“I’m going to go somewhere that isn’t here,” he said, with a tip of his head at the feet, at the two of us, at the whole soft operation his kitchen had become. “You two have your — whatever this is.”
“Girl stuff,” Stephy said, eyes shut.
“Terrifying,” Liam said as he went out the back. We heard him whistling halfway across the yard before the screen had finished swinging shut.
Sunday dinner at Owen and Louisa’s was the only law on the ranch we agreed on without putting it to a vote. You came. If you were ambulatory and within sixty miles, you came; if you weren’t ambulatory, Lou brought you a plate. I had missed twice in all the years I’d been around, and both times she’d known the reason before I’d thought of the excuse.
She met me at the back porch with both hands going for my face. Aunt Lou stood five-foot-three on her best day and had the wingspan and the temperament of a woman who’d raised seven children — five of her own and two who weren’t, and had never once let the second number sit smaller in her mouth than the first. Her hands smelled of flour and onion. They cupped my jaw and held it the way you hold a thing you have long since decided is yours.
“Look at me, baby.”
I looked at her.
She looked. Long enough that I felt the heat come up under her palms; then she patted my cheek once and let me go. “Get in here. There’s a child who’s been asking for you since Friday.”
The kitchen was already at full broil. Maggie at the counter doing something complicated to corn, Jack stealing it off the board the moment it was done; Hunter on the phone with oneboot up on a chair; Clay and Wyatt out the back arguing about a fence post the way they’d been arguing about fence posts since before I came to live here, Callie in the doorway refereeing without conviction. Jessica had Stephy and Ivy bracketed at the end of the table, Stephy six and a half months pregnant, Ivy a couple of weeks behind her, comparing swollen ankles like trophies. Two dogs underfoot. The radio going over the top of all of it.
Owen looked up from the head of the table, said “Soph,” and went back to the bread he was tearing. From Owen, that was a standing ovation.
Maisie came at me low and fast. She’d got tall since spring, which was a thing I refused to examine too closely, and she had Horsey clamped under one arm and a heel of bread in the other fist like she’d been told repeatedly to put it back and had decided to absorb the consequences.
“Aunty Soph, Horsey bit Daddy.”
“Did he?”
“On the nose.”
“Probably deserved it,” I said, and somewhere behind me Clay huffed without looking up.
Louisa pressed a glass of something cold and pink and ferocious into my hand and steered me to the chair between Liam and Stephy with the firmness of a tugboat. I sat. Stephy’s shoulder came up against mine on one side, Liam’s elbow knocked mine on the other, and across the table Owen found my eyes and held them a beat. I dipped my chin: fine. He went back to his plate. The whole thing closed in around me, loud and certain, eighteen years deep.
Maisie climbed me like a piece of furniture and set Horsey on the table beside my plate.
“He’s hungry too.”
“He’s a horse,” I said. “He gets the salad.”
Hunter laughed into his beer. Owen reached for the platter. Louisa said grace. We ate.
Aunt Lou sent me home with a foil-wrapped brick of leftovers heavy enough to qualify as personal protection. Stephy had hugged me at the back porch, both arms, the bump between us like a third party to the negotiation, and told me to come up Thursday — the only piece of housekeeping she’d done at me all night. Liam had walked me to Doris and tapped the roof once before he closed my door. “Drive safe,” he said, as if I might forget how the road worked between here and there.
I sat with my hands on the wheel and let the engine tick down, and I did not look across the road.
The cottage windows were dark behind the pickets. The path was the path. I would walk it, I would put the brick in the fridge, I would brush my teeth and lie down.
I got out, took the leftovers off the passenger seat, grabbed my bag from the backseat, walked my path, and let myself in.
Monday came up grey and reasonable. I made coffee in the COUNTY HOSPITAL — STAFF mug and I drank the first one standing at the sink — quick, hot, professional — and I was out the door in scrubs at twenty past six with my second cup in a travel mug, ten minutes ahead of when I needed to be in Doris.
I got two steps off the porch and stopped.
The taillight. The taillight that had been out since the second Tuesday in September — out long enough that I’d developed a small choreography around it, a habit of parking nose-out so the dead side faced the wall, an apology I’d been carrying around about getting to the auto place — was on. A new bulb seated clean in a housing somebody had taken the trouble to clear of grit first.
I walked around the car carefully, half-expecting it to do something on its own. The front passenger tire — spongy at the curb since the cold snap, topped up weekly at the gas stationlike an interest payment I’d never finish — was at pressure. Full, even, sitting up under the wheel arch the way it should. The cap was screwed back on. Whoever had done it had even wiped the rim.
There was a piece of paper folded under the windshield wiper.
I picked it up.
