Читать книгу His For Christmas - Michelle Douglas, Cara Colter - Страница 11

NATE HADN’T REALLY expected Morgan’s house to have this effect on him. It was cozy and cute, like a little nest. The enjoyment he had taken in her discomfort over agreeing to invite him over to help her find a “stud” was dissipating rapidly.

And who had pushed the envelope, who had suggested this foolishness? He wished he could blame her, but oh, no, it had been all him, lured by her blushing at the word stud.

Feeling the need to be a man, to do for her what she didn’t have the skill to do herself.

But now, in her house, with her purple sofa and her toy hammer in his hand? It was his lack he was aware of, not hers.

This house made him feel lonely for soft things. Feminine touches, Cindy’s warmth, seemed to be fading from his own house. The couch throw pillows she had chosen were worn out, the rag rug at the front door a little more rag than rug these days, the plaid blanket she had bought when Ace was a baby and that Ace still pulled over herself to watch television, was pathetically threadbare.

It reminded Nate, unhappily, how desperately inadequate he was to be raising a girl on his own.

What was it about Morgan that made him look at a life that he had felt he made full and satisfying despite the loss of his wife, to thinking maybe he wasn’t doing nearly as well as he’d imagined? Around Morgan his life suddenly seemed to have glaringly empty spaces in it.

“Wow,” he said, forcing himself to focus on her wall, to not give her even an inkling of the craving for softness that was going on inside of him, “for a little bit of a thing, you know how to destroy a wall.”

“It wasn’t intentional.”

“Destruction rarely is.”

He needed to remember that around Morgan McGuire. His life and Ace’s had had enough unintentional destruction wrought on it. They could not bear more loss, either of them. He needed to do what he had come here to do, and get out, plain and simple.

Not that anything seemed simple with Morgan sharing the same room with him as it did when he brooded on it alone over the forge.

Nate brought himself back, shook his head again at the large holes where she had tried to hang his coat hooks and the weight of them had pulled chunks of drywall off the walls.

He tapped lightly on her entrance wall with a hammer.

“See? There’s a stud.” He glanced at her. She was refusing to blush this time, probably because of his explanation, so he went on explaining, as if his voice going on and on was an amulet against the spell of her. “You can hear the solid sound behind the wall. They’re placed every sixteen inches. So you could put a coat hanger here, and—” he tapped the wall gently “—here. Here. Here.”

“But that’s not where I want the coat hangers,” she said mutinously. “It’s not centered properly. I want them in a row like this.”

She went and took a pair of hangers from where he had set them on the floor, inserted herself between him and the wall and showed him.

“Here and here. And the other two in a straight line down from them.”

He went very still. She was so close to him. He had no protection against this kind of spell. His craving for all things soft intensified. Her scent, clean, soap and shampoo, filled him. She was not quite touching him, but he could feel a delicate warmth radiating off her.

It seemed, dangerously, as if she could fill the something missing place in his life.

Nate knew he should back away from her a careful step but he didn’t. He tried to hold up the amulet of words again. “Hmm. Guys don’t think like that. For most men, it’s all about function, not form.”

But all the words did this time was make him more sharply aware of their differences, male and female, soft and hard, emotionally open and emotionally closed.

“Tell that to someone who hasn’t seen your work,” she said.

“I do try and marry form and function in my work.”

Now his amulet, words, had come back to bite him. He contemplated his use of the word marry in such close proximity to her, hoped it was completely coincidental and not a subliminal longing.

He could not help but feel he was being drugged by her closeness, the spell of her winding its way around him, stronger than all that physical toughness he possessed.

Because Nate still had not moved. He could smell that good, good smell that was all hers. Wholesome. Unpretentious. But alluringly soft, feminine, just like this space.

She seemed to realize suddenly that she had placed herself in very close proximity to him. She went as still as him, caught, too, in the unexpected bond of awareness that leaped sizzling in the air between them.

Then, stronger than him, after all, Morgan tried to slip away, back out under his arm, but he dropped it marginally, and they were locked together in the small space of the hallway.

He looked at her for a moment, the intensity between them as tangible as a static shock off a cat, or clothes out of the dryer. He was weakened enough. It was absolutely the wrong time to remember how soft her cheek had felt under his fingertips, and then his lips.

