Stepping out of the shower, Daryl shakes his head like a wet dog, and water splatters on the cheap plastic floor of the shower bed. He rips a towel from the rail and wraps it around his waist. They use lake water to fill their tanks, after filter and boiling it, which is a lot of work, so they've agreed to only two showers per week. Today's a good day for it, given all the looting. He's found walker blood in places he didn't know it had seeped to.
The bathroom is narrow and no place to dress in, so, towel wrapped around his waist, he eases the door open. When he walks out, he bumps into Carol, grazes her leg, as a matter fact, dick first, and there's an instinctive stir. "Why you hovering out here?" he mutters as he moves away.
"I just got in from the lake." That's apparent from the fact that she's still wet, towel draped over her shoulders. "Did you save me any hot water?"
"Ain't your day for a shower."
"We went looting."
He moves a little further away. "Well don't take forever. Sun's setting."
"Aww. I didn't know you liked watching the sunset with me so much."
"Stahp. Meant the water heater's gonna go out when it does." While the sun is up, they have power from the solar panels. When the sun sets, there's a backup battery that still powers some things - but the water heater isn't one of them. Daryl hasn't been able to figure out how to write it in.
She smiles and vanishes into the bathroom, and he heads through the kitchenette, then through the combined living room / dining room (with its table, two chairs, couch, and tiny pantry), to his bedroom, which is only about twice the size of the postage stamp of a bathroom, but big enough to get dressed in, especially when the bed is folded up into the wall, as it is now.
Now dressed, he heads topside and drapes his towel over the rail to dry before unfolding the extra deck chair and setting it up next to his. Because the truth is, he does like to watch the sun set with Carol. It's become a habit of theirs, a predictable routine. He never knows how the morning or afternoon will go on any given day, but he can always check off the evening point by point-(1) Sit and watch the sunset. (2) Clean guns or fiddle with his bow in the living room while Carol putters around straightening up or sits and reads a book. (3) Go to bed.
He likes the predictability. Evenings were never predictable in the Dixon household when he was growing up. There could be a volatile eruption at any moment. He could end up cowering in his bedroom, chair wedged under the doorknob, or slamming the front door, going for a hike, and sleeping somewhere beneath the stars. His years of roaming with Merle were no more predictable. They might sleeping in the pickup truck one night, in a roach motel another, in some trailer of one of Merle's girlfriend's the next. A drug dealer might burst in any time, demanding money, or the girlfriend might smell another woman on Merle, and they'd be out on their asses.
But these past few months have been comfortingly predictable. Same room every night, same bed, same camp, same routine, same even-keeled housemate.
They aren't the only ones who make a habit of the nightly show. Others are situating chairs on the decks of their houseboats now. He sees Jackson and Addison on the next boat over, talking to Glenn and Maggie. Jackson nods to him, and he nods back awkwardly.
By the time Carol joins him, a new towel slung around her neck now, in her gray sweatpants and pink tank top, the rays are already dancing on the dark waters of the lake. She eases down beside him with a glass of wine in her hand, three-ounces. That's her routine. Three ounces while the sun sets, because they have six cases of that, back on shore at the boat house. Glenn and Maggie found it all, but they share with the others. It's a job, supply running, like boiling water or fishing or hunting or anything else. The results are shared.
There have been a few arguments over distribution, but fewer than Daryl would have expected. He supposes communism can work on a family-level, and that's what they are now - a family - after all they've been through together. And today they adopted two teenagers into that family. One happens to share his DNA, but he's still a stranger. That's fine, Daryl supposes, this present adoption, but if the camp continues growing, the current model will likely break down. There will be competition for supplies, maybe even fights and theft.
But if they don't bring in more people, what are they doing? One family, on a perpetual vacation, just keeping themselves supplied, floating on boats until the world ends again?
Daryl tries not to think about where it's all going, or not going. He tries to survive one day at a time, putting one foot in front of another, and enjoying the little things – moments like this: Carol turning and giving him a contented little smile as the sun sinks like a ball of fire beneath the quietly rippling waters and sends flecks of light dancing to the hull of their home.
