Because Jessica had it half right and didn’t know it. It wasn’t the overprotective; the overprotective I’d had my whole life. Itwas that my brother and the man I’d brought home had shaken hands like they’d done it before — each with the other’s name already in his mouth, no introduction wanted, none given — and I was the only soul in that yard it should not have made sense to, and I’d let it go by.
I’d told Liam more than once, in plain words, to stay out of my business. No running plates on the men I saw. No “just checking.” He’d grumbled, and gone quiet instead of turning up with a folder, and I’d let myself believe he’d heard me. Now I stood at the sink and turned it over and couldn’t make it sit flat. Either he’d kept out of it and the two of them had crossed paths some ordinary way nobody had thought to mention — or he hadn’t kept out of it at all. Something was up. I rinsed the plate a good deal longer than the plate needed and could not, for the life of me, put my finger on what.
Later,the dishes done, I took my wine to the front of the porch where it was quieter, where the men’s voices came around the corner of the house low and easy and the September dusk was letting itself down over the paddocks the slow way it did out here.
Caleb found me at the railing. He came and set his forearm along the top rail beside mine — close, so the heat of him crossed the inch of evening between us — and looked out at the dusk with me.
“You alright?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I like your family.”
“I know.”
“They like me.”
“I know,” I said, and there was a smile somewhere under it I didn’t bother keeping off my face out here, where only he could see it.
He let a moment go by. Then, lower, looking at the paddock and not at me: “Your brother doesn’t. Yet.”
“He will.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He turned and looked at the side of my face in the last of the light. I kept my eyes on the dark. Down past the barn a horse shifted and went quiet again.
“Alright, beautiful,” he said.
And the word crossed to me then, warm and low and his — the same word he’d laid on the back of my neck at four o’clock and undone me with. Except this time, with my arm against his and my brother out past the barn refusing to find him at all, something in me caught on it going by. The smallest hitch. Like missing a step in the dark and finding the floor was right there after all.
I found the floor. I let the hitch go.
I leaned my shoulder into his arm, and he took the weight of it without a word, and we stood at the rail and watched the dark come the rest of the way in.
He hadn’t saidmuch since we pulled out of the drive, and it wasn’t an empty quiet. Caleb gone quiet was a different animal from Caleb gone absent. The highway ran out black ahead of the headlights, the radio down low on some old song neither of us was hearing, his hand warm and heavy on my thigh.
I watched the dark fields go by my window. Aunt Lou had sent us off the porch with a foil parcel the size of a tire and a kiss on Caleb’s cheek he hadn’t seen coming. Owen had shaken his hand again at the truck, longer than the first time. Liam had said goodnight from the barn door with a lifted hand and not come down, and nobody had made him.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
“Thank you for asking me.” Simple, eyes on the road.
“I’m sorry about Liam.”
His thumb moved once on my leg. “Don’t be. He’s doing what a big brother should be doing.” The headlights ate another stretch of dark line. “It’s not about me. Not the way you think.”
I let it go by — took it for a generous man giving my difficult brother more rope than my difficult brother had earned — and turned my head to look at him in the green wash off the dash.
I thought about all he had done for me — all the small ways he had been showing up for me. And the sentence came up my throat.
It had been coming up my throat for weeks — since the first time his name had got out of me as the man and not the road, in his father’s yard, with no decision behind it at all — and I had not once let it past my teeth.
I closed my mouth on it.
Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was. And a thing that true wanted the right minute set under it, and a truck doing sixty past a black field with a sad song on wasn’t the minute. That was the reason I gave myself, and I half believed it, which was enough.