Nate was not seeing her as his daughter’s teacher right now. Unless he was mistaken, her eyes were smoky with a longing that mirrored his own.

But he had already buried a wife. And his best friend. To believe in good things again felt as if it would challenge even his legendary strength.

Even this situation should be showing him something important. He had vowed he did not want to tangle any further with the young schoolteacher.

And yet, here he stood in her front hallway.

Nate knew, the hard way, that life could be wrested out of his control. His young wife had gone out the door, Christmas Eve, for one more thing.

One more thing for Ace’s sock. He could even remember what it was, because she had told him as she went out the door laughing. Reindeer poop. Chocolatecovered raisins that one of the stores had bagged and labeled in tiny ziplock bags.

He’d been so glad to see her laughing, so happy to see her engrossed in getting ready for Christmas that he hadn’t really paid any attention to the snow outside.

Why had he let her go? Why hadn’t he offered to drive her?

And then, instead of Cindy coming back with reindeer poop, there had been that awful knock on the door, and a terrible descent into hell.

So, he knew, firsthand and the hard way, life could be snatched from your control.

It only made him more determined to control the things he could.

And he could still exercise some control over this. And he was aware that he needed to do it. The last thing he needed to do was give in to the insane desire to kiss Morgan again…And not on the cheek this time, either.

Congratulating himself on the return of his strength, feeling as Sampson must have done when his hair grew back and he pulled that building down, Nate dropped his arm, backed away. He needed to go now.

“Look, I’ll make you a mounting board for the coat hangers. I’ve got some really nice barn wood at home that I’d been planning to reclaim. I’ll fasten the board to the studs, so it’s nice and solid, and then put the coat hangers on that.” He looked at his watch. “Rehearsal is nearly over, Miss McGuire.”

And he was aware as he said it that it could be taken a number of ways. That their rehearsal was nearly over. And what would that mean? The real thing to follow?

He hoped not, but now that he had promised her the barn board, he knew his escape was temporary. He was going to have to come back and put it up.

Hopefully he would have time to gird his loins against her before he did that!

They got back to the auditorium just as Mrs. Wellhaven was wrapping up. Ace flew off the stage and into his arms, seeming remarkably unscathed by her hour in the clutches of the dragon.

He lifted her up easily, and he felt the weight and responsibility of loving her, of protecting her from hurt, from more loss.

He glanced at Morgan over his daughter’s head. His tangling with her teacher had the potential to hurt her. Bad.

“Guess what, Daddy?”

“What, sweetheart?”

“Mrs. Wellhaven says one of us, somebody from our class, is going to be the Christmas Angel! They get to stand on a special platform so it looks like they are on the top of the tree. They sing a song all by themselves!”

He knew this latest development had the potential to hurt Ace bad, too. His love for his daughter might blind him to her—like every father he thought his little girl was the most beautiful in the world—but he knew Ace’s was not a traditional beauty. With her croaky voice and funny carrottop, she was hardly Christmas-angel material.

“She’s letting all twenty-two of you think you have a chance of being the Christmas Angel?” He could hear annoyance in his voice, but Ace missed it.

“Not the boys, silly.” She beamed at him. “Just the girls can be Christmas angels. It could be me!”

Ace’s voice was even more croaky than ever, excitement and hope dancing across her very un-angel-like features.

Hope. Wasn’t that the most dangerous thing of all?

Nate’s eyes met Morgan’s over the top of Ace’s head. She didn’t even have the decency to look distressed, to clearly see how unrealistic his daughter’s hopes were.

He felt the weight of wanting to protect his daughter from all of life’s disappointments, felt the weight of his inability to do so.

“I should have beaned Mrs. Wellhaven while I had the chance,” he said darkly. And he felt that even more strongly the next morning at breakfast.

“Daddy, I dreamed about Mommy last night.”

Nate flinched, and then deliberately relaxed his shoulders. He was standing at the kitchen counter, making a packed lunch, his back to Ace, who was floating battle formations with the remains of the breakfast cereal in her bowl.

He knew his own dreams about his wife were never good. Cindy swept away by a raging river, him reaching out but not being able to get to her. Cindy falling from an airplane, him reaching out the door, trying desperately to reach a hand that fell farther and farther away…

He often woke himself up screaming Cindy’s name.

Nate hadn’t heard Ace scream last night. He tried not to let his dread show in his voice, but didn’t turn around to look at her.

