Daryl usually rises with the sun and is gone from the houseboat before Carol awakens, but this morning he is stirred by the bright streaming rays of the sun. He rolls out of bed feeling a little drunk from more sleep than usual, and the bird sitting on the rim of the open portal of his window chirps loudly and takes flight over the waters of the lake.
He slams up his folding bed into the wall, sheets and all, and pulls on his clothes in the space that provides. Running a hand through the short strands of his hair, he yanks open the door, pads barefoot into the living are, and sees Carol bent over in the kitchen to pull something out from a lower cabinet. Her ass, which is accentuated by the fabric of her close-fitting gray sweatpants, is well positioned, and his eyes are drawn to it like a magnet. He feels a stirring he would rather not. Most of the time he can keep his mind from going such places, but there have been moments, here and there, over their time of living together, when an image rises like leaping flames to his mind.
As much as she likes to flirt and tease, it's a game, he thinks, and she'd be uneasy if she knew the scene that was playing out in his mind right now: her stripped of her pants, bent over that counter, with him behind. Carol views him as safe - a strange thing, given how cautiously the women used to watch him in the quarry, how careful they were to keep their camp sites far from his, how, whenever they found themselves alone near him, their eyes scanned the camp anxiously for Shane or Dale.
Maybe it was his desperate search for Sophia. Maybe it's the history of abuse they share in knowing silence. Maybe it's a bond that comes from surviving together the destruction at the quarry camp, the CDC, and the farm… but she trusts him not to try to lay a finger on her, not to make a move. She can play all she wants, like a cat with a toy snake, building up her confidence day by day, and he'll never turn suddenly, hiss, and bite.
He looks abruptly away when she stands straight and turns toward him. "Enjoying the view?"
"Stahp. Was trying to see what you were pulling out from there."
She shakes the canister of grits she holds in her hand. "Breakfast. Want some?"
He nods. It's a rare day his breakfast isn't a piece of jerky from his pack and a handful of wild berries in the woods. Grits sounds pretty damn good.
She glances down at his bare feet, which are grimy from when he stepped into the creek to follow that deer with Jackson yesterday, and the water and soot flooded down inside. "You're allowed to wash your feet even if it's not a hot shower day," she assures him.
He grunts. "Just gonna get dirty again."
She shakes her head, sets a pot on the two-burner stove top, and fills a glass measuring cup of water from the sink. "I think the tank is dry," she says. "I didn't quite get two cups. But it should do." She pours the water into the pot and turns on the burner.
"I'll do the water today." Doing the water means drawing buckets from the lake, as if it were a well, pouring the water through filters, boiling it, and then refilling the boats' water tanks. "Fill another storage drum while I'm at it." They're keeping drums of clean water in the boat house, so they have them for winter, when ice might make it harder to draw. The houseboats once used water hookups to the city water when docked, but the city water no longer flows, and, even if it did, it would no doubt be contaminated by now, with no one to man the filtration plants. It's safer to purify the lake water.
"Well, I'm going to work on C-section practice with Hershel this morning." She's been prepping, because Lori needed a C-section with Carl and might with this baby to come. Hershel's done his share of birthing cows, but he doesn't want to be the one to cut open Lori, if it comes to that. His hands are a little too shaky these days, he says. "Then I'll do a little garden duty. I get to watch Carl make puppy eyes at Addison all morning."
"Kid don't stand a chance."
"Not today, no," Carol agrees. "Maybe when he's sixteen and she's not quite eighteen. Especially if he turns out to be as handsome as his father."
"Pfft. Rick? Handsome?"
She smiles. "Jealous, Pookie?"
"Guess he does have those dreamy baby blues."
Carol laughs. "Would you put some bowls on the table?"
Daryl grunts and goes to the small, narrow, two-shelf cupboard that has all their cups, bowls, plates, and refillable water bottles. When he sets two on the table, he notices she's grown strangely quiet. "You a'right?"
"Talking about Carl's little crush on and Addison," she says. "It just made me think." She stirs the grits into the now boiling water. "After the CDC, after we knew there was no government working on a cure …I thought about it, Carl and Sophia, that it was almost inevitable they'd…you know. Someday." She winces. "But that was when I thought Sophia would live to grow up."
Daryl swallows and ducks his head to the ground. He hates it when she mentions the girl. It brings up all the old guilt, the gnawing sense of failure. But that doesn't bother him as much as Carol's pain. He tries to think of something to say, but all that comes to his head is the meaningless platitudes he heard from one cousin after another at his mother's funeral, cousins who were second or third, or once or twice removed, or whatever the explanation was – cousins whose names he didn't know, and who he'd never seen before his mother's charred-up body was in that cheap mortuary special of a coffin. And he remembered how those platitudes wormed through his ears and down into the pit of his stomach, where they twined into a ball of rage.
