3. Perry
Perry
Iwake in a clinic bed with a knee the size of a cantaloupe and no memory of falling asleep.
The room’s dark. Down the hall a coffee maker gurgles and a radio plays something with too much fiddle.
My ribs feel like branches breaking in a storm every time I breathe.
Don’t breathe, dummy.
Great advice.
They’ve strapped the knee into a brace that runs hip to shin, and the whole leg throbs to a beat I can’t shut off.
Ruth comes in before the sun does. She’s the PA who set my collarbone two seasons back and my thumb the season before that. Wide, unhurried, glasses on a chain, zero interest in my charm.
“You’re awake,” she says. “Pity. I liked you quiet.”
“Ruth. Marry me.”
“I’ve buried two husbands and I’m choosy about the third.” She flicks the overhead on and I flinch. “How’s the pain.”
She checks the brace, the tape, presses here and there, and watches me to see if I’m falling into pieces.
I am! On the inside.
But a big rodeo star can’t break a sweat just because he cracked some ribs.
“Ribs’ll knit on their own if you let them,” she says.
“Six weeks, no dumb ideas. The knee’s the trouble.
MCL’s torn clean through, and you did something to the meniscus I don’t love.
You need a surgeon, then three or four months of doing nothing, which for you is about the same as a prison sentence. ”
“Three or four months?” My voice goes up high.
“If you’re good.”
“I’m always good.”
“Pssst. You mean never.” She pulls her glasses down and looks at me over the top of them. “Perry. Rush this and you don’t get a bad season. You get a bad leg. For good. You hearing me?”
I hear her. I hear her fine.
I just can’t make the words line up with the numbers in my head. Third in the standings. Fort Smith, Amarillo, a world title in December. First Sterling to ever ride for one. All of it, four months out, riding on without me.
“Season’s over,” I say. Not a question. I’m trying it out loud, seeing if it fits in my mouth.
“Season’s over,” Ruth says, gentler now. “Go home. Heal up. There’s always next year.”
Next year is what you tell a man so he won’t do something stupid in the parking lot. Twelve years I’ve chased this one.
“What if I brace it and only take the ones that…”
“No.” She doesn’t let me finish. “I’ve set this same knee on three men who wouldn’t hear me. Two of them walk with a cane now and the third sells insurance. You want to sell insurance, Perry?”
“I’d be great at it. It’s all charm.”
“Go home.”
They leave me to get dressed, which turns into a war. I work my good arm into my shirt and give up on the buttons. My gear bag slumps in the chair where Kendrick left it. I dig for the book to make sure it’s there.
Louis L’Amour. The drifter, the worn-out ranch. The cover’s hanging by a thread. It didn’t do so well after being grounded into the dirt by a hoof.
Boots sound in the hall. I zip the bag shut fast and put my brave face back on. The face that says, “I’m gonna listen to the experts.”
But inside my heart and soul, a different voice says, “We’ll see about that.”
Kendrick comes in with two coffees and the look he’s worn since we were ten, the one that means he’s about to make me do a thing I don’t want to do.
“They’re calling the tour out at noon,” he says. “Denver next, then the long haul west. I gotta be on the road by ten.”
“Go. I’m not gonna sit here and hold your hand.”
“I know.” He hands me a coffee. Sits. Doesn’t drink his. “Perry, I need you to do something for me while you’re laid up.”
“If it’s feed your horse, Buck’s already on him.”
“It’s not the horse.” He turns the cup in his hands. “It’s Kylie.”
I blink. “Your sister?”
“My sister.” He says it slow, so the weight lands.
“She came home to run the library after Mama couldn’t anymore.
Now the county’s trying to shut it down.
Budget cuts. There’s a vote in six weeks, and she’s fighting the whole thing alone, and she won’t ask a living soul for help.
Stubborn as our daddy and twice as proud. ”
“I’m on the road till October,” he goes on. “I hate that she’s up against it by herself. You’re gonna be home anyway, climbing the walls, no good to a soul.” He almost smiles. “So help her. Whatever she needs for that library. Do that much for me.”
“I don’t know the first thing about libraries.”
“You know how to work a room. She doesn’t. That’s the exact thing she needs, and she’d never admit it.” He finally looks at me straight. “One more thing.”
“Here it comes.”
“She’s my little sister, Perry.”
“I heard you the first time.”
“I mean it.” No joke left in it. “You’ve got a way with women that ends in somebody crying at a truck stop. Not her. She’s not one of your weekends. You be good to her, and you keep your hands to yourself, or I come off that tour and end you myself, bum knee and all.”
I lay a hand over my heart, which pulls a rib and serves me right. “Kendrick. I would never.”
“You would always. That’s the whole point.”
I want to tell him no. I want to tell him I’m in no shape to chaperone a librarian’s crusade, that I can’t button my own shirt, that the last thing I need this summer is a project with a due date.
But he’s my oldest friend, and he’s about to drive away from his banged-up best friend and his cornered little sister.
“Yeah,” I say. “Alright. I’ll look in on her. I’ll help with the library.”
The relief on his face makes me feel like a better man than I am.
“Thank you.” He stands, claps my good shoulder easy. “She’s a good one, Ky. You’ll like her, if you ever slow down long enough to notice her.”
“I notice everybody.”
“No.” He pulls his hat on. “You get noticed. Different thing entirely.”
He’s gone before I can decide whether that’s an insult.
Mama drives me home the long way, past fields turning gold at the edges, and she doesn’t say much, which is how I know she’s worried. Twice she reaches over and pats my good knee like she’s checking I’m still there.
Jubilee Hill comes up on the left like a fancy brochure for the South. White fences, the big barn, the house my great-grandfather raised with his own hands and his own stubbornness. The place I’ve lived all my life but spent twelve years leaving.
She parks by the porch and cuts the engine. For a moment, neither of us moves. Cicadas saw away in the pecan trees. A horse brays from the paddock, and another one brays back louder.
Getting out is its own event. I swing the braced leg wide, plant the crutch, and lever myself up out of the seat with a grunt I’d never let a crowd hear.
My ribs file a complaint. Mama hovers a step off, hands half-raised, knowing better than to help me and hating every second of it.
“I’ve got it,” I tell her.
“I know you do.” She doesn’t lower her hands.
I stand a minute in the yard, propped on the crutch, and look up at the house. Same porch swing. Same crooked third step my daddy never did get around to fixing.
I’ve made an art out of leaving this place every summer.
“You’ll heal here,” Mama says, coming around the truck. “Where I can see you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
And under the painkillers and the wrecked season and the ache running down my leg, one useless thought floats up and won’t go under.
I promised Kendrick I’d look after his sister.
Kiki Barnes. The know-it-all girl with a long ponytail that’s just waiting to smack you in the head when she swings her head hard because you mispronounced an author’s name.
“It’s a French name,” she stressed to me when she was sixteen and I was in the library checking out two of their new Louis L’Amour books and I said it like Lewis Lammor.
“It’s LOO-ee luh-MUR.” She spoke quietly but with a spark in her eyes that challenged me to say it properly.
“You’re kidding.”
“If you’re going to read all of his books, at least get his name right.”
So, yeah, the uppity know-it-all librarian is who I’ve promised to help.
Lord, help me now.