“Uh-huh?” He scowled at the lunch ingredients. If he sent peanut butter again was Morgan going to say something? When had he started to care what Morgan had to say?

Probably about the same time he’d been dumb enough to plant that impromptu kiss on her cheek.

It was ridiculous that a full-grown man, renowned for his toughness, legend even, was shirking from the judgments, plentiful as those were, of a grade-one teacher.

“It was a good dream,” his daughter announced, and Nate felt relief shiver across his shoulder blades. Maybe finally, they had reached a turning point. Ace had had a good dream.

He recognized that he, too, seemed to be getting back into the flow of a life. If going shopping and volunteering to help with a town project counted. He suspected it did.

And did it all relate back to Morgan? Again, Nate suspected it did.

In defiance of that fact, and the fact that some part of him leaned toward liking Miss McGuire’s approval, he slathered peanut butter on bread. Ace liked peanut butter. And she liked nonnutritiously white bread, too.

“You rebel, you,” Nate chided himself drily, out loud.

“Do you want to hear about my dream?”

He turned from the counter, glanced at his daughter, frowned faintly. Ace was glowing in her new sparkle skinny jeans and Christmas sweater with a white, fluffy reindeer on it. Even her hair was tamed, carefully combed, flattened down with water.

He turned back to the counter. “Sure. Raspberry or strawberry?”

“Raspberry. In my dream, Mommy was an angel.”

Something shivered along his spine. You’ve been my angel, Hath, now I’ll be yours.

“She had on a long white dress, and she had big white wings made out of feathers. She took me on her lap, and she said she was sorry she had to leave me and that she loved me.”

“That’s nice, Ace. It really is.”

“Mommy told me that she had to leave me right at Christmas because people have forgotten what Christmas is about, and that she was going to teach them. She said she’s going to save Christmas. Do you think that’s true, Daddy?”

After David had died, Cindy had found respite from her grief in that time of year. By the time Ace had come along, she loved every single thing about Christmas. Every single thing. Turkey. Trees. Carols. Gifts. Reindeer poop.

After David’s death, she’d developed a simple faith that she had not had when they were children. Cindy believed God was looking after things, that there were reasons she could not understand, that He could make good come from bad.

While not quite sharing her beliefs, to Nate it had been a nice counterpoint toward his own tendency toward cynicism.

After she had died, his cynicism had hardened in him. In fact, he felt as if he shook his fist at the heavens. This was how her faith was rewarded? How could this have happened if things were really being looked after?

Show me the reason. Show me something good coming from this.

And the answer? Yawning emptiness.

He had buried her in the gravesite in an empty plot that was right beside David. Nate had gone to that gravesite a few times, hoping to feel something there. A presence, a sense of something watching over him, but no, more yawning emptiness.

So his cynicism hardened like concrete setting up on a hot day, and he didn’t go to the graveyard anymore, not even when Cindy’s sister, Molly, went to mark special occasions, birthdays, Christmas.

And now listening to Ace chatter about angels, it felt as if his cynicism had just ramped up another gear.

Why did he have an ugly feeling he knew exactly where this was going?

“I hope so, honey.” Because, despite the cynicism, he was aware nobody needed Christmas saved more than him and his daughter.

Unfortunately, he was pretty damned sure Ace’s dream had a whole lot more to do with Mrs. Wellhaven’s ill-conceived announcement about one of Ace’s class being chosen the Christmas Angel than with her mother.

Ace confirmed his ugly feeling by announcing, sunnily, “In the dream, Mommy told me I’m going to be the Christmas Angel!”

Nate struggled not to let the cynicism show in his face. Still, he shot a worried look at his daughter.

Even with the new clothes and better hair, Ace looked least likely to be the Christmas Angel, at least not in the typical sense he thought of Christmas angels: blond ringlets, china-blue eyes, porcelain skin.

Ace looked more like a leprechaun, or a yard gnome, than an angel.

“Poor Brenda,” Ace continued. “She thinks it’s going to be her. I wonder if she’ll still be my friend if it’s me.”

Brenda Weston, naturally, took after her mother, Ashley, and looked like everyone’s vision of the Christmas Angel. Chances were she didn’t sing flat, either.

“You know it was just a dream, don’t you, Ace?”

“Mrs. McGuire says dreams come true.”

