CHAPTER 17 #3
Charlie came flying out from the house in her husband's old slicker as they led the horses in, hollering before she got to them, and when she reached Beck she didn't ask about the herd, she grabbed a fistful of his sodden shirt and shook him.
“Cody told me what you did on that road. Beckett Calhoun, if you ever, ever.” Her voice cracked and went watery, and she pressed her forehead to his soaked chest for one second, just one, her wedding band cold against the back of his hand.
Then she pulled back and swatted him hard on the arm and the moment was hers again.
“You scared ten years off me. Get inside.
You're not allowed to come home and then go and die, that's not how it works, you don't get to do that to us.”
Us. He stood there in the rain with his sister's small angry hands gripping his arms, and the word went all the way through him. You don't get to do that to us. Like he was an us now. Like he was a thing this place would grieve.
He didn't have a joke for it. For once in his life he couldn't find the joke. He just put his arm around his little sister's shoulders and walked her toward the porch, and his throat was doing something he didn't have a name for, and he let it.
---
He found Laney out by the barn when the worst was tended and the horses were rubbed down and the rain had eased to a long soft grey hush.
She was crouched over the down heifer in the dry of the aisle, hands gentle on the swollen leg, that pen shoved through her braid leaking ink down the wet copper of it.
He stood in the big doorway and watched her work and didn't say anything, because watching her work had always been the truest thing he knew.
She felt him there. She didn't look up.
“She'll keep the leg,” Laney said. “Bad bruise, no break. She'll be sound by haying.” Then, still not looking up, in a different voice: “I saw what you did on the road.”
“Cattle turned, didn't they.”
“Don't.” She came up off her heels and faced him, composed the way she got over a hard case, but he knew her, he knew exactly what that composure was holding back.
The rain dripped off the eaves between them.
“I watched you cut a loaded truck off a highway. I watched the brake lights and I did the math same as you did, Beck, I am very good at the math, and for about two seconds I thought I was going to have to scrape you off that road.”
“But you didn't.”
“No.” A single hard breath through her nose.
“You stayed on the horse. You turned the cow.
You did the reckless thing and the right thing at the same time, which is the worst kind of thing you do, because it means I can't even be angry at you cleanly.” She looked at him, and for one second the fear from the ditch was right there in her face again, plain and unguarded, and this time it ran deeper than the fear of wanting him.
Underneath it lived the fear of losing him, the same animal wearing a different coat, and neither of them needed it said aloud. “You stayed,” she said. “On the road. Here. You stayed.”
“I'm getting the hang of it.” His voice came out rough.
The medal was a warm coin against his sternum.
He thought about the ditch, the kiss, the ten years, the truck.
He thought about how easy the old reflex was, the door at the end of the lane, and how for one whole storm he hadn't looked at it once. “Laney. About last night.”
“Not now.” But she said it gentle, and she didn't go still and cold the way she would have a month ago.
She said it like a thing put off, not a thing shut.
She reached out and touched his sleeve where the rain had plastered it to his arm, just touched it, one cool careful press of her fingers, the way she'd touch a stitch to see if it would hold.
“Later,” she said. “When we're not both standing in our own grief over a heifer. I mean it. Later.”
Later. From her, that word was a whole country he'd thought he'd lost the road to.
“Later,” he said.
She nodded once, and gathered her kit with Tom's brass knife glinting in it, and walked out into the soft grey rain toward her truck, and Beck stood in the barn doorway and watched her go and did not, this time, measure how far it was to gone.
Behind him the herd shifted and lowed, all of it, every head, safe behind Red Mesa wire.
The storm muttered off toward the next county and the iron-and-rain smell thinned out into the clean washed green of after, the smell of a thing survived.
Beck thumbed the scar through his eyebrow once, by old habit, waiting on the old itch that meant his body had already half left.
It wasn't there. His boots stayed put in the wet straw. He'd stayed, and his hands knew it, and his family had seen it, and so had she.
He stood there a while in the doorway, soaked through and shaking still and grinning like the fool he was, rain ticking off the eaves, the heifer's slow breath warm at his back, the cold medal warming against his sternum.
The terrible reckless beautiful thing he'd been running from since the ditch rose up in his chest and filled it.
He let himself hope. God help him. He let himself hope.