Page 3 of Thunder

Diesel’s barking at the noise, and I clap along with my cane hooked over my wrist because a man needs both hands to clap and I need one for the fence rail.

I smile because you smile at a wedding.

Then people start moving toward the barn where the food is, and the crowd swallows the space between me and her, and that's my window.

I take it.

I catch Rogue on the way past—get a hand on his shoulder, lean in over the noise. "Happy for you, brother. Truly."

"You're not stayin'?" He says it flat.

Rogue doesn't miss things. It's what makes him good and what makes him a problem.

"Hip's had enough. Gonna get off it before it quits on me in front of God and the chapters."

He looks at me a half second longer than the lie deserves.

Then he nods, because it's his wedding day and he's got a wife to feed, and he's not going to spend the moment digging at me. "Go easy on it."

"Yeah."

I go.

Sixty yards of gravel back to the trucks, and every one of them hurts.

I'm glad of the hurt because it gives me something to think about that isn't the green dress.

I don't look back to see if she watched me leave.

I already know she didn't.

She's better at this than I am.

She'll walk into that barn and eat cake and laugh with her sisters who aren't speaking to her and hold the whole thing together with that Lyle spine, and nobody will know she's coming apart.

She learned how to do that somewhere along the way and it's the saddest skill a person can have.

I get to the truck. Lean against the door and breathe through the worst of the hip before I trust myself to climb in.

Out past the pasture the fiddle's started up again, faster now, and I can hear the party finding its feet—my whole family, the only one I've ever had, celebrating a good thing under that old tree.

And me out here in the gravel, leaving it, because I can't sit in a room with the woman I want and keep lying about it.

I told her I wasn't done.

I told her she wasn't done with me either, and I meant it, and I've spent every day since doing exactly nothing about it but heal and hurt and going out on runs I volunteered for so I wouldn't have to watch her across a supper table.

I get in the truck. Sit there a second with my hand on the key and my bad leg stretched out stiff into the well.

There's a rattlesnake healing on the side of my neck that she hasn't seen yet.

Got it the week after she walked out my door—sat in a chair in Llano and let a man put her on my skin where I'd feel it every time I turned my head, because I'm a fool for her and I decided I'd rather wear the proof than pretend.

She hasn't laid eyes on it.

She will.

This ranch is too small and I'm too far gone for her not to, and when she does, she's going to know exactly what it means.