Thank you, Miss McGuire. There she was again, somehow front and center in his life.

“Miss McGuire,” he said, choosing his words with great care, “doesn’t mean dreams you have while you’re sleeping come true. She means dreams you think of while you’re awake. Like you might dream of being a doctor someday. Or a teacher. Or a pilot. And that can come true.”

“Oh, like stupid Freddy Campbell thinks he’s going to be a hockey player?”

“Exactly like that.”

“Can he?”

“I don’t know. I guess if he works hard enough and has some natural talent, maybe he could.”

Ace snorted. “If Freddy Campbell can be a hockey player, I can be the Christmas Angel. See? I’m dreaming it while I’m awake, too.”

There was no gentle way to put this.

“Ace, don’t get your hopes up.” He said it sternly.

She smiled at him, easily forgiving of the fact he was doing his best to dash her dreams. “Don’t worry, Daddy, I won’t.”

“You know what?” he said gruffly. “You’re the smartest kid I ever met.” Six going on thirty. Maybe that wasn’t such a good thing, but Ace beamed at him as if he’d presented her with a new puppy.

“The Christmas Angel probably has to be smart,” she decided happily.

He sighed. Over the next few days, he’d try and get it through to her. She wasn’t going to be the Christmas Angel. And he’d better let Morgan know he didn’t want this particular brand of hopeless optimism encouraged.

An excuse to talk to Morgan, a little voice inside him, disturbingly gleeful, pointed out.

He had to deliver her the board he’d made for her coat hangers anyway. So, maybe he’d kill two birds with one stone. And then he’d be out of excuses for seeing her.

And then he’d get back on track in terms of distancing himself from her, protecting his daughter and himself from the loss of coming to care too deeply for someone.

Which meant he knew the potential was there. That Morgan McGuire was a person you could come to care too deeply about if you weren’t really, really careful.

“Come on, squirt, I’ll drive you to school.” He shoved Ace’s lunch into a bag, and went to the table. He roughed her hair, and she got up and threw her arms around his waist, hugged hard.

“I love you, Daddy.”

And for one split second, everything in his world seemed okay, and Ace, the one who had given him a reason to live, seemed like the most likely angel of all.

Morgan’s doorbell rang just as the Christmas tree fell over. Thankfully it made a whooshing sound, probably because it was so large, so she heard it and leaped out of the way, narrowly missing being hit by it.

“Hell and damnation!” she said, regarding the tree lying in a pool of bent branches and dead needles on her floor.

Her bell rang again, and Morgan climbed over the tree that blocked her entrance hallway and went and flung open the front door.

Nate Hathoway stood there, looking like damnation itself. Despite the cold out, he wore a black leather jacket and jeans. Whiskers darkened his cheeks. His eyes sparked with a light that would have put the devil himself to shame.

“I thought you were opposed to cussing,” he said mildly, white puffs of vapor forming as his hot breath hit the cold air.

Silently, she cussed the lack of insulation in her old house that had allowed her voice to carry right through the door. She also cussed the fact that she was wearing a horrible pair of gray sweatpants and a sweatshirt that said Teachers Spell It Out.

While she was on an inward cussing spree, Morgan also cursed the fact that she could imagine, all too well, what the slide of that warm breath across her neck would feel like.

“I am opposed to cursing in front of children!” she defended herself. “In cases of duress, amongst consenting adults, it’s fine.”

His eyes narrowed with fiendish delight. She wished she would have chosen a term different from consenting adults. It was a mark of how flustered his unexpected appearance had made her feel that she had said that!

And it was obvious he was thinking that phrase usually referred to something quite a bit more exciting than cussing.

“What was the crashing noise?” he asked, peering over her shoulder.

“Nothing!” she said stubbornly. It was her first Christmas by herself. She had never set up a tree before. Frankly, it was one of the loneliest and most frustrating experiences of her single life. And she wasn’t pretending otherwise because Amelia Ainsworthy, someone she did not know, and was not likely to meet, thought such efforts at aloneness were character building!

He glanced behind her. The tree was lying there, blocking the door.

“Did your tree fall down?”

He did not sound gentle. Did he? Maybe he did, a little bit. But it didn’t matter!

“I set it there,” she lied, hoping to hide both her loneliness and her frustration from him. “It’s too tall. I’m going to put the lights on before I stand it up.”

