Red Tide² ━ FTWD

CHAPTER 15: Primal Law

RED TIDE

chapter fifteen: primal law

[ season 2, episode 4; blood in the streets ]

MAY 16, 2003

Katie watched from her seat on the front porch as the setting sun lit the mountaintop on fire, bathing the peaks in a pink crescent, ever-slimming as the day laid to waste. Wind chimes tinkled out an errant melody as the breeze gently stroked through the tines, and her hair.

In the yard, the girls were still splattered with paint from their earlier hijinks, clothes dotted and hair matted in chunks with eggshell white from the local hardware store. What had started as a convenient form of free labor (which doubled as a way to keep her children occupied as she worked) had turned into a war after Heather decided the best utensils with which to paint were her hands, her canvas being Meghan. Naturally, her eldest couldn't let that stand, and thus began the short-lived Jackson Pollack Civil War.

She'd make them shower when they got back inside, but for now, Katie was content to let them run out their energy.

"Now we've got the kitchen finished, all's left is the girls rooms," Lewis said from his seat next to hers, raising his bottle to the pair currently busy chasing his lab, Tabitha, around.

"I was saving those for last. I didn't want them to have to sleep in a construction zone if I didn't have anyplace else to put them. Now that the others are done, we can bunk out in the living room until the fumes settle," Katie briefly explained, stretching out against her porch chair, enjoying the satisfying feeling of her back cracking and settling once more.

After she'd steeled herself to ask for Lewis' help in repairing the porch, he'd surprised her by offering his services restoring other areas of the over two-hundred year old home — some of which, she didn't even know were problems to begin with. It had been a long week of moving furniture, taping up the floor, taping shut everything else, and moderating childhood disputes, all with the promise of doing it again tomorrow.

"That's a good plan," Lewis paused, a little too long to be normal. The same kind of silence he possessed when he was deciding what to say to keep the peace with a cranky neighbor, or nosy cashier. It was the silence of internal debate — one between what he wanted to say, and what he felt he should.

"You can speak your mind, Lew, I won't get mad," Katie prompted him.

Lewis chewed on the inside of his cheek a moment, then said, "That husband of yours is still in town, isn't he?"

Katie straightened unconsciously in her porch chair, and reached to the side table between them for her own drink, an iced tea, that she let rest in her lap.