Page 46 of Thunder

"But not all of it."

I don't answer that.

Which is its own answer, and we both know it.

He nods slowly, like something got confirmed that he already knew, and he doesn't push.

He doesn't get up in my face about it the way an angrier man might over his baby sister and a man my age with my history.

"She could do a lot worse," is all he says, finally, "than a man who'll sit here and tell me the truth when he could've lied. Reckon she's already surrounded by enough liars."

He tosses back the last of the whiskey and sets the glass down softly. "You hurt her, that's different. That's a conversation you and me have with our hands. But you're not, are you? You're one of the few things holdin' her up right now."

"Tryin' to be."

"Then we're good." He stands, claps me on the shoulder once, hard, a brother's hand. "Take care of her. Somebody in this family better."

He's gone before I can say anything back, out into the afternoon toward his bike, and I sit there alone in the empty clubhouse with two empty glasses and a whole world of trouble.

I finish my drink slowly.

An investigator pulling on a thread that ends at a grave I dug.

A shadow outfit photographing my daughter at the swimming hole.

A grieving man who just gave me his blessing to love a woman I helped orphan of her peace, and doesn't know it, and would take that blessing back so fast if he ever found out what my hands have done.

And under all of it, the same cold thing that's been sitting in my gut since church.

For years, I was the sword.

Point me at the threat and I go, and I was good at it, and it never scared me much because I never had enough to lose to be scared.

Now I've got everything to lose, and the threats are coming from three directions at once, and my body can't run down a single one of them.

A man learns what he's made of when he's got something to protect and no way to protect it.

I'm about to find out what I'm made of.

And God help me, so is she.

CHAPTER NINE

Presley

Number 68 gets her clean bill of health on Tuesday morning, and by that afternoon I've helped bring a baby into the world, and somewhere in between the two my sister starts to come back to me.

It doesn't happen the way you'd imagine it.

It happens at the pens, of all places, the same rail where Grace and I have done our circling for weeks, where the heifer that nearly died became the one neutral thing we could both stand near.

She's meeting me to sign off on turning 68 back out with the herd—a vet thing, an official thing, a reason to be in the same square of dirt without either of us having to call it what it is.

She's huge now.

Braxton's due any day, and she's carrying low and miserable in the August heat, one hand at the small of her back the whole time she looks the heifer over, and I keep asking if she wants to sit.

She keeps waving me off because Grace Lyle does not sit down on a job.