lights are on when I nose up the driveway, which means Deborah’s awake. Harold’s got at least until noon before he rolls face-first onto the floor.

The beautiful, untouched snow blanketing their driveway sets me off. They’ve got no problem hiring people to power-wash their house and prune their rosebushes and arrange rock structures in the flower beds. And yet for whatever arbitrary reason, they depend on Nicholas to make this particular problem go away. They expect it. They say he’s so good, so kind, and that pressure is a ten-ton weight, making sure he’ll never stop doing it. If he does, they’ll withdraw all their approval. He won’t be the good, kind son anymore. He’s heard the way they talk about Heather and knows that with one misstep, they’ll be talking about him the same way.