“Don’t take up poker,” he advised her solemnly. “You made that decision after it fell, didn’t you?”

She shrugged, trying not to let on how his appearance had made her aware of a dreadful weakness in her character. Morgan wanted a big, strong guy just to come in and take over.

She wanted a man to figure out the blasted stand, saw off those bottom branches, muscle the huge, unwieldy tree into place, put the star on top and figure out lights that looked as if they required a degree in engineering to sort out.

Nate truly was the devil, arriving here at a horrible moment, when she felt vulnerable and lonely. He was tempting her to rely on something—or someone—other than herself. She was sending him back into the night.

“Do you want help with the tree?”

“No,” she spat out quickly before the yes, yes, yes clawing its way up her throat could jump out and betray her.

He nodded, but he could clearly see the horrible truth. She was the kind of helpless female the new her was determined not to have any use for!

“I brought over the board to put the coat hangers on. I could put it up for you if you want.”

Her eyes went to what he was holding. A helpless female might weep at the beauty of the board he had reclaimed for her. It was honey-colored, the grains of the wood glorious, the surface and edges sanded to buttery smoothness.

Well, right after he put it up for her, she was sending him back into the night. She would draw the line at allowing him to help with the tree.

Despite wanting to rebel against the teachings of the blissfully single Amelia, Morgan knew she would be a better person, in the long run, if she put that tree up herself. She stepped back from the door, and he stepped in.

She touched the board. “That’s not what I was expecting,” she said. “Something worn and weathered. When you said it was barn wood, I thought gray.”

“It was, before I ran it through the plainer. Some of this old wood is amazing. This piece came from a barn they pulled down last year that was a hundred and ten years old.” His fingers caressed the wood, too. “Solid oak, as strong and as beautiful as the day they first milled it.”

Morgan was struck again by something about Nate. His work always seemed to be about things that lasted. There was something ruggedly appealing about that in a world devoted to disposable everything.

Including relationships.

There was a tingle on the back of her neck. A relationship with this man would be as solid as he was, a forever thing, or nothing at all.

Don’t you dare think of him in terms of a relationship, the devoted-to-independence woman inside her cried. But it was too late. That particular horse was already out of the barn.

“Where’s Ace?” she said, glancing behind him.

“The Westons took her to the Santa Claus parade and then she’s sleeping over at their place. Ace is thrilled.”

As she closed the door, she read a moment of unguarded doubt on his face. “You, not so much?”

“I don’t know. I don’t quite get the purpose of it. I get going tobogganing, or to a movie. I don’t get sleeping at someone else’s house.”

Don’t blush, she ordered herself. They were not talking about adult sleepovers.

“Sleeping is not an activity,” he muttered.

“Believe me, they won’t be doing much sleeping. Probably movies and popcorn. Maybe some makeup.”

“Makeup?” He ran a hand through his hair and looked distressed. “I hoped I was years away from makeup. And don’t even mention the word bra to me.”

Believe me, that was the last word I was going to mention to you.

He could fluster her in a hair, damn him. She tried not to let it show. “Not serious makeup. Not yet. You know, dress-up stuff. Big hats, an old string of pearls, some high heels.”

“Oh.”

“Is there something deeper going on with you?” she asked. “Something that needs to be addressed?”

Morgan saw she could fluster him in a hair, too.

“Such as?” he asked defensively.

“Any chance you don’t like losing control, Nate?”

He scowled, and for a moment she thought she was going to get the lecture about knowing everything again. But then she realized he wasn’t scowling at her. After a long silence, he finally answered.

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he admitted reluctantly. “I felt like I wanted to call the Westons and conduct an interview.”

Interrogation, she guessed wryly. “What kind of interview?”

“You know.”

She raised her eyebrows at him. He sighed. “Just casually ferret out information about their suitability to have Ace over. Don’t you think I should know if anyone in the house has a criminal record? Don’t you think I should know if they consume alcoholic beverages? And how many, how often? Don’t you think I should know if they have the Playboy channel? And if it’s blocked?”

Morgan was trying not to laugh, but he didn’t notice.

“Even if I got all the right answers,” he continued, “I still would want to invite myself over and just as casually check their house for hazards.”

“Hazards? Like what?”

“You know.”

“I’m afraid I can’t even imagine what kind of hazards might exist at the Westons’ house.”

