We Could Get By

xxiv.

“He said he didn't want a party, Nellie.” Sweeney wobbled just slightly, the wooden chair on which he stood giving a pitiful creak beneath his newly polished shoes.

Nellie waved her hand dismissively, as if shooing a fly, and stood on her toes to hand him a haphazard pile of colored streamers. He bent to take them from her, but the pile was much too large and they dragged along on the ground. “‘S not a party- ‘ere, love, bend down- not so fast, you’ll fall!” she said, wrapping the excess streamers in big, loose loops over his shoulders to keep Socks from batting at them. He frowned. “‘S jus’ a nice family birthday celebration.”

Sweeney slowly straightened back up and began the struggle to find the beginning of the streamers, his face pinching and twisting in frustration. “I wouldn't be up here at all if-”

“If ya wasn't afraid of me fallin’ an’ bustin’ me arse, I know. But ya can't have me down ‘ere slavin’ away over the cake while you're sittin’ somewhere like a lump.” She cracked two eggs into a bowl with the surprising ease of an expert. If only I was an expert at getting it to turn out alright, she thought.

“Not your arse I'm worried about,” he muttered, tacking the bright end of a streamer to the wallpaper above the curtain rod.

“What was that, love?” She wiped her hands on the front of her dress and patted her updo absentmindedly, perpetually looking as if perhaps she had forgotten some ingredient somewhere along the line but was hardly concerned.

“Nothing.”

-

A tune had been lilting through Nellie's head and warbling gently past her lips and into the kitchen (“Sing here again, home again, come again spring,” before she would fail to recall the rest of it and start over) all day. Sweeney had said nothing, though she was sure he spent more time glancing over at her than he did actually draping the streamers around the parlor. She had entertained the idea of him stepping down off the chair and twirling her grandly around the parlor, tangling her in his arms and kissing her heartily- before she remembered that any sort of waltzing or spinning would probably make her sick.

Mrs. Lovett had put him in charge of wrapping Toby's gifts while she struggled with getting the icing for the cake the right consistency. No matter what she did, it still resembled sugar soup. The cake rounds were baking, all four tiers at once. The warm, inviting smell floated through the bones of the house and made her feel light. It felt almost like Christmas or New Year's Day, toasty and bundled up safe in their home like being wrapped in a sweater. It felt like that morning, swallowed up in the warmth of their blankets.

Something had shifted momentously then, in the early blue of the dawn. The earth had stopped turning, just long enough to be noticed, and then began again, but this time absolutely changed in a way that nobody else could feel. Nellie had been floating peacefully between sleep and the waking world, shreds of dreams still swimming behind her eyelids. She had fought to cling to them, to see them more clearly and drift back into sleep, but then her husband stirred beside her. Sweeney had draped his arm around her, shifted himself just a bit closer, and pressed his face into the back of her neck. Even now, standing in the parlor, she could still feel the hardness of his bones, the sharp lines of his body etched into the skin of her back. He had been sound asleep, she knew, but it did nothing to dull the joy that had settled high in her chest. A few short months ago, he would have stayed clear on the opposite side of the bed.

Nellie wondered how it would be when Christmas actually rolled around this year. Would he help them with the cookies and the pie, all stoic and covered in flour? Would he take her hand in the warm circle of the fire when the day was done?