But he doesn't have to think of something to say, because Jackson's voice floats down through the open doorway from the deck above: "Knock knock!"
"Come on in, Jackson!" Carol tells him, her tone switching to sudden sweetness like it does sometimes. Someone who didn't know her like Daryl does would never guess at the pain beneath the surface.
Jackson turns and climbs down the short ladder before walking toward the kitchen.
"I was just making some grits," Carol tells him cheerfully. "Would you like to stay for breakfast?"
Jackson smiles. "Yeah! I haven't had grits in…well, awhile." He extends a paperback book to Daryl. "The book I was talking about. The Tao Te Ching."
Daryl takes the book in his hands. The cover bears a watercolor-like picture of some smudgy mountains – at least he thinks they're supposed to be mountains. The subtitle reads, Lao Tzu's Book of the Way. "That the same guy wrote the Art of War?"
"Uh, no. That was Sun Tzu. Why? Have you read The Art of War?"
"Nah. Just heard m'brother Merle talking 'bout it once, like he'd read it and it made 'em some kind of military mastermind. Doubt he ever actually read more than the back blurb." Daryl fans through the pages. "Least it's short. Ain't got no pictures though." It did have a lot of line divisions. "You giving me poetry?"
"I guess you could call it that."
Daryl chuffs and tosses the book on the nearby coffee table before he goes over to a corner where there's a folding chair, among other junk, which he unfolds and puts at the table where he and Carol eat, so Jackson can have a seat. He gets him a bowl and sets out three glasses and three spoons as well. Then, since they don't have any water left in the tanks, he grabs a 16-ounce plastic bottle and sets it on the table.
"Your father was thirty-six years old before he learned to set a table," Carol tells Jackson.
Jackson blinks. Probably because Carol said your father, and Jackson's father probably set the table all the damn time. Jackson's father had a college degree and a steady paycheck. But he must realize she means Daryl, because Jackson says to him, "You never set a table growing up? Your mom always did?"
"My mom didn't do it either."
"Well the spoons are on the wrong side," Jackson observes.
The correction irritates him for reasons he can't quite explain to himself. "Ain't no fucking sides in the apocalypse."
Jackson holds up a hand. "Fair enough."
Carol seasons the grits with salt and pepper and divides them evenly into the bowls while Daryl pours about five ounces of water into each glass, and they settle tightly around the little table.
"This is really good, ma'am, thank you," Jackson says after his first bite.
"Ain't bad, but it needs butter," Daryl mutters.
"Well, Jackson, I see your mother taught you good manners," Carol says with a smile.
"Said it ain't bad," Daryl insists. "Just needs butter."
"Well, Pookie, trap me a cow the next time you're in the woods."
Jackson smiles hesitantly and glances at Daryl, who glares at Carol for letting her little nickname slip, but Jackson doesn't mention it. Instead he says, "Addison and I came across a goat once in the woods. We tried to catch it, but…walkers got it first. Maybe there's still some farm animals out there we could trap."
"Well if we ever see one, we'll certainly try," Carol tells him.
Jackson turns to Daryl. "So what are we hunting today?"
"Ain't huntin' today. Just got a deer. Gonna do the water."
"So when do we do the water?"
"We?" Daryl asks.
"You boys can take our boat out to do it," Carol announces. "In an hour, when I go to Hershel's, how about?"
"Sounds good," Jackson replies. "I'll run home and change first. I dressed for hunting."
Daryl looks him over. "How so?"
Jackson pulls at the fabric of his long-sleeve t-shirt, which has a green army camouflage pattern. "The camo?"
"It's fall."
"Yeah? So?"
"So ain't a lot green right now."
Jackson looks down at his shirt. "Oh. Well, this was all I had."
"Well, you managed to bag a deer just fine with whatever you wore yesterday," Carol assures him, and then gives Daryl a look. He doesn't quite know what that look means.
When Jackson's gone and Carol is clearing the dishes, she says, "You could give him a little more encouragement."
"Encouragement to what?" He folds up the chair and puts it back in the corner.
"He obviously wants to spend time with you. That's why he volunteered to do the water."
"Don't know what 'm s'posed to say to 'em on a boat half the day."
"Say whatever you'd say to me," Carol suggests.
"I just respond to whatever you say."
"Yes, Daryl, that's how a conversation works." Carol shakes her head and leaves the dishes in the sink. "I'm going to get dressed."
"Thought you were dressed."
"I'm not gardening in sweatpants," she insists. "Clearly this is what I slept in. Or did you think I slept stark naked when you're not around?"
Daryl flushes.
"Just me and my trusty wand?"
"Stahp!" But he wonders, as she makes her way to her bedroom and shuts the door behind herself, if maybe she does have a trusty wand in there? When she's alone at night, and he's on the other side of the thin wall between them, does she - "Fuck," he mutters to himself, and pulls his shirt tail a little lower over the front of his pants.