Carol and Sophia have cleaned the entire kitchen and organized the kitchen cabinets. A fire burns low in the fireplace. A wind-up cuckoo clock on the wall – which has had the cuckoo ripped out (or shot out?) but still opens its doors noiselessly - says its already six p.m. Sophia is getting hungry, but Carol doesn't dare touch any of their sponsor's food without asking him first.
Mother and daughter sit on the living room floor playing Uno. (Sophia discovered there were also Uno cards under the coffee table, without pictures of naked women on them.) Sophia has just set down a Draw Four card when the front door bangs open and Daryl steps inside.
In one seamless motion so fast that Carol almost doesn't see it, he unshoulders his crossbow and raises it toward her. Then he lets out a relieved "Whooo!", lowers the bow, and takes a step back. "Fuck! Forgot y'all was gonna be here. Thought someone broke in."
"Cody let us in," Carol says.
"Probably talked your damn ear off."
"He's…friendly," Carol agrees.
"Never shuts up that guy," Daryl mutters, and then he goes through the open door of the bedroom on the left of the kitchen and tosses his crossbow on the bed. He comes back out and looks at the fire. "Hot in here," he says. "You know it's the last week of August? In Georgia?" He plucks a large green ash tray off the end table beside the armchair and looks down at in disbelief. "Why's this empty?" he roars.
"I emptied all the ashtrays," Carol says, standing up from the floor, feeling nervous but not wanting to show it, not wanting to cower the way she used to do before Ed.
"I keep all my ash to use to dampen the fire." He sighs, puts the tray on the end table, and goes to open up a window but finds she's already opened it.
"The fire will die soon," Carol insists. "I haven't been stoking it. We just lit it so we could heat up a kettle for hot water to do some cleaning."
He turns from the window. "That's what the electric hot pot is for!"
God this man is temperamental. Nearly as temperamental as Ed. Well, not nearly, because by now, Ed would be slapping her across the face with the backside of his hand. "I didn't know if I could use the battery pack to plug that in. I didn't know how often you get to recharge it."
"Use it next time," he says. "You can take the battery pack to the big house anytime and tell Jeeves to recharge it. They got power up there in the day from solar panels. Someone'll send it back down when it's ready."
"Jeeves?" That can't be a man's real name, Carol thinks.
"The butler."
"There's a butler?" Sophia asks.
Daryl looks at her like he's just remembered she's there. Then he looks at their packs leaned against the love seat. Then he looks at the closed door to the bedroom wing off the living room. "C'mon. Get y'all settled in Merle's old room."
Carol and Sophia pick up their packs and follow him to the bedroom. He swings open the door and walks inside to reveal a queen-size bed between two nightstands. There's no dresser, but each nightstand has three drawers. There's a desk in one corner, and an armchair in another. Dirty clothes (Carol assume they're dirty) are draped everywhere. On the bottom of the bed, atop the comforter, a Playboy magazine lies wide open with the centerfold unfolded. Daryl snatches up the magazine, flips back the half-turned comforter, and scoops up two more porn magazines from the bed. With a beet red face, he walks straight past them out the door and slams the magazines into the kitchen trash can. Then he returns and says, "Might want to change the sheets."
"Yeah, I might," Carol agrees, and tries not to smile, but it's a little amusing how quickly he went from irritated and intimidating to red and embarrassed.
"Sorry," he mutters. "If I'd known a kid was moving in, I'd of cleaned the place up sooner." He glances at Sophia. Then he walks to the closet and slides it open. "Clean sheets," he says and points to the top shelf, where a crumpled mass of sheets lies.
"I'll take your word for it," Carol says, now more entertained than nervous.
"Well sorry if they ain't ironed to your satisfaction," he replies. "But they are clean. "
Sophia catches Carol's eye and smiles.
"Hell you two smirking at?" he asks, and their smiles fade.
