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Twisting in the seat, her pink fingernails wrapped around the chair catch my eyes before I find her face. Cheeks pink, dried blood in her hair, she smiles and says, “Thank you,Hud.”
I fall back into the waiting room seat and pull my phone from my pocket, dialing Deuce. He answers right away, and I’m glad that Ev is out with Bear because I don’t feel likesharing this with her. Right now, I don’t really even know why I’m calling.
“Hey,” I reply to his hello. Around me there are two groups of people and I suddenly feel like I’m screaming. “Hang on a sec, let me step outside,” I tell him.
“Step outside? Ain’t you stackin’ grass?” Deuce asks. Despite the fact he’s basically lived on the ranch for the last eight years, he still uses the wrong terms for everything. Doesn’t bother me.I speak Deuce.
The doors seal closed, leaving me outside in the sunshine, no one but a security guard roaming about. “I’m actually at the hospital.”
“Fuck—what’s going on? Ev there? Bear okay?” His voice is immediately rattled, and I know he’s the right man for my baby sister because she was the first person he thought to ask about. But I already knew Deuce was solid before now.
“No, no, I’m okay, Ev and Bear are out doing wedding stuff.” I walk the length of the sidewalk, watching my boots as I say, “Dolly had an accident. I heard her screaming and went over there.” I swallow, remembering the blood on her arms, the deep gash in her hand. “She said she threw a vase to kill a spider, then she stepped on the broken glass and when she tried to pull it out of her foot, she cut her hand, too.”
“Holy shit—is she okay?” he asks, the bell on the shop door dinging. Sounds like he slipped outside for privacy, too.
“She’s getting stitched up but, yeah, she’s okay,” I report. “I brought her and I’m driving her back. Juniper and Ivy are out hunting supplies.”
“Damn,” Deuce breathes out. “Little thing surely hates spiders, huh?”
“Yeah,” I say, dragging out every last letter as I attempt to phrase my thoughts.
“What’s up?” he questions.
“Well… I don’t know. I wanna tell you something because I wanna know what you think but you can’t tell Everly, all right? Because… I don't know. I just… I want it to stay between us.”
“You got it, brother,” Deuce says earnestly.
“I think I was processing this earlier when I saw you but…” I pull my hand down my jaw, then waste no more time. “This morning after breakfast, I walked Tiffani out to her car and… someone had… punctured it,” I tell him, remembering the pancaked rubber on the front left wheel. No weapon was around, only one of the old metal forks from the diner, likely snuck out by a kid who dropped it in order to avoid getting caught. I stayed a few minutes while the tow truck came. I could’ve put her donut on, but she didn’t have it.
“Really?” Deuce asks, his tone mirroring mine. “Bluebell has a tire slasher, huh?”
“I guess.”
“Well, what’s this got to do with Dolly being at the hospital?” he asks, and not for the first time, I wonder if I’m an egotistical maniac for taking these two random things and trying to make them share logic. Still, I’m committed. And I can count on Deuce to tell me the truth. He always does. He told me the first day we met years back when we shook hands that my sister is the most important thing in his life.
His actions have never, not even once, proved otherwise.
“So, okay,” I say, catching him up. “I helpedher fill out the intake forms, here at the hospital. And then she needed to pay her co-pay.”
“All right…”
I stop walking, analyzing a rather serious crack in the foundation beneath me. “I took her card up, you know, because of her foot.”
“Okay…”
“Her bank card PIN.” I scratch at the side of my jaw, feeling pretty stupid now. But I’m already here, so… “It was my birthday.”
Deuce says nothing. And the other end is silent for an amount of time that has me checking the screen to see if the call is still active.
“When you say her PIN code is your birthday… I mean… remind me,” he replies. “You’re a handful years older than Ev, and I know your birthday is in August because we’re a week apart.”
I turn back and glance at the hospital doors, feeling nervous. “My birthday is August 8, 1985. 08/08/85. Her PIN is 0885. And after I paid, I came back and handed her the bank card and I said,Hey your PIN is my birthday,and she said,I know.”
Deuce snorts. “Yeah, of course she knows when your birthday is. Ev and Bear put Christmas lights up in summer every year and go apeshit on balloons. She lives next door. She sees that shit.”
“I know,” I tell him, because I’ve already thought of that. “But, I don’t know. She gave me this…look.”
A man goes by me, pushing a woman in a wheelchair, a baby bundled to high heaven in her arms. I move out of the way, stepping onto the lawn under a tree. The shade coolsme, still my palms are sweaty as I pass the phone from one hand to another.
