CHAPTER 9
LIFE REALIZATION #6: CHICKENS ARE SURPRISINGLY RESILIENT
Two weeks later, officially in a long-distance relationship with Chad and inching my business forward like a turtle with no legs, I made good on my promise to Grant by going on that freaking group bike ride.
To avoid people watching me, I chose the back of the pack, where I could relax enough to enjoy the gently sloping landscapes of the Tennessee countryside. The green, everything was green. The hills. The trees. The stems on the wildflowers. All contrasting beautifully against the bright-blue sky. The air was filled with a symphony for the nostrils: cut grass, honeysuckle, and unpolluted air.
A short, stocky woman named Dani rode beside me, giving me the details of the group.
Frank was an accountant and full of himself but surprisingly knowledgeable. Sarah, his wife, was a quiet triathlete who crocheted. William was an electrical engineer, kind, but usually boring. Grant was a nonconformist architect whom Dani had a difficult time summing up in one sentence. It was funny getting these one-liners from a stranger, especially about the two I’d already met. There were others, but her rundown was interrupted by an incident ahead.
Everyone stopped, either straddling or standing beside their bikes on the road, next to a white wooden fence, a farmhouse in the distance. Someone was on the ground, in the middle of the empty street, yelling. Someone else was helping him to his feet.
“I gotta see what’s going on,” Dani said and then rode away from me.
Before I could figure out what had happened, the crew was once again riding in the direction of Marcy Jo’s, our midride lunch destination. Only one person stayed behind, hunched over something I couldn’t see in the patch of grass beside the road.
Grant.
I don’t know why I stopped, but I did.
“What is it, little gal?” I heard him say as I unlatched my kickstand and got closer. He bent forward; then a bird screeched, leaped up, and smacked him in the face. Grant’s arms shot out and grabbed the floundering mass of feathers.
“Is that a chicken?” I asked, wide eyed.
“Look in that pack right there, will you?” Grant nodded toward the folded leather pack in the dry dirt beside him.
I bent to pick it up.
“I’ll need an antiseptic pad, the small packet of styptic powder, and gauze.”
I dropped the pack, my vision blurring.
“Gauze? Why do you need gauze?” I backed away, holding one hand over my mouth.
“Superficial scratch on her leg. Amazing, since a man-child and his bike ran into her.” I didn’t move. “I’ll get the supplies then.” He shifted to the pack, keeping his eye on me.
“I don’t ... I don’t do blood.” My voice was far away, as if it had left my body. It wasn’t blood exactly; it was anything medical. The gauze, the injury, the implication of a hospital, all of it triggered an internal storm. Okay, panic. I panicked at all that stuff.
“Why don’t you sit down?”
I didn’t want to need to, but I needed to. I sat and viciously plucked at the clover on either side of me.
“I have to ask,” he said to my back. “What did you expect to see here after witnessing that collision?”
“Collision?” My voice cracked on the word.
Damn it. Damn it. Damn it.
Whyhadn’t I ridden on with everyone else instead of staying with this insane man, tending to a random chicken on the side of the road.
“You didn’t see William run right into this bird?”
“What? No! I would’ve never come over here if ...” I trailed off, my stomach splashing acid onto the words. “I was in the back. I thought you said you were an architect. Shouldn’t a vet be doing this?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I watched his hands move as he spoke. “I came across a dog once, riding on the back roads. She’d had ... a little accident.” He paused. “Now, I’m always prepared.”
That would never be me. I couldn’t do things like that, which was why I’d never had a pet or a plant and never wanted kids.
Grant did things like that.
He looked down and smiled at the bird. “Good as new.”
“You’re done?”
“Yep. And everything’s covered.” He stepped over to me, the animal tucked firmly under his arm. “Just an ornery chicken.”
I stood, then stepped closer to Grant and the bird, squinting so I wouldn’t accidentally see the injury. I calmed at the sight of sweet little beady eyes and ran a shaking hand over soft feathers.
Grant looked down the empty road. “Heartless jerks. At least you stayed. Thanks for your ... help.”
“Does it count if I was wishing the whole time that I’d left with them?”
He laughed. His laugh was nice. “It counts.”
He gestured toward the farmhouse and told me he was going to take the bird home.
He blinked. I blinked. The chicken blinked.
“I’ll come with you.” Why was I drawn to a situation that also repulsed me? The sun reflected off a golden fleck in his eye. “I don’t know how to get to our next stop anyway.” That was why I was following him. Right?
