Page 62 of Thunder

She points her spoon at me.

"But if she's your girlfriend, she should come to my birthday, and also you can't be weird about it."

"I'm never weird."

"Daddy. You're a little weird."

She goes back to her cereal, case closed, the whole earth-shaking matter settled to her satisfaction. "You don't have to tell me if it's a secret. I'm really good at secrets. I never told anybody about the window."

"What window?"

"Exactly," she says, and I decide not to pull that thread before nine in the morning.

Mama Lou comes for her at noon, because Saturday's their day and has been Raine's whole life.

The two of them baking, running errands, or watching their shows, and my mother gives me a look on the porch that says she's done her own investigating and reached her own conclusions and is choosing, for now, to keep them to herself.

"You look good, son," is all she says, Raine's overnight bag over her shoulder. "Rested. Haven't seen that on you in a long while."

"Sleepin' better."

"Mm." She pats my cheek like I'm still ten. "Sleep. Sure. That's what we're callin' it."

And she's gone down the steps before I can say anything, cackling to herself, Raine already in the car hollering about what kind of pie they're making.

The cabin goes quiet behind them.

And I stand on my porch on a golden Saturday afternoon with the whole place to myself and a woman two cabins over that I get to go find, and I think a man could get used to this.

A man could get downright careless about how good this is.

I already have, if I'm honest. We both have.

Her hair ties are in my bathroom, her creamer's in my fridge, and my kid's running a detective agency, and not one of us has been half as careful lately as we were in the spring.

Can't bring myself to care today.

Today's too good.

* * *

I find her in the main barn, where I figured, because Presley at loose ends on a Saturday means Presley working.

She's got the big sliding door open to the afternoon light and a folding table set up in the alley with her laptop and a mess of papers spread out.

EPD sheets, breeding charts, and a herd book gone soft at the corners.

She's chewing the end of a pen with her boots up on a hay bale and her brow furrowed at a spreadsheet.

She's so beautiful concentrating that I stand in the door a second just to look at her before she knows I'm there.

"I can feel you staring," she says without looking up.

"Can't help it. You're a sight." I roll the side-by-side slowly, the bed of it loaded with what I've hauled out. "Figured you skipped lunch again. You always skip lunch when you're deep in numbers."

That gets her to look up, and her whole face changes when she sees what I've brought.

Because I didn't bring her a sandwich.