Page 1 of Thunder

PROLOGUE

Thunder

A cane is a coward's third leg, and I hate the sight of mine leaning against the fence post while I stand here pretending I don't need it.

A little over three weeks out from the surgery, and I can hold myself up through a wedding if I lock the hip and don't think too hard about the twenty yards of gravel between me and my truck.

The doctors said walk.

They didn't say it wouldn't hurt like hell.

Every step out to this pasture rang up the side of my leg like a struck bell, and now I'm standing in the front row of Rogue's wedding, sweating through my good shirt and gripping a fence rail like an old man.

Meanwhile, the woman I'd give both legs to stand beside is forty feet away, where I'm not allowed to look at her.

So I look at the oak instead.

Phantom's daddy planted it when he was a boy, and it's stood over every important thing this family's ever done since.

Hay bales set in a half-circle underneath it, Marlena's quilts thrown over them so nobody's sitting on bare straw in their Sunday clothes.

Mason jars of black-eyed Susans and those little Mexican hat flowers on every bale, the ones Bex and Hadley pulled off the back acreage yesterday while I sat on a bucket and wasn't allowed to help carry anything.

A white runner down the middle of the grass from the pasture gate to the trunk.

It's a good day for it.

Late light comes gold across the pasture, the heat is backing off, the cicadas are winding down.

Marlena's in a chair at the front because she can't stand for long yet, her hand at her ribs where the bullet went in.

Phantom stands under the oak in a black shirt with his hands folded, looking out at all of us like a man counting his herd and finding it mostly whole.

We came close to burying more than we did five weeks ago, and every soul under this tree knows it.

It hums under a wedding like this one—the gladness has a blade in it.

We're not just happy. We're relieved all the way down to the ground.

Banshee's got his sling off, Bex on his arm.

Blaze holds his hat against his chest.

Spur and Dakota, Shadow with his hand spread wide on Grace's belly where the next Lyle boy's already making himself known.

Holt and Cash rode in from their chapters.

A little woman with Garrett's eyes sits front row in navy—the dead husband's mother, come to give her blessing to the man marrying the widow, and if that's not the bravest thing I've seen all year, I don't know what is.

The fiddle starts up on the porch of the main house.

Diesel comes first down the runner, that tough old shepherd with a leather pouch swinging off his collar and the rings tucked inside it.

Nash walks beside him with one hand flat on the dog's back.

The both of them took worse than I did that night, and here they come down the aisle like it never happened, boy and dog, and the sound that moves through the hay bales is half a laugh and half something wetter.

My own throat goes tight and I let it, because everybody's is.