CHAPTER 3
Wren
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Molasses-sweet calf feed dust hung over Junie Mabry's counter, turning the morning light brown at the edges and settling into every receipt, boot track, and seed packet in the feed store.
Wren stood inside the door with one hand on her bag strap and tried not to calculate the price of breathing.
The bell above the door gave one tired clank behind her.
The store smelled like feed, old wood, coffee, and a hundred practical errands.
Mineral sacks made gray walls near the back.
A rack of work gloves leaned beside the hardware aisle.
The bulletin board carried sale notices, church supper reminders, a flyer for Della and Ruston's wedding weekend, and three handwritten pleas to buy used equipment before rain came.
Junie looked up from the counter, pencil tucked behind one ear, reading glasses low on her nose. "There she is."
There were at least seven ways to hear that in Dusthallow. Wren chose welcome because she needed the day to start somewhere solid.
"Here I am," she said. "In need of fence staples, which is a glamorous sentence I did not use much in Austin."
Junie's mouth twitched. "Austin missed its chance, then."
"Sudie's south line?" she asked.
"That obvious?"
"Colt came in yesterday evening for staples and wire clips and looked like he'd rather chew gravel than say your name in front of the coffee counter."
The words landed with embarrassing accuracy.
Wren had spent the night hearing his voice from the fence line, low and controlled, asking whether three weeks was all Dusthallow got from her this time.
She had folded her blouse around it. She had woken in the dark and found the question waiting beside the bed like a bill.
"He was fixing my grandmother's fence," Wren said.
"Half of it. Then he had cattle to move and a little girl to pick up."
On the end of Junie's counter, near a chipped mug and the register, a clipboard waited under a binder clip. PRESCHOOL PICKUP SIGN-OUT, someone had written across the top in block letters. Beau Duvane's name sat halfway down, with a blank space waiting for Junie's tidy initials.
Beau at preschool. Junie ready for pickup if Colt got hung up. Colt's day divided into chores, cattle, and a child whose routine mattered more than any unfinished argument at Sudie's fence.
That steadied Wren in a way she had not expected. It also shamed her a little.
"I only need enough to finish the sag near the cottage," Wren said. "Maybe two boxes."
Junie slid off her stool and headed for the hardware aisle. "Two boxes if the cedar posts held. Three if they split."
"The posts are mostly fine."
"Mostly is where ranch money goes to die."
Wren followed past salt blocks, rope, and gloves.
Every price tag seemed to lean out and tap her forehead.
Fence staples. Wire clips. Gas before her car coughed itself into permanent silence.
Bread, eggs, coffee for Sudie's kitchen if she could stretch the numbers.
Eighty-two dollars and fourteen cents had seemed like a number when she crossed the county line. In Junie's aisle, it became weather.
She picked up one box of galvanized staples. It weighed more than it had any right to.
Junie pulled down another. "These hold better."
"Do they cost better?"
"No."
"Then I admire them from here."
Junie looked at her over the glasses. "Sudie know you're buying repair supplies?"
"Sudie knows the fence is down."
"That wasn't the question."
Wren turned the box until the price faced her.
She had come home with two suitcases, a failing car, and a bank account so thin she had started doing mental math as punishment.
None of that was Junie's business. The trouble was that Dusthallow had always treated privacy as something you earned only after everyone inspected the edges.
"I'll pay for what I buy," Wren said.
"I figured."
"You figured it in the tone people use before they offer me something free."
"I don't offer free staples to women wearing shoes that cost more than my first washer."
Wren glanced at the flats that had once been sharp and black and now had a strip missing near the toe. "These shoes are lying about their circumstances."
"Most pretty things do, sooner or later."
The bell clanked again.
Cressie Ames came in with a paper sack tucked against her hip and the bright look of someone who had spotted a loose thread and intended to pull. She took in Wren, the staple box, the city shoes, and Junie's unreadable face in one sweep.
"Well," Cressie said. "Dusthallow does draw folks back when the calendar gets sentimental."
Wren smiled because Odette Pryce had taught her daughters that a smile could be a knife if no one saw the blade. "Cressie. You look exactly the same."
"I've changed plenty. I just do it where people can see me. " Cressie set the sack on the counter. "You staying through the wedding, or is Della renting you by the hour?"
Junie made a soft sound. "Coffee's fresh, Cressie."
