Page 13 of Kid Gloves

I've changed clothes three times for a casserole, and I want to talk about who I've become.

"It's dinner," I tell Tank, who's watching me from the rug with his chin on his paws while I hold up the third shirt option like it owes me answers. "It's Sunday dinner with the neighbors. Farm people. I am farm people. Why am I—" I catch my reflection mid-gesture, hair half-done, one earring, wild-eyed. "Okay. Yeah. Don't answer that."

Rosie said don't wear anything you can't eat in, which sounds like a joke until you've seen the woman operate a casserole dish. I land on the green shirt, jeans, and the boots without the roof-tar on them, and Tank escorts me across the yard like a bailiff, and Wade is waiting on his porch, having somehow interpreted his mother's dress code as the same gray henley in a fourth color.

"You look nice," he says. Two words more than expected. My whole nervous system does something embarrassing with them.

"I look like I lost a fight with a closet."

"Noted." He almost smiles. "That's your word, I'm told."

The farmhouse is a quarter mile up the ranch road, white with a porch on three sides, and you can hear it before you can see it — screen door, dog tags, a five-year-old shouting numbers that aren't in order. Wade slows half a step as we come up the walk, and I watch this enormous fence post of a man take an actual breath, like he's the one who needs steadying.

"They're a lot," he says.

"I've been briefed."

"No," he says, with feeling. "You haven't."

Assigned seating. I want that on the record: there are place cards, in cursive, and mine has been positioned directly across from Wade with the precision of an artillery strike. Rosie catches me noticing and smiles like sunrise, utterly without shame.

The table: Hank Mercer at the head, silver-haired, a face like Wade's with forty more years of weather and laugh lines Wade hasn't earned yet. Rosie at the foot, running the whole operation with her eyebrows. Grady and Winnie, who has brought a folder of drawings. Cash, who nods at me once — I'd been warned that's a paragraph. Jake, already grinning at me like we're co-conspirators in something I haven't agreed to. Dean and Callie, engagement-glow visible from space. And a chair that gets filled ten minutes late by a big warm-faced man in a golf shirt who kisses Rosie's cheek, claps Wade's shoulder, and shakes my hand in both of his.

"Ray Bowden. I do the paper around here so these boys can play with dogs." His grip is friendly, his eyes crinkle all the way. "You're the fire girl. Terrible thing. Terrible. Don't you worry about that claim, honey — I've got the adjuster on a leash shorter than anything in those kennels."

"I've been on hold with them for four days."

"That's 'cause you're calling the front door. I go in through the kitchen." He winks and settles in like a man who's had this chair for decades, which, I will learn, he has. "Ellie Boone's grandbaby at this table. Lord. Small world gets smaller."

Dinner is a contact sport. Platters travel counterclockwise at speed. You take or you starve. Hank tells a story about Wade at nine, ordering his brothers through a car-wash fundraiser with a clipboard—"made Dean re-wash a Buick, made Jake cry," and Jake objects on factual grounds ("I was moved, there's a difference"), and Winnie presents me with a drawing of nine puppies, each labeled, each name wrong in a way I'd die before correcting. Biscuit is rendered as "BISKIT," ears crooked. The child has an eye.

"Miss Delaney." Winnie fixes me with the family stare, terrifying on a kindergartner. "Is it true your goat eats federal crimes?"

"Commits," Grady murmurs.

"Commits federal crimes."

"Allegedly," I say. "Brisket retains counsel."

"What's counsel?"

"A lawyer, baby," Rosie says, passing rolls.

Winnie considers this. "The goat has a lawyer?"

"The goat is a lawyer," Jake says solemnly, and Winnie nods, satisfied, and adds something to her folder.

Somewhere in the second platter rotation, Dean leans over and lowers his voice to a conspirator's register. "Quick orientation, since nobody gave you the field guide. You'll need this."

"For dinner?"

"For him." He tips his fork at Wade, who's deep in some cattle-adjacent dispute with Hank. "The Wade-to-English dictionary. 'Noted' means that mattered to me and I'm not equipped to say so. 'It's a compliance decision' means I wanted to and found a rule that let me. 'The org chart needed the role', Callie told me about that one, means I built you a job so you'd stay."

My fork stops. "That's not⁠—"

"'I'll look into it' means it's already done. 'That's inefficient' means it scared me. And if he ever tells you something's 'your call'—" Dean whistles low. "That's the big one. That man hasn't given anyone a call to make since 2016. I flew fighter jets, and the scariest thing I ever did was borrow his truck without logging the mileage."

"Why are you telling me this?"