Carol needs to be more careful. She doesn't know what she's dealing with yet in this man. He seizes a rifle from the corner of the closet and disappears with it. He returns with an empty laundry basket and tosses it on the bed before jerking open a nightstand drawer. He cleans out all the drawers, dumping the items haphazardly into the laundry basket. There are several knives, an open pack of cigarettes, three closed packs, a bottle opener, a corkscrew, a bunch of pills in prescription bottles, boxes of ammunition, and two more porn magazines.
After Daryl tosses the last porn magazine in the basket, he looks straight at Carol's crotch, and she tenses. At least that's what she thinks he's looking at until he asks, "What caliber?" and she realizes he's looking at the butt of the handgun rising above the inside-the-waistband holster in her jeans. "Nine millimeter."
"Fine. You can have one box." He grabs a box of ammunition from the basket and slams it down on top of the nightstand. The rounds inside rattle. He said it like she'd asked him for more than one box, like she'd asked him for any ammunition at all. But she relaxes now. He's probably not going to try to hurt either of them at some future time if he's giving her the means to shoot him. He jerks up the overflowing laundry basket and squeezes sideways with it out the door.
Carol pulls down the sheets from the top shelf of the closet. When she turns around, she sees Sophia has sunk into the back corner of the room near the armchair. Carol hates how tensely and silently she's slunk back there. It's what she used to do whenever Ed was yelling.
"He seems angry," Sophia says quietly.
Carol sets the sheets on the nightstand. "His brother just died, sweetie. He probably is angry. Let's try to be sensitive to that." It's pathetic, she knows. It's a pathetic thing to say when Sophia spent the first twelve years of her life walking on eggshells around a man. And she hates that she's telling Sophia to do that again, hates herself for it.
So when she hears Daryl shout from the kitchen, "Where the fuck are my dishes?", she storms from the bedroom, rapidly closes the distance between herself and the sink, comes to a standstill three feet away from him, raises a finger, points at the cabinets and roars, "In the cupboard where they belong! Washed and dried!"
Daryl blinks. He looks her up and down through narrowed eyes, and she's instantly sorry for her outburst. She drops her pointing finger to her side and feels her entire body tense in anticipation of a blow.
But Daryl only takes a step back from her while looking at her warily. "Thanks," he says. "Been there a week."
Her body unwinds. He's not Ed. He's not going to hit her. Still, she better smooth things over after yelling at him like that. "Should I…do you want me to make you dinner?"
"Nah. I ate up at the big house. During the meeting. Uncle Ben makes a mean rice casserole."
Carol doesn't know if he means he ate a meal made from a box of Uncle Ben's rice or if he's referring to an actual person in the big house that way, the way he called the butler Jeeves.
Daryl looks around the kitchen and seems to notice, for the first time, that all the counters are scrubbed down and the electric appliances cleaned and organized. The spices she's gathered from random corners of the cupboards are now in the spice rack that hangs from the wall. He starts opening the cupboards and scanning the neatly organized shelves. She can't tell if he's making sure she hasn't taken anything or if he's marveling at the order. He closes the last one and turns to her. "Just fix you and your girl something."
"What should I fix?"
"Hell would I know? Do I look like a chef to you?"
"I mean…I don't know what I'm allowed to use. Of your food. To cook for me and Sophia."
"Sophia?" he asks. "That your little girl's name?"
"Yes." She didn't even remember they hadn't actually been introduced. She puts a hand above her chest. "And I'm Carol."
"Daryl," he says. "Dixon."
"Doyle," she tells him. "Doyle's my last name."
"Irish name," he says.
"My father was first generation Irish-American."
"Yeah, well mine was descended from stingy, pigheaded, redneck Scotsmen."
She has no idea how to respond to that.
"That's where the word redneck comes from," he says. "The Scottish."
"I didn't know that."
"Something to do with Presbyterians."
"I'm Catholic," she ventures because she thinks maybe he's trying to have a conversation with her to get to know her.
"Fuck does that matter?"
Or maybe he's not. "I suppose it doesn't."
He twirls a finger in the air. "Think this was the resurrection JC was always going on about?"
She's confused for a moment until she realizes that by JC he means Jesus Christ, and by "this" he means the walkers. "No. I do not."
