Cole’s hand came down on his arm. Not hard. Just there. Rhett closed his mouth.
Wade didn’t move closer. He didn’t reach across the table. He held my gaze with the same quality of attention he had held it with through the whole of it, dark eyes steady on my face, and he said, “Wrong by whose measure?”
I didn’t answer right away. The question sat in the warm air of the room and the fire kept doing what it did and I looked at Wade and felt the specific helpless sensation of a person who has been handed a question they don’t want to look at directly.
“Mine,” I said finally. “I don’t know. Mine.” I pressed my thumb flat against the edge of the card. “I’ll be in the middleof something ordinary, I’ll be washing a dish, or I’ll be in the nursery doing something to the shelf, and something will be funny, and I’ll laugh. Actually laugh. And then about three seconds later I’ll remember that he’s gone and I haven’t thought about him in an hour, and that feels,” I stopped. My throat was not going to close on me. I decided this and my throat agreed, barely. “It feels like a betrayal. Like the laughing is taking something away from him. Like if I’m laughing then I must not have loved him as much as I thought I did.”
Wade was watching me. Not moving, not preparing a response with the visible urgency of a person who was waiting for a gap to speak into. Just listening, his hands flat on the table, his face open and completely present.
So I kept going.
“And the sleeping. That’s,“ I let out a breath through my nose. “I slept nine hours two nights ago. I don’t think I’ve slept nine hours since before he died. And I woke up and for about thirty seconds I felt good. Rested. And then I felt like the worst person alive for having been unconscious for nine hours while he’s,” I stopped. “While he’s been gone. Like I should be doing something. Like sleeping means I’ve stopped fighting for something, except I don’t know what I’m supposed to be fighting for or against.”
I glanced at Rhett. He was looking at his cards. The angle of his jaw was tight.
“And then there’s the rest of it,” I said, and I did not specify what the rest of it was, because we were all in the same room and we had all been in that room four nights ago, and nobody required clarification. “Wanting things again. Wanting,” I pressed my lips together. “I didn’t think I was going to want things again. I had sort of made peace with that, with the ideathat I was going to just be the person who took care of the ranch and took care of Hope and that was enough, that was the whole of it. And then.” I set my cards face-down on the table. My hands came together in my lap. “And then it turns out I’m not that person.”
The fire settled. The room was very quiet.
Wade’s hands were still flat on the table in front of him, and he looked at me for a moment after I finished, and I could see him deciding something, not about whether to speak but about how to say what he was going to say. The difference was visible. He was not a man who said things before they were ready.
“I’ve lost people,” he said.
His voice was the same as it always was: low and even, without ornamentation. He said it the way he said things that had weight, without announcing the weight, just setting it down.
“People I loved. My grandmother, when I was twelve. A man I considered a brother, six years ago, different circumstances, but the same absence afterward.” His thumbs rested on the table, unmoving. “There’s a period of time where you measure everything against them. Whether you’re being faithful enough to what they were. Whether being okay means you’ve stopped knowing how much they mattered.” He paused. “I used to think that if I was happy, it meant I had come to terms with them being gone. And coming to terms with them being gone felt like agreeing to it. Like deciding it was acceptable.”
The fire breathed behind him.
“So I stayed sad,” he said. “For a long time, I just stayed sad, because it felt like the only honest position. Like sadness was the correct response to a real thing, and anything else was a lie I was telling myself.” His jaw moved once, a small compression and release. “It wasn’t. It just kept me alone.”
He let that sit.
Then he looked at me with the directness that was simply part of how he occupied rooms, the straightforward quality of a man who had decided something was worth saying clearly.
“You’ve told us about him,” Wade said. “Not all at once. Over dinners. Over evenings.” He glanced down at the table for a moment and then back up at my face. “I know he laughed at a livestock auction when you caught him looking. I know he had opinions about yearling heifers that weren’t always correct. I know he named your daughter before she was a fact yet.” His voice stayed level throughout, but there was something in it, something that sat beneath the evenness of it like warmth beneath still water. “I know what kind of man you’ve described.”
I was looking at him. My eyes had gone wet and I was aware of this and not doing anything about it yet.
“All he would want,” Wade said, “is for you and Hope to be happy. That’s it.” He held my gaze. “That’s the whole thing.”
The simple directness of it landed somewhere I had not been sufficiently braced for.
I sat with it. The tears didn’t fall all at once, they built at the corners of my eyes and sat there while I blinked, while I looked at the worn surface of the card table and the jack of hearts lying face-down and the amber light going slowly warmer as the afternoon leaned toward its close. My jaw was not going to hold if I said anything. I held my own jaw and I breathed and I let the words be in the room.
Across from me, Rhett was looking at his cards with his jaw working in the way it worked when he had decided not to say what he was thinking. He had not moved for the last two minutes, which was the longest I had ever seen Rhett go without movement. Cole’s arms were folded across his chest, his eyessomewhere in the middle distance, a fixed point that was not the table and not any of us but the private internal space he went to when something had gotten through and he was not going to make an event of it.
Wade picked his cards up.
He did it without announcement, his fingers finding the edges and lifting them in the single clean motion of a man resuming something he had set aside. He arranged them without looking at them first, straightening the hand, and then he looked across the table at me with the expression he wore when he had finished saying what he had to say and had no interest in pressing further.
“We still playing?” he said.
The breath that came out of me was not one thing. It was laugh and grief and something that lived in the space between the two, a long unsteady exhale that I let out through my nose and then through my mouth, and I dragged the back of my wrist across my eyes in a single quick stroke and reached for my cards.
“Yeah,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I’d intended, the edges of it still carrying what the last ten minutes had put there. I picked up the jack of hearts and looked at it. “You’re still going to lose, though.”
The corner of Wade’s mouth curved.
