What the Giants Make

She's sleeping. Peacefully, thank God. Last night's nightmares were a lot. Probably the worst we've seen in the long years we've known her. Whatever hit her sideways did a number. This is a normal furlough, not an emergency, but you wouldn't have known that at three in the morning with her thrashing against Tank's arm like it was the enemy.

I think it's adorable, the way she's chewing on her thumbnail even in her sleep. Tank shifts the cover over her and tucks it tighter as she shivers. We share a smile over the top of her head — the kind of smile two men her size probably shouldn't be capable of, all that softness folded into faces built for other things.

My hands knead the dough, slow and careful. Big hands like mine can murder a thin, delicate recipe if they don't work with care. When it feels right, I grab the rolling pin and pastry board from the freezer — a trick I found to keep heat from ruining the project. I tip the dough out and roll it thin as a sheet of paper, keeping a constant pressure. Quickly I layer the prepared butter slab over half the sheet. Fold it into thirds. Roll it out again. Fifteen times, the way the recipe says, patient as church. The final roll-out, I slice the dough into triangles and wrap them around one of my truffles. When these bake up they'll be light, fluffy, buttery chocolate croissants. I slide the tray into the oven and start on the drizzle.

Tank joins me in the kitchen now that the delicate work is done — he knows better than to bring his hands anywhere near mine while I'm laminating, learned that the hard way with a ruined batch and a week of me not speaking to him about it. He reaches into the other oven, pulls out the pork for his barbecue pulled-pork sandwiches. I smile as he sets up some of the heavy rolls I made yesterday to serve as buns. Damn, tonight's dinner is going to be good. Hope she likes it.

"She say anything?" I ask. "Before she went under?"

"Not words." Tank shreds the pork with two forks, easy, unhurried, the same hands that broke a man's collarbone last month doing something this gentle without a flicker of contradiction in his face. "Just held on tighter than usual. Took her longer to settle than it used to."

"She's due a bad stretch. Been carrying something for months now."

"She'll tell us or she won't." He says it without heat. That's the arrangement, has been for years — you don't push, you just make sure there's food and a bed and somebody's hands nearby when the thrashing starts. "Either way she eats good tonight."

"Either way." I pour the drizzle, testing the consistency against the back of a spoon the way my own grandmother taught me, God rest her, back before any of this — before the road, before the patch, before I learned what my hands were also good for when the job called for it instead of dessert. Funny thing, having two sets of skills in the same hands. You'd think they'd fight each other. They don't. Never have. A man who can take someone apart with precision can put a pastry together with the same precision, if he's willing to slow down enough to let it matter.

The croissants come out gold and blistered, and the smell hits the whole cabin at once — butter and chocolate and something faintly like a bakery three towns over that neither of us has been inside in years but both remember exactly. Tank looks up from the pork like a dog catching a scent, which, coming from a man his size, is somehow not undignified at all.

"You're not touching these before dinner," I tell him.

"Wasn't going to."

"You were absolutely going to."

He grins, doesn't deny it a second time, and goes back to his pork. Companionable silence settles over the kitchen — the good kind, the kind we don't get near enough of, most weeks. Furlough is furlough. It doesn't come often and it doesn't last, and when it does land, it lands on us like this: two big men in a small kitchen doing the one thing the job never lets us do properly, while the reason we bother is asleep down the hall, chewing her thumbnail in a nightmare that's finally loosened its grip.

I check on her once more before the sandwiches are ready. She's rolled toward the window, moonlight catching the sharp small angles of her face, and for a second — just a second — she looks like exactly what she is under all the rest of it. Somebody's kid. Somebody who should never have had to learn half of what she knows, and did anyway, and kept some part of herself soft enough to still curl up small and safe in a bed two overgrown bikers keep warm for her four times a year, whenever the job lets go long enough to let her rest.

She doesn't stir when I pull the door shut. Good. Let her sleep through it. The pastries will keep warm under a towel same as always, and when she wakes up starving, the way she always does after a bad night, there'll be pulled pork and fresh rolls and something sweet at the end of it that nobody's ever going to sell in a shop case, no matter how good my friend Gastavo's coffee is.

Some things you make because you love someone. The minute you make them because somebody's paying, they stop being that.

Tank sets the table — badly, forks on the wrong side, same as every time, and I fix it without comment, same as every time — and outside the window the moon's doing something soft over the yard, and somewhere down the hall she's finally, finally sleeping like it doesn't cost her anything.

Furlough's furlough. We'll take it while it lasts.