"I can talk and pour."
Of course she could. Dusthallow's true industry was multitasking with other people's business.
"I'm here through the wedding," Wren said. "Three weeks."
"Three whole weeks. Nearly long enough to remember which end of a fence staple points where."
"The painful end is generally universal."
Junie coughed into her shoulder, which was the closest she came to laughing when she did not want to encourage anyone.
Cressie poured coffee and leaned against the counter as if placed there by municipal authority. "I heard Colt was down at Sudie's yesterday."
"He was."
"That must have been something."
"Fence repair usually is."
"I meant for you."
The feed dust seemed thicker, sweet enough to sicken. Wren set the box on the shelf before her thumb could soften the cardboard corner. "It was generous of him to help Sudie."
"Colt Duvane always was generous where the Calloways were concerned."
There it was, delivered in the pleasant tone Dusthallow women used when handing over casseroles and indictments.
Wren had been back less than twenty-four hours, and the town had already gathered around the old story like a porch light.
The girl who left. The boy who stayed. The family wedding that made everyone else's curiosity look respectable.
Wren lifted the box again. "Do you need anything from this aisle, Cressie, or did you come in for a full inventory of my emotional supplies?"
Junie laughed then, one low note.
Cressie smiled wider. "I came in for molasses blocks and the pleasure of seeing whether Austin taught you manners."
"Some. I misplace them under stress."
"You always did have a smart mouth when you were nervous."
That one landed close to memory. Wren had once stood in this store at seventeen with prom flowers in a bucket by the door and Colt waiting outside in his truck.
Cressie had told her she would break hearts if she kept smiling at boys like she was already halfway gone.
Wren had rolled her eyes then, too young to know how accurately a person could be cursed by what everyone assumed.
The bell clanked a third time, and Paloma Reyes swept in carrying two empty flower buckets, a folder pinned under one arm, and the expression of a woman whose morning had grown teeth.
"Junie, tell me you have green floral wire, narrow ribbon, and a county commissioner hidden in the back who can move a delivery truck through a pasture without arguing about liability."
"Wire and ribbon, yes," Junie said. "Commissioner, no. I sent my last one back for being stringy."
Paloma's gaze snapped to Wren. "Oh, thank heaven. You."
Wren glanced behind herself, which was pointless because there was a wall of mineral tubs there. "That depends on the sentence that follows."
"You did event design in Austin."
"Among other humbling activities."
"Can you letter chalkboards?"
"By hand or print?"
"Both?"
"Yes."
"Can you make a seating chart look intentional when the bride's mother changes three tables, the groom's aunt refuses shade because of a grudge involving potato salad, and the chapel vestibule is half the width everyone remembers?"
Wren's mind did what it always did when panic walked in with a deadline. It made columns. Materials. Time. Cost. Style. Hidden risks.
"How many guests?"
"One hundred and twenty at the ceremony, more at the pasture after."
Cressie whistled. "Della's wedding is getting big enough to need traffic control."
"Della's wedding," Paloma said, calm with thorns under it, "is going to look gracious, intentional, and unbothered if I have to staple eucalyptus to every fence post in this county."
"Don't use my staples," Wren said.
Paloma looked at the box in Wren's hands. Her face softened by one degree. "You're fixing Sudie's fence?"
"Buying supplies."
"Colt didn't finish?"
Wren kept her face in order. "Colt has a ranch, a child, and presumably a limited tolerance for Calloway property."
Junie reached for a coil of green wire. "Beau's at preschool. I've got pickup if Colt gets hung up with the north pasture."
"Good," Paloma said. "Then I can ask this without borrowing trouble from a five-year-old's schedule. Wren, I need help."
There was no clean way to refuse. There was also no clean way to say yes without exposing the hunger in it.
"Show me the folder," Wren said.
Paloma had it open before Wren reached the counter.
Inside were ribbon samples, a rough chapel layout, a list of signs, and photographs of limestone catching morning light in honey and gray.
Wren touched the edge of one picture. She remembered the chapel cooler than it looked, with polished pew ends, old hymnals, beeswax, and dust in the bell rope stair.
A room where vows sounded witnessed by more than the people present.
"You need a welcome sign, markers from the chapel to the pasture, table numbers, a seating board, and bouquet ribbon tags," Wren said.
Paloma blinked. "Say that slower so I can pretend I had a list."