"Yeah. Me neither." He lowers his arm. "Listen, just eat whatever you want. Fix what you want. Only thing off limits is the booze. And don't eat too much. Gotta make it stretch. Ration distributions aren't for another two weeks. I ain't had time to hunt with all the shit that's been going on, so I'm probably not gonna be able to get any extra game other than my community quota this month."
"Okay," she says, wishing he'd be more specific so he doesn't get upset later if they eat something he wanted. "Are there any specific chores you want me to do while you're gone on your …mission… tomorrow?"
They're going to kill people, she knows. They're going to kill twenty men. She doesn't care. Not after what a representative sample of those men tried to do to her little girl.
"Laundry'd be nice."
"How do I – "
"- Laundry truck leaves for the stream at two in the afternoon three days a week. One of those days is tomorrow. They'll have washboards and buckets on the truck you can use. Laundry soap's in the bathroom. You hang it when you get back here. Got a pile of dirty clothes in my closet."
"Do you want me to wash Merle's clothes, too?"
Daryl swallows hard, and she thinks it was a mistake to speak his brother's name. "Nah, ain't no one can wear his shit. He was a big fucker." He seems to reconsider. "Actually, wash it. I'll give it to the tailor. He can cut it up for material. They're always having to patch clothes, especially for the kids." He fishes a pack of cigarettes out of his front shirt pocket and slides one between his lips. "Jefe'll probably assign you community chores tomorrow."
"Jefe's not joining the mission?"
"Jefe don't leave the camp."
Well isn't Jefe special, Carol thinks. Rick left camp to do supply runs. He put his neck out there. Of course, the quarry camp only lasted two days once Rick got there. And the CDC only lasted one. And the farm only lasted three weeks. Maybe Rick's not the best example of how to keep a camp afloat.
"Just eat what you need while I'm gone." He puts the cigarette pack back in his pocket and pulls out a lighter from his pants pocket.
"You smoke inside?" she asks. She shouldn't have. She's not ingratiating herself this way, but it just slips out.
"Oh God," He mutters around the cigarette. "You're one of those." He rips the cigarette from out of his mouth. "Fine. I'll smoke outside." He leaves through the front door, which is the only door.
Sophia has made the bed up nicely when Carol returns the bedroom, as nicely as she can with crumpled sheets. She's taken down a fleece blanket from the closet as well, and folded the comforter that was previously on the bed and set it on the floor of the closet. Daryl left all of his brother's clothes in here. There's a pair of boots on the closet floor, and one shirt and two leather jackets hanging from the rod. The rest of Merle's clothing is scattered across the room, and Carol squeamishly collects it and stacks it on top of the comforter on the closet floor. "I think I'm going to wash my hands," she tells Sophia. "And then I'll fix us some dinner."
Carol plugs the electric griddle into the battery pack, on which only one of three power bars glows green. She scrambles one of the two brown eggs. She hopes Daryl doesn't mind, but they've had so little protein this past month, and they haven't had a real egg since Hershel's farm. She scrambles it with a 6 oz. can of diced tomatoes and divides it evenly on two plates.
Now that the sun has set, they eat by the light of an oil lamp she found in the bedroom. For dessert, she opens a can of pineapple rings that is two months past its expiration date. It looks and smells fine.
As she washes up, she tells Sophia to hop in bed.
"It's early," Sophia says.
This first night, Carol would rather play it safe and stay out of their sponsor's hair. She'd like to be behind closed doors before he's back from his long smoke, or whatever he's doing. She pulls the plug from the sink, which she had filled with cold and kettle-boiled water to wash. "Let's just go to bed, sweetie."
Despite her protests, Sophia falls asleep almost immediately, but Carol lies on her back staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the cottage. She hears Daryl come inside the living room—recognizes his voice when he apparently stubs his toe in the dark and curses. An electric light comes on – from a flashlight, she presumes. She sees a glow creeping under her door, tenses and worries he'll knock, whisper for her to come out, and then tell her part of her sponsorship duties involve sucking his cock or something like that.
But he doesn't. The light shifts, and the footsteps creak away, and the cottage is silent.