Page 92 of Rune’s Solace

“I’m going to plant lilacs.” His voice broke clean in half. “In the spring. A row of them, along the south fence where the light’s best, and I’ll baby them through the heat, and I’ll get them to grow where they’ve got no business growing, because I am the best grower in three counties and I have never once in my life grown a thing for the pure joy of it, and I’m going to start with yours. I’m going to grow you your field, Amy. Right here. Where you can see it out the window every morning and know there’s not one soul left in this world who can take it from you.”

And I put my face in the chest of the man who came through the door, in the dark of a cabin at the corner of a compound full of people who loved me, and I understood that the last thing between us was gone.

He knew all of me now: the worst and the most secret and the most mine. He’d been handed part of it and refused to use it, and I’d given him the rest with my own two hands. Every locked room in me stood open, and he’d walked through every one, and not a single one could frighten me now that a man I trusted had stood inside it beside me.

He had all of me. All of it, given on purpose, to the one person who ever earned the giving.

And he was going to grow me a field of the thing that kept me alive.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

TWO NIGHTS AFTER I brought Amy home, I was sitting at the end of the clubhouse bar with a beer I wasn’t drinking, being the thing I’m best at, which is furniture.

That’s a skill nobody credits. I’ve spent my life being the man people forget is in the room, big as I am, you’d think it’d be the opposite, but I go still and I fade into the wall, and folks say things in front of me they’d never say if they remembered I was there. It’s useful in the life. It’s less useful when what you end up witnessing is a family coming apart three feet away and no clean way to stand up and leave without making it worse.

I hadn’t slept right since I carried her out of that place. Every time I shut my eyes I was back in that doorway with a man’s hand around her throat and the cold coming up in me clean and total and the thing I keep in a garden doing what it does. I don’t remember deciding. You don’t remember a fall. I remember her hand at her throat, and then it was over, and Cal on the floor, and my own hands not shaking.

That’s the part that sits on me. Not that I did it. I’d do it again this morning, twice, and sleep fine. It’s that it cost me nothing in the moment. That she’d had to watch me be it. And that I’d had to stand in that bloody yard after and wait to find out whether she’d ever let me put those hands on her again.

The club was still raw. Two days out from nearly losing Amy and everybody was moving soft and staying close, the way a club does after it gets a scare, and Brenda was working the room the way she does after a scare, which is feeding everyone and touching everyone and fussing herself half to death because if her hands are full of other people’s needs she doesn’t have to sit still with her own. She’d been at it two days. She was running on fumes and grief and relief all stirred together, and anybody with eyes could see she was one kind word from going to pieces.

And Horse was at the other end of the bar watching her do it with his heart in his face, the way he always does, like a man looking at a fire through a window he’s decided he’s not allowed to open.

Then Brenda stopped. Set down her rag. And she went to him.

I saw it happen and I knew what it was before she got there, because it was the same walk I’d watched Amy make across my cabin, the same terrible brave thing: a person reaching, out loud, in the open. Brenda came around that bar and she put her hand on Horse’s forearm and she said, low, not meant for the room, “Horse. I ’bout lost that girl. I can’t do the scared part by myself tonight. Come sit with me a while. That’s all I’m askin’.”

And Horse, big, good, loyal Horse, who’d put his own body between that woman and a threat in a parking garage not a month back, went stiff as a fence post, the way he does anytime she gets too close to the truth of it. He didn’t take her hand. He looked at it on his arm like it was a thing he didn’t know what to do with. And then he said something back to her, low, just for the two of them, too quiet for the room to catch. But I was close enough at the end of that bar, and still enough, that I caught it.

“Don’t go makin’ more of it than it is, Brenda. We’re all shook. You’ll feel better in the mornin’.”

More of it than it is.

I don’t think he even heard himself. That’s the thing about Horse: he doesn’t say the cruel thing on purpose, he panics and reaches for the nearest wall and shoves it up between them, and the wall he grabbed this time was telling a woman who’d just reached for him with her scared heart that she was making too much of it.

I have watched men get shot and flinch less than Brenda flinched. She took her hand back off his arm slow and pressed it flat to her own chest, and I watched twenty years go across her face, and she said, “Course. You’re right. We’re all shook,” in a voice with nothing left in it, and she turned and walked fast toward the back, and she was crying before she cleared the door.

Amy was up off the couch and after her before the door swung shut. She shot one look at me on her way past, stay, watch him, I’ve got her, and was gone.

Which left Horse at the bar. And Fiona, a few feet down it with a stack of plates in her hands, close enough to have caught every word of it, her face gone white and still.

And me, in the corner, furniture.

* * *

Fiona set the plates down very carefully. That’s how I knew it was coming. The careful ones are the ones you watch: the slammers blow off their steam, but a woman who sets a stack of plates down soft as a whisper before she turns around is a woman who’s about to take the roof off.

“You absolute coward,” she said.

Horse didn’t turn around. “Baby girl — ”

“Don’t.” Her voice had gone hard. “Since I was a girl, Dad. Fifteen years I’ve watched you love that woman and never once say it. She raised me. When Mama died and you fell down inside yourself and couldn’t climb back out, it was Brenda who fed me and braided my hair and sat up with me through the nightmares. All those years. It was Brenda at every school thing you were too deep in your grief to come to, it was Brenda, and you have never once, not one single time, let that woman know she was anything to you but help around the place.”

“That ain’t — ” Horse’s voice was rough. “You don’t know what’s between grown people.”

“I know she just reached for you.” Fiona took a step toward him. “Two nights after this club almost put Amy in the ground. She was scared and she was tired and she reached for you, out loud, and you told her she was makin’ more of it than it is.” Her voice cracked for the first time. “You told her she was makin’ too much of it. Of being scared she almost lost Amy. You couldn’t even give her that.”

Horse turned around then. And his face had come apart, an old man’s face full of an old man’s life of not-doing-the-thing, and he said, “What do you want from me, baby girl,” in a voice that had given up before the sentence started.