“Marcy Jo’s? You keep going straight. Run right into it.”
As we moved forward, a teenage boy wearing a white T-shirt and jeans materialized beside us. He took the chicken and, after listening to what had happened, thanked Grant, all while rubbing his face against the bird’s feathers and whispering, “You know better, wild Gloria.” The boy tipped his head. “We’ll get her seen to.” He bellowed another “thank you” as he backed away and then ran up the hill.
Disappointment curled in my stomach. I ignored it, passing it off as a side effect from helping the chicken and not from my realization that we weren’t going to be walking up to the farmhouse alone together.
Grant put his hand on the fence next to us. “William’s a cheat. We had an unofficial bet going on, first to Marcy Jo’s.”
“Racing?” I needed to be back on my bicycle. There was too much about this man, this ride, that chicken.
“Yeah, William was behind me before—”
He cut himself off as I ran over to my bicycle, hopped on, and took off, a little plume of dust spitting out from the back of my tires as I bumped onto the asphalt.
“I thought you said you didn’t know how to get there!” he shouted.
I called out over my shoulder, “You keep going straight. Can’t miss it.”
The split rail fence at Marcy Jo’s Mealhouse supported twelve bicycles. I was the thirteenth. The last. The loser because Grant had caught up to and passed me.
A smiling woman in a lightweight blue sweater and jeans greeted me when I walked through the very red door, said her name was Marcy, and gestured animatedly toward two mismatched tables that were so scratched up they were charming and had been pushed together to accommodate the large cycling party.
Grant was at the other end of the table, and as soon as our eyes met, my stomach twitched for some ridiculous reason, and I stuck out my tongue at him like a child.
He grinned.
I ordered—biscuits and gravy, even though I wasn’t hungry—then sat beside Dani, who immediately started talking like I’d been there the whole time. I inhaled, turned everyone into agreeable numbers, and nodded like I was fascinated by the fact that Dani’s daughter had perfect pitch.
Despite my effort to ignore the men at the other end of the table, my ears, and eyes, had other ideas, damn them.
“I don’t know anyone in their forties that can put food away like you can and still look like a beanpole,” Grant said.
William pushed a healthy bite into his mouth. “Not forty yet.”
Grant dusted his mouth off in an effort to hint at the jam on William’s face. “Your table manners are obscene.”
“Someone didn’t throw a chicken at you.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t kill her.”
“He looked fine!” William said around two-thirds of a biscuit. “How did it feel to be left in the dust, though, all by yourself?”
“She. The chicken was a lady, Gloria. And I wasn’t by myself.” Grant looked up, directly into my eyes. Mine ricocheted away, fastened onto a small sign that read HOMEMADE BUTTERMILK PANCAKES in the middle of the table as my cheeks burned. Look at the way they dust that powdered sugar!
I forced myself to focus on Dani, but all through the meal—I ate two bites—I felt Grant’s eyes on me. Those eyes prevented me from demolishing this gravy-smothered amazingness. Too nervous.
Relief flooded me when someone suggested we head back outside, but then Grant stepped up beside me. My pulse giggled like a schoolgirl. Ignorant pulse.
“You’ve enjoyed the ride?”
“Yeah, thanks for the invite.” But it wasn’t an invite ... begging? It was begging.
“Think you’ll come again?”
No.
I shrugged. “Sure.”
“Good.”
I grabbed my helmet and put it on. Why was he standing here?
“Has Deanna talked to you about Wildhorse yet?”
I pinched the skin of my neck in my helmet strap. Ouch! “Who’s Wild Horse?”
“Wildhorse Saloon. Downtown.”
I shook my head, and Grant smiled.
“You’ve been downtown, right? Broadway?”
“I have an office downtown.”
William came up beside us, threw his arm around Grant’s shoulders. “But have you been down Broadway? Honky Tonk Highway? Line dancing? Country music?”
I shook my head.
“If you’re going to live in Nashville,” William continued, “you’ve got to go down Broadway at least once.”
“But I don’t dance, and I don’t like country music.”
William grabbed his chest as if I’d insulted him personally.
“I don’t like country music either,” Grant admitted, still smiling. “But a swing group rents out the first floor of Wildhorse once a year. We’re going in a couple of weeks. You should come. You can get a taste of downtown Nashville without having to listen to that much country.”
“You have to come,” William insisted.
Grant looked at me, waited for my answer, that smile still just under that mustache.
“But . . .”
I needed to ride because I had the uncomfortable feeling country music was in my future.