"To Beckett and Laney," Pearl says. Raises her sweet tea. "About time."
The yard raises whatever they're holding.
About time echoes across Silver Mesa in approximately fourteen voices.
Jolene goes next, which involves considerably more words than Pearl and approximately the same amount of emotional devastation. She talks about watching Laney come into the diner for four years with the particular look of a woman who was doing fine and deserved better than fine.
She talks about the morning Beckett walked in with mud on his khakis, Rowdy's teeth marks on his briefcase handle, then ordered the brisket plate without knowing it was the right order.
She knew then, she says.
She knew before either of us did.
Remy disputes this claim loudly from his crate.
Silas, somewhere near the back of the gathering, says quietly, "I knew first."
Everyone looks at him.
He drinks his coffee and does not elaborate.
Remy steps back up on his crate. Clears his throat. Looks at me with the expression of a man who has been rehearsing something and is going to deliver it regardless of how the room is feeling.
"When Money Bags arrived at Silver Mesa Ranch," he says, "I gave him two weeks.
Maybe three if Laney went easy on him." He pauses. "She did not go easy on him." He looks at Laney. "Which was correct."
He looks back at me. "But he stayed. Through the irrigation disaster, through the flood, through the charity rodeo feed bag explosion that I will be talking about until I'm very old." He stops. Something shifts in his expression that is not the performance version of Remy.
The honest one. "He stayed because this place got into him the way it gets into people who are supposed to be here." He raises his drink. "To the man who cowboyed up. And the woman who made him want to."
I look at Laney beside me.
She's looking at Remy with her eyes soft and completely unguarded in a way they haven't been for a long time.
She finds my hand without looking.
Wyatt goes next with a story about the first night at Whiskey River that gets more embellished the longer it goes and ends with a version of events that I'm fairly certain didn't happen that way but is significantly funnier than what actually did so I let it stand.
Harvey says three words. Raises his drink. Sits back down.
His brother, the guitarist, plays a chord of agreement.
It is the most either of them has contributed to a social situation and it lands perfectly.
June goes last before Maisie, her voice steady for approximately one sentence before it stops being steady, and she talks about a phone call months ago when Laney called her from a barn in a storm and she drove out without asking why because that's what you do.
She looks at me when she says it.
Thank you, I say with my eyes.
She nods.
The gathered crowd of Silver Ridge stands in the string light glow on a Saturday evening and I look at all of them, these people who showed up for a moving truck disaster and stayed for everything after, and think that this is what I bought when I bought Silver Mesa Ranch.
Not twelve hundred acres.
This place. These people. All of this.