His scowl deepened. “Like loaded weapons, dogs that bite, unplugged smoke detectors.”

She was biting the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing. She knew it would be the wrong time to laugh. “The Westons are very nice people,” she said reassuringly. “Ashley is active in the PTA.”

He sighed. “Intellectually, I know that. That’s how I stopped myself from phoning or going in. I grew up with Ashley Weston. Moore, back then. She was a goody-goody. I guess if Ace has to sleep somewhere other than her own bed, I want it to be at a house where I know the mom is a goody-goody. Sheesh. The PTA. I should have guessed.”

“Don’t knock it until you try it,” Morgan suggested drily.

“I’m not trying it. Don’t even think about sending me a note.”

There were quite a few single moms in the PTA, probably the same ones who swarmed him at the supermarket, so, no, she wouldn’t send him a note.

“Still—” he moved on from the PTA issue as if it hardly merited discussion “—what about next time? What if Ace gets invited to someone’s house where I didn’t grow up with their parents? Or worse, what if I did, and I remember the mom was a wild thing who chugged hard lemonade and swam naked at the Old Sawmill Pond? Then what?”

No wonder he had an aversion to doing his grocery shopping locally. That was way too much to know about people!

“I’m not sure,” she admitted.

“Oh, great. Thanks a lot, Miss McGuire! When I really want an answer, you don’t have one. What good is a know-it-all without an answer?”

Morgan was amazingly unoffended. In fact, she felt she could see this man as clearly as she had ever seen him. She suddenly saw he was restless. And irritable. He had needed to do something tonight to offset this loss of control.

“Is this the first night you’ve been apart since the accident that took her mom?” she asked softly.

He stared at her. For a moment he looked as though he would turn and walk away rather than reveal something so achingly vulnerable about himself.

But then instead of walking away, he nodded, once, curtly.

And she stepped back over the fallen tree, motioning for him to follow her, inviting him in.

Morgan knew it was crazy to be this foolishly happy that he had picked her to come to, crazier yet that she was unable to resist his need.

But how could anyone, even someone totally emancipated, be hard-hearted enough to send a man back into the night who had come shouldering the weight of terrible burdens? Not that he necessarily knew how heavy his burdens were.

He hesitated, like an animal who paused, sensing danger. And what would be more dangerous to him than someone seeing past that hard exterior to his heart?

And then, like that same animal catching the scent of something irresistible, he moved slowly forward. He stepped over her tree, and she wondered if he knew how momentous his decision was.

If he did, he was allowing himself to be distracted. He surveyed the strings of lights strewn around her living room floor, the boxes of baubles, the unhung socks. For a moment it looked as if he might run from the magnitude of what he had gotten himself into.

But then he crouched and looked at the tree stand, a flying-saucer-type apparatus, that was still attached solidly to the trunk of the tree. It just hadn’t kept the tree solidly attached to the floor.

“Is this what you expected to hold your tree?” he asked incredulously.

It was the kind of question that didn’t really merit an answer. Though it had been the most expensive tree stand at Finnegan’s, a tree nearly crashing down on top of her was ample evidence that the design was somewhat flawed.

“It’s worse than your hammer,” Nate decided, with a solemn shake of his head. Still, he looked pleased that he had found something in such dire need of his immediate attention.

“I bought a new hammer,” she said.

After his last visit, she had decided she wasn’t having her hammer choice keep her from the promised bliss of the single woman.

Though somehow, in this moment, Morgan knew she had missed the point because she felt ridiculously eager to show it to him, secretly, weakly wanted his approval of her choice.

“Really?” But he hardly seemed interested in her new acquisition of a hammer. He had already moved on to other things.

With raw strength that made her shiver, he yanked the stand off the trunk of the tree and scowled at it, looked at it from one way and then another.

“I think I can fix it.” He began to whistle through his teeth, a song that sounded suspiciously like “Angel Lost” though she decided against pointing that out to him, because he was so obviously pleased to have things to look after since Ace was out of his reach for the evening.

Morgan told herself she was duty bound to resist this beautiful gift of a man coming to help her. Duty bound.

So, naturally she didn’t.

“I’ll go make cocoa,” she said, and then, in case that might be interpreted as far too traditional, she let the independent and blissful woman speak up, too. “And I’ll get my new hammer, too.”