[*]
The siblings settle in surprisingly quickly given their initial guardedness. Carol helps Addison learn to shoot better, because she seems more comfortable learning from a woman than from Rick or even her own brother. "Jackson's a great guy," she tells Carol, "but he can be a bit bossy sometimes when it comes to me. Besides, we could use a break from each other."
Jackson becomes quick friends with Glenn, and they swap stories from their days of working in pizza joints - apparently Jackson worked back-of-the-house for two years in high school. "Better tips for drivers," Jackson says. "But at least I got to read Kierkegaard during the non-rush time."
Daryl overhears and asks Carol who Kierkegaard is later that night. She doesn't know. "Some philosopher."
"Yeah. Guessed as much," he mutters.
Daryl sees the young man reading a lot when he's not working, books he's found after rummaging through the other uninhabited houseboats. It's hard for Daryl to believe Jackson "sprang from his loins," as T-Dog terms it. The young man is far too "bookish." That's Carol's word.
But Jackson's not physically lazy. He's thrown himself into the work of helping Glenn and T-Dog fence in a section of the shore, just like he said he would. Soon, the gardens and dock will be secure, and they won't have to sail out at night to put distance between themselves and wandering walkers. They'll just have to peel them off the fence each morning. That's good, because when winter comes, and the lake begins to ice, sailing out might not be feasible.
In addition to learning to shoot, Addison works in the gardens with Beth, "farmer Rick" (as Lori has teasingly taken to calling him), and Carl. The girl has been making friends with the Beth, who is about two years older than her. Carl Grimes has developed an obvious crush on the redheaded, green-eyed teenager. Addison indulges him with good humor, but she's careful not to encourage him too much either.
"Puppy love," Carol calls it one morning. "Sophia used to have that kind of crush on Carl." She winces, and Daryl doesn't know how to comfort her, so that day, when he goes hunting, he returns with yellow wildflowers and shoves them in a brown beer bottle on their little kitchen table.
"Flowers?" she asks, sounding just as surprised as the day he brought her that Cherokee rose in Dale's old RV.
"Yellow," he replies, as though that's explanation enough. She said once it was her favorite color, after all. She smiles, a little sadly, a little gratefully. He ducks his head and climbs up top the boat.
She joins him as the sun begins to set. She curls into the deck chair, legs up in it, while the light dances. And when it's dark, and the two auto-lights behind them have flickered on, she asks, "Why don't you take your son hunting? Get to know him a little better?"
Daryl hates the way she says that. "Your son." It's true, and it's not true at the same time. "Don't think he's ever been hunting."
"All the more reason to take him," she reasons.
"Ain't sure he'd want to."
"He should probably learn, don't you think? You can't be the only hunter in the camp."
"You been learning to trap," Daryl reminds her. "Maggie can hunt a little." The truth is, he doesn't know what he'd say to Jackson if they were out there in the woods for hours. That first meeting at the diner before the dead started walking was awkward enough. It's been three weeks now since the siblings settled in the camp. He and Jackson do talk to one another, about business matters – how's the fence coming, hand me this, hand me that, did you get that water boiled? But to spend hours together in the woods? More conversation might be expected of him.
"Daryl," Carol says in that tone she uses when she thinks he's being obstinate.
"Fine," he mutters. "See if he wants to go with me tomorrow."
She tilts her head toward him and gives him that twinkled-eyed look that tells him she's about to tease him or share one of her terrible corny jokes. "So what we do now that the sun is set?" she asks. "How should we entertain ourselves?" Now she smiles, and he waits for whatever the punchline is. "Wanna fool around?"
"Pfft."
She laughs.
He rises from his chair. "Gonna go down."
"Even better."
"Stahp."
Daryl heads below deck. She follows a few minutes later, after manually turning off the upper deck lights. The overhead lighting glows low in the living room. He sits on the couch and fiddles with his bow while she walks past him and sets her wine glass in the tiny stainless steel sink in the kitchenette. She'll wash it in the morning, when they have hot water again.
"Thinking I'm headed to bed early," she tells him. "I have camp watch starting at 2 AM."
"Nite," he replies, and peers up from his bow as she slips behind the door of her bedroom.