7. Perry
Perry
The Sterlings have ridden out together on the first Saturday of the month since before I was born, and I’ve never once missed it on purpose. Missing it on doctor’s orders is a fresh humiliation, and I’m handling it with my usual grace, which is to say I saddled a horse anyway.
“You’re not riding,” Herc says, arms crossed, playing the wall.
“I’m sitting on a horse that happens to be moving. Different thing.”
“That’s the exact thing riding is.”
“Ruth said take it easy. Old Roan here is easy. He’s practically furniture.”
Herc looks at Mama. Mama looks at me, runs the odds on whether it’s worth the fight, and decides it isn’t. “Walk only,” she says. “You come off that horse, I’m the one telling Ruth. Not you.”
Kylie rolls into the yard at nine with a covered dish and no idea what she’s walked into.
I invited her out to plan the event. That’s the reason I gave her and the reason I gave myself. There’s a whiteboard’s worth of fundraiser left to sort, and the ranch is as good a place as any. That it lands on trail-ride Saturday is a coincidence I arranged with both hands.
She’s in jeans and boots that have seen real work, not the boutique kind, and I clock that before I clock one other thing about her.
Sienna gets to her first. Axe’s fiancée takes one look at Kylie, then a longer look at me, and her whole face lights up like she’s been handed a gift.
“You must be the librarian,” Sienna says, delighted, and I know right then I’m in for it.
“Perry’s told us nothing about you,” she goes on, sweet as pie, “which is how we knew it was serious.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Kylie says. “I’m his community service.”
Axe laughs from the fence rail. “Community service. I’m stealing that.”
“He hangs banners now,” he tells Sienna. “Our Perry. In a window. On purpose.”
“It’s a leadership role,” Kylie and I say at the same time, and then we don’t look at each other, and Sienna makes a small triumphant sound I’ll be hearing about at Christmas for the rest of my natural life.
One of the hands, Cole, a kid six weeks on the payroll who hasn’t learned when to leave a thing be, grins over his shoulder while he cinches his girth. “So she’s the summer project. Nice work if you can get it, Sterling.”
The yard goes quiet. I’m off Old Roan and halfway to being a problem before my knee reminds me I can’t be one, so I make the point with my mouth instead.
“Her name’s Miss Barnes,” I say, easy, which is how everybody in three counties knows I mean it. “She’s running the fight to keep the only library your future kids will ever set a boot in. You’ll speak to her like it.”
Cole’s ears go red. “Yessir. Didn’t mean nothing by it.”
“I know you didn’t.” I let the grin back out to sand the edge off. “Go on.”
When I turn back, Kylie’s watching me with a look I can’t read, and Sienna’s watching Kylie watch me, and I’ve officially lost the reins on this whole Saturday.
By the time we’re mounted, Sienna’s claimed her outright, the two of them riding hip to hip and talking boots and libraries and, from the sound that drifts back, me.
I’ve never once brought a woman to a Sterling trail ride.
My family took about four minutes to fold this one in like she’d been missing from the picture the whole time.
We mount up. I get on Old Roan slow and ugly, and it costs me a rib and a word I don’t say in front of my mother, and I keep my face shut over it.
Then Kylie swings up onto Sasha’s spare mare like she was poured into the saddle. She gathers her reins one-handed and sits there easy as a Sunday, and something in my chest trips over its own feet.
I filed her wrong. I filed her as books and step stools and a mouth that draws blood.
I forgot she grew up four miles from this gate on the same red dirt I did.
Every kid in this county learns to sit a horse before they learn cursive.
She’s not a town girl playing at country.
She’s homegrown, same as me, and she rides like she’s got nothing left to prove to the animal or anybody watching.
“You gonna stare,” she says, not looking at me, “or you gonna keep up?”
“Can’t keep up. Doctor’s orders. I’m furniture today.”
“Then I’ll ride slow so the furniture doesn’t tip over.”
We ride out last, side by side. It’s the best I’ve felt since a bull the size of a truck decided my season for me, and all I’m doing is walking a gentle horse next to a woman who refuses to flatter me.
The trail runs down through the low pasture and along the creek, the same loop I’ve ridden a thousand times in the dark of my own head since I left.
The others push out ahead. Herc and Sasha, Axe and Sienna, the hands strung loose behind.
Kylie and I fall to the back at a walk, which is all I’ve got, and for a good while neither of us bothers to fill the quiet.
“Can I tell you something about your event,” I say.
“You’re going to regardless.”
“You need to be the one who stands up at that board meeting. Not the petition. Not me. You.”
She shakes her head before I’ve finished. “People don’t listen to me. I’m the girl who reshelves their books.”
“That’s the exact reason they’ll listen. You’re not selling them a thing. You’re the one who’s held the door open this whole time and never asked for a nickel of credit.” I look over at her. “You just have to let them see you do it.”
“I don’t love being seen.”
“I noticed.” I let it ride a second. “For what it’s worth, I think that’s a waste. Of the two of us out here, you’re the one worth looking at.”
She cuts me a glance, quick, checking whether I mean it, and whatever she finds makes her look off across the creek and tighten her hand on the reins.
“Don’t do that,” she says, quiet.
“Do what.”
“Say things like that like they cost you nothing. They don’t come cheap for everybody. Some of us keep the ones we’re handed.”
I don’t have a joke for that. It’s the truest thing anybody’s said to me in a year, and she said it to a creek instead of to me, and it goes in deeper for that.
A cottonwood root humps up the trail and Old Roan jars over it, and the pain whites out my sight for a second. I make no sound. I’ve made none over worse.
“You’re gray,” she says. No teasing left in it. “We’re stopping.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re the color of a fish belly and your jaw’s set like a bear trap. Perry. Stop.” She reins in and waits me out, and I hate that it works, and I stop.
She doesn’t fuss. She sits her mare beside me in the cottonwood shade while I breathe through it, close enough that our stirrups near touch, and she doesn’t look away from the hurt the way most folks do. She looks straight at it. Like it’s allowed to be there.
“It’s a bad one, isn’t it,” she says. “Not the knee. The whole of it. Being stuck here.”
“I’m from here.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
She’s looking right at the part of me I keep taped over. So I hand her a true thing I’ve not said out loud to my own brothers. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s a bad one.”
“I figured.” She gathers her reins. “Come on. Slow. I’ve got you if you list.”
Nobody’s said that to me and meant it in a long, long time.
Here’s what I don’t tell her.
Somewhere in the last two weeks, between the shoebox and the banner and the coffee I learned to fix without asking, this stopped being a favor I owed Kendrick.
I don’t know the day it turned. I only know it’s turned.
I arranged a whole trail ride to get a librarian up on a horse next to me, and that is not a thing a man does for his best friend’s kid sister out of duty.
Kendrick’s voice sits right behind my teeth. She’s not one of your weekends.
She isn’t. That’s the whole trouble. She’s the far opposite of a weekend. She’s the first thing in twelve years I’ve looked at and not wanted to leave.
We ride back up toward the barn with the sun going long and gold across the pasture. She’s wind-pink and loose in the saddle now, laughing at something Sienna hollers back at us, guard down for once, and I watch her and think one clear, dangerous thing.
I’m going to kiss that woman, and soon, and it’s going to blow up my whole life.
Old Roan stumbles on the slope, and my knee reminds me exactly what I am today, which is a man in no shape to chase a single thing he wants.
That has never once stopped me before.