Rick lights the fireplace in the master bedroom suite on the main floor while Judith settles under the covers in the middle of the King-size bed. Daryl wonders how Rick likes Judith sleeping between him and Michonne. He sits down on the bed next to her, with his back against the massive, ornately carved headboard, and swings up his feet.
Rick stops poking the fire and glances over his shoulder. "You mind, Daryl?"
"Nah, I like readin' to 'er." No one had ever read to him.
"I mean your muddy boots. On the bed."
"Oh." Daryl swivels to the side and jerks them off, one by one. They thud against the oriental carpet covering the hardwood floor. "All these rooms got fireplaces and bathrooms and shit?"
"The master suite on each floor has a bathroom," Rick answers. "but the smaller rooms share hall bathrooms. We're on a septic system here, and things still flush if you throw some creek water in the toilets. I found the plans in the study. Gravity's pulling the waste down to the septic tank, but the waste isn't getting pumped from the tank into the leach field without electricity. The tank will fill in a few weeks. We need to figure out how to manually pump the sludge out."
"Sounds like a fun job for Jesus."
Rick chuckles. "The small rooms don't have fireplaces, so in the worst part of winter, people will need to double up in the suites or sleep in the library or living rooms or billiard room. They all have fireplaces."
"Billiard room? That where Colonel Mustard did it with the candlestick?"
Rick shakes his head. "Man, guess how much this place used to cost a night?"
"More'n the monthly payment on my trailer, probably." It had been Merle's trailer, really. It was in Merle's name. But it seemed Daryl was always making the payments, since Merle was always owing his meth dealer money. But Merle said that was the least Daryl could do, because his big brother was generously allowing him to live in the smaller bedroom.
A hardback book hits Daryl solidly in the nose as Judith tries to hand it to him. "Daddy," Judith says in a tone of exasperated authority. "Unca D weads. NOW."
Rick holds up one hand in surrender as he puts the fire poker back. "Okay, okay. I'll stop talking to him and go give Tara a break on watch."
As Daryl rubs the bridge of his nose, he thinks, proudly, that Little Ass Kicker packs quite the punch.
[*]
Jesus ends up claiming the small bedroom next to Aaron's, which has an adjoining door – a compromise that doesn't seem to require much discussion. Enid and Gracie take the next room over, which has a queen bed. Aaron and Jesus push the bed against the wall, so Gracie can sleep on that side without rolling out.
While they're busy with that, Carol takes her stuff to the last unclaimed bedroom – the third floor suite, which has a gold-plated sign out front that reads, The Chardonnay Room. There's nothing particularly Chardonnay about the room, except a gold color theme. The queen-size bed has a frilly canopy and is littered with tiny, useless pillows.
There's a dusty vanity with a cracked mirror in the corner. The room has its own bathroom, with a free-standing, Victorian-style ceramic tub. She supposes she can mix boiling kettle water with cold creek water for a warm bath, if the tub still drains well. But that's for another day.
Her new room has a fireplace opposite the bed. Carol takes a newspaper-style wine guide off an end table next to the armchair, rips out the pages, and uses them to light the dry wood in the fireplace so she can see better. She turns off her flashlight when the flames catch, puts it on the mantle, and then opens the closet and sets her backpack down beside a partially open suitcase. The hem of a lacy red negligee spills out of the side. Carol crouches down, eases it out, and runs her thumb over the silky material. She thinks of what she once told Lori – Ed never let me have nice things.
"Whoever stayed here before the world ended sure had nice clothes," Michonne says from the open doorway. "They don't fit me, but they might fit you."
"I'll rifle through them later and see if there's anything practical," says Carol, dropping the negligee on top of the suitcase, standing, and walking away from the closet.
[*]
"…They roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth," Daryl reads."And rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws."
Judith makes a claw of her little hand, rips it through the air, and shouts, "Woar! Kick 'em ass."
Daryl chuckles. He's not surprised this book doesn't scare her. Judith's seen far worse than the wild things. "Dunno if Max is gonna kick their asses," he tells her, "but we'll see."
[*]
Michonne leans her slender shoulder against the doorframe. "Do you really think Maggie might be alive?"
Carol wraps one hand around the wooden pole that holds up the canopy of the bed, as if she could hold up her own spirit that way. "I have to."
"Rick doesn't want to hope," Michonne admits. "I think he's afraid to hope. And I think maybe he's also afraid to think he may have left anyone behind."
"You had no choice," Carol reassures her. "You were under fire, in more ways than one. Even when we got there, Daryl and I couldn't get close enough to see anything."
[*]
Half sitting up and leaned back against Daryl's chest, Judith yawns.
"And Max the king of the wild things was lonely," he reads, gently brushing Judith's hair back from her drooping eyelids, "and wanted to be where someone loved him best of all."
What the hell was it with children's books, anyway? He could read 300 pages of a military thriller, people dying left and right, and not feel a damn thing, and then some stupid, simple line like that in a goddamn picture book would come along and twist his gut all up like a pretzel.
"Then all 'round from 'cross the world, he smelled good things to eat."
Lines like that. No big words, nothing fancy, but it conjures up a dozen memories of Carol cooking, all jumping over each other in his head, until he can almost taste the scent of her mess hall venison drifting from the cooking tent in the old prison yard.
"So he gave up being king of where the wild things are."
[*]
Michonne's eyes flit to the armchair in the corner of Carol's room and then to the crackling flames in the fireplace and finally back to Carol. "Did you get that thing I asked for?"
Carol nods. She returns to her backpack in the closet, from which she removes a box containing a pregnancy test. "I have two more, if you need them." She extends it to Michonne. "Does Rick know?"
"I don't even know." Michonne takes a step back into the hallway and slips the box into an inside pocket of a black leather jacket she must have picked up on the road. "Thanks, and don't mention anything to Rick. I haven't said anything yet."
"You should," Carol tells her.
"I'm going to take the test first. He doesn't need this stress right now."
"And you don't need to bear this stress alone," Carol insists.
"Thanks for the test." Michonne vanishes from the hallway.
[*]
Daryl looks down at Judith, whose eyes are completely closed. "…And sailed back over a year," he whispers. "And in and out of weeks, and through a day."
Judith's little chest is rising and falling now, and he can hear the soft sounds of her rhythmic breathing, but as long as he's here, he might as well finish the book. "And into the night of his very own room. Where he found his supper waitin' for him." When he hears the slight hitch in his own voice, he clears his throat. "And it was still hot."
Daryl closes the book gently and sets it on the nightstand. He dries his itchy eyes – damn allergies - with two fingertips. And then he eases out ever so carefully from underneath Judith and settles her head on a pillow before tucking the covers up around her.
He scoops up his discarded boots in one hand and tiptoes to the end of the bed, where he reclaims his bow and backpack. Quietly, he slips them onto his shoulders, watching Judith to make sure she doesn't wake. When he looks up, he finds Michonne standing in the doorway, smiling. "Thank you," she tells him. "Carol's in the Chardonnay room. Last bedroom on the third floor, at the end of the hallway."
Daryl wonders if that means Carol told Michonne he's rooming with her. He doesn't ask, in case that's not what it means. Instead he nods, mumbles, "G'nite," and makes his way upstairs.