CHAPTER 16
Laney
◆
The town had strung the side street with lantern light, and Laney stood at the rim of it the way she stood outside a stall with a fractious animal inside — assessing exits, reading the room before she committed her hands.
Cedar Gulch did this every summer. Closed the block behind The Spur, hauled a flatbed in for a bandstand, salted the asphalt with cedar shavings so the boots wouldn't scuff, and let a four-piece band saw out two-steps until midnight.
The whole county came. She could diagnose the crowd by smell alone: fry grease and spilled beer, somebody's funnel cake, horse on the men who'd come straight from work, and under all of it the green wet breath of the irrigation ditch that ran along the back lots, where the grass kept its dampness and the fireflies came up at full dark in a low drifting haze, green-gold over the black water.
She'd watched them as a girl. She watched them now without meaning to, the way you keep a hand on a pulse.
Elevated, she thought, and the diagnosis was her own. That's the music. That's the heat. She made herself finish the chart honestly anyway: and none of it is him.
It was a lie, and she knew the shape of it, and she let herself tell it anyway.
Diane had a hand on her arm. Her mother smelled of the diner she'd just locked, coffee and griddle and the lemon she used on the counters, and she was looking out across the dancers with that particular brightness she got when she'd decided something on Laney's behalf.
“You've got hay in your hair,” Diane said, and reached up and took it out, and her thumb stayed a second too long against Laney's jaw. “There. Now you look like a woman at a dance instead of a vet who wandered in by accident.”
“I came for the funnel cake.”
“You came because I told you that if you spent one more Saturday with that broodmare I'd have you committed.” Diane's eyes were doing their slow read of the crowd, and Laney followed the line of them and found, of course, the place where they landed.
Beck stood near the bandstand with Wyatt and Charlie, a beer sweating in his hand, his hat pushed back, laughing at something Wyatt had said.
The lantern light caught the first grey at his temples and the white split through his eyebrow, and even from here she could see he was holding the bottle without drinking it, the way he did.
He doesn't touch the stuff at these things anymore.
He used to. Now the bottle's just a prop.
She filed the fact and hated that she'd been keeping a file at all.
“Two coffees every morning,” Diane said, apropos of nothing, watching the dancers. “At my counter. Every morning since he came home. One of them is never for him.”
“Mama.”
“I'm only reporting the news.” She patted Laney's arm and drifted off toward the pie table, leaving the sentence sitting there in the warm dark like a coal.
---
Grant found her by the lemonade. He had a way of arriving that never startled anyone, an easy open-handed approach, and he handed her a cup before she'd asked for one, and that was Grant entire — the thing you needed, before the wanting got complicated.
“You look like you're triaging the dance,” he said.
“Old habit.”
“The band's not in distress. I checked.” He smiled, and it was a good smile, even and unhurried, and she felt the comfort of it settle over her like a clean dry blanket.
Whatever it carried, it carried no charge, ran no fever.
She had spent enough nights cataloguing the difference that she could have written it up: Subject presents calm.
Pulse unaffected. No symptoms. It would be so easy, a life with a man who registered as no symptoms.
She'd thought about it the way she thought about a sound retirement plan — sensible, prudent, the kind of choice Tom would have nodded at.
You don't borrow trouble, Laney-girl, he used to say, elbow-deep in a calving.
You doctor the trouble in front of you and you go home to the porch that doesn't burn. “Dance with me, Laney.”
There was no push in it. Grant never pushed. He held his hand out the way you'd offer a halter to a horse that had every right to refuse, palm up, no tension in the arm, and he waited.
And she almost did it. That was the thing she'd remember after — how close her hand came to his, how reasonable it would have been, how her whole sensible life leaned toward that open palm and the version of things where she went home unburned.
The band slid into something slow. The fireflies came up off the ditch behind the lots, green-gold, rising.
She glanced past Grant's shoulder. She didn't decide to; her eyes did it on their own.
Beck was watching them.
He'd gone still in a way the crowd never got to see, the loose joke-ready stillness peeled off him to leave something held underneath, his jaw set, his thumb moving to the scar through his eyebrow and then stopping itself halfway, catching the lie before he told it to himself.
He looked away the instant she caught him, turned to say something to Wyatt that she'd have bet money he didn't mean, and his shoulders came up around it.
Jealous, she read, clean as a temperature. He's jealous and he's ashamed of it and he won't say a word, because he thinks he's got no right.
The reading undid something in her she'd spent a decade splinting.
“Grant,” she said, and the kindness in her own voice surprised her. “You're the best man I know.”
His hand lowered. He didn't pretend not to understand. He looked at her a long moment, and then out at the bandstand, and his mouth tipped into something rueful and clean. “He's the fire,” Grant said. “I always knew that. I just kept hoping you'd remember fire's the thing that burned you once.”
“I remember it every day.”
“Yeah.” He set his cup down. “That's what scares me for you.” He touched the brim of his hat to her, no bitterness in it, the road not taken stepping off the road with grace. “Save me one someday when it's nothing but a friendly dance. I'll be around.”
He walked away into the crowd, and that was Grant — even his leaving was easy, the way nothing about Beck had ever been.
She crossed the street.
---
She didn't let herself think about it or she wouldn't have done it.
She walked through the dancers, past the cedar shavings and the beer cups, straight up to where he stood with the bottle he wasn't drinking, and Charlie's eyebrows shot up and Wyatt grinned and found something fascinating to look at elsewhere, and Beck went very careful, the way he went careful around Diesel.
“Calhoun,” she said. “You going to stand there guarding that beer all night, or are you going to dance with me before I change my mind?”
Something moved across his face, fast, a thing he caught and held down. He set the bottle on the lip of the flatbed without looking away from her. “Thought you didn't dance.”
“I don't. I'm making an exception. Don't make me regret the diagnosis.”
His hand closed around hers, and that was the first of it — just his hand, rope-rough, warm, the calluses banding his palm she could have identified blind, and her pulse did a thing she chose not to narrate.
He drew her out onto the cleared asphalt under the lanterns, and his other hand found the small of her back, light, a question and not an answer, leaving her all the room in the world to step out of it.
She stayed where she was.
They'd danced like this when they were seventeen, in a hayloft to a radio, and her body knew the shape of it before her mind agreed to.
He led the way he worked cattle now, rusty and certain at once, and she let him, and the band played something old and slow, and the green-gold haze drifted up off the ditch behind the lots and she stopped counting symptoms.
She could feel his heartbeat where her hand rested against his chest, and out of long habit she read it — fast, faster than the dance accounted for, and not steadying.
So she wasn't the only one running a fever.
The knowledge ought to have armed her. Instead it loosened something low in her, some last buckled strap, and she let her cheek come to rest a half-inch from his collarbone where she could smell him under the dust and the beer he hadn't drunk: warm skin and saddle leather and the faint sharp green of the creek grass he must have walked through.
Familiar as her own hands. She'd have known him in the dark with her eyes sewn shut.
“You ran Grant off,” he said low, near her ear.
“He withdrew. There's a difference. He's a gentleman.”
“He is.” A pause; the muscle in his jaw worked. “I'm not feeling real gentlemanly about it.”
“I noticed.” She tipped her head back to look at him. “You've got a tell, you know. You think you're the only one in this county who can read a body.”
His mouth curved, but his eyes had gone serious, that storm-grey gone deep. “Laney.” Just her name, said low. He'd always done that — said her name like it was the whole sentence.
The song was ending. She could feel the crowd, the lanterns, her mother somewhere being smug, the whole town watching the Calhoun who left dance with the Cross girl he'd left. She didn't want it watched.
“Walk me down to the ditch,” she said. “I can't hear myself think in here.”
---
The noise of the dance fell away behind them by degrees, the band thinning to a far-off thread, the lanterns to a glow over the rooftops.
Out past the back lots the dark was soft and full of water-sound, the ditch running low and patient through the grass, and the fireflies were everywhere now — green-gold, lifting off the wet grass and hanging over the black water in a slow uncountable drift, the way they'd done every summer of her life.
She'd forgotten how it quieted a person. Cold mud smell, wet willow, the cooling asphalt giving up the day's heat at her back.
Beck stopped where the grass dropped toward the ditch and looked at the fireflies like a man who'd been somewhere a long time without them.