12. Kylie
Kylie
For four days I keep the drawer shut, and for four days the drawer rattles.
I watch him now. I hate that I watch him now, but I can’t make myself quit.
I catch how he goes still when his phone lights up and turns it face down without checking it in front of me, which is new.
I catch him at the ranch window, looking out at the paddock like a man working a sum he doesn’t like the answer to.
Monday I bring him coffee at the ranch and he’s out on the porch with his back to me, phone to his ear, and I hear him say, “I hear you, Dale, I do, just give me a little more time to—” and then the screen door gives me away and he turns, and the sentence changes shape in his mouth and comes out the other side as “—to wrap things up here, yeah,” smooth as cream.
Then he smiles at me and holds out his hand for the coffee like he didn’t just watch me watch him lie.
Wednesday he turns up at my place after close with takeout and a paper bag he won’t let me look in until we’ve eaten.
We eat on my floor with our backs to the couch, his bad leg stretched out long.
He tells me a story about a rodeo in Cheyenne, the one where a clown lost his pants and a bull named Tequila Sunrise put three riders in the dirt inside an hour, and he does all the voices, and I laugh until I get rice on his shirt.
This is the thing nobody warned me about him.
Not the grin. Not the hands. It’s this: how easy he makes a Wednesday.
How a floor and a takeout carton and Perry Sterling telling a story feels like the fullest my small life has ever been.
Then he sets the bag in my lap.
Inside it is a book. Not new. Old, re-covered in clear tape by hands I would know anywhere, a Louis L’Amour with a penciled price inside the cover from some estate sale three states off.
“Found it in Amarillo, years back,” he says, not looking at me, picking at a takeout carton. “Carried it around ever since. Figured it ought to live somewhere it’ll actually get read.” He shrugs like it weighs nothing. “Figured it ought to be here.”
I hold this book that’s ridden around in his truck for years, this piece of the private self he’s never once shown a living soul, and I understand he is handing me the realest thing he owns. And instead of joy, what I feel is the drawer banging open.
You don’t give away the thing you carry unless you’re fixing to travel light again.
I run my thumb over the tape on the spine, the tape he cut and pressed down himself some lonesome night in a motel a thousand miles from here, and I want to hold this book to my chest and I want to throw it across the room, and I do neither. I set it down gentle on the rug between us.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, and mean it, and hate that I mean it.
He watches me hold it and his face goes soft and pleased and boyish, like a kid who picked the right present, and that’s the thing that undoes me.
He isn’t performing. This part is real. He found me a book he loved and carried it to my floor and he means every ounce of it.
And at the very same time he is running a clock out on me he won’t say out loud.
Both true. Both his. I don’t know how a person carries those two things around in the same body, but he does it easy, and I’m starting to understand that’s the most dangerous thing about him.
“Perry.” I keep my voice level. I’ve had a lifetime of practice. “Is something going on.”
“What do you mean.”
“With your knee. With… Dallas.”
The name lands. I watch it land. For half a second his face does something unguarded and caught, and then the easy comes down over it like a shade drawn on a window.
“Just rehab stuff,” he says. “Boring. Nothing you need to worry over.” He leans and kisses my temple and takes the book back out of my hands to find the page he dog-eared for me, and the moment folds itself away. And I let him fold it. I’m a coward. I want one more Wednesday.
Thursday I go to knitting. Miss Ruthanne asked me, and I’ve promised the drawer one more day shut.
The church annex, the six of them, the lamplight, the steady click of needles. They fuss over me the second I sit, having plainly decided I’m theirs now, and for a while it’s the exact balm I came for. Miss Cora shows me how to pick up the stitches I’ve been dropping since March.
The Deekes twins are feuding, as ever, this round over whose turn it is to host the Christmas cookie swap, a war that’s been running since roughly the Ford administration.
Miss Ruthanne wants to know, in detail, whether the young man has met my mother yet, and whether he has intentions, and whether I understand that intentions in a man Perry Sterling’s shape do not simply wander in off the street.
I tell her we’re not there. She tells me she’s knitted a christening gown on shorter notice than this. The whole room hoots.
Deborah asks after the fundraiser and I tell her we’re two weeks out and climbing, and it’s warm and slow and safe, and I let my shoulders all the way down for the first time in four days.
Then it comes. And it comes from the gentlest one in the room, which is how these things always seem to go.
“My grandson heard it on the rodeo channel,” one of the Deekes twins says, needles never slowing, riding in on the tail of the fundraiser talk.
“Your Perry’s making his big comeback. Stetson and all.
Off to some fancy clinic down in Dallas end of the month, get that knee put right, then back on the circuit come the winter.
” She beams at me over her glasses. “Isn’t that something.
Langston’s own, riding for a world title. You must be busting proud.”
The room keeps going for a second. Needles click. And then, one by one, they don’t.
They’re all running the same arithmetic I’m running. End of the month. Two weeks. He never told her.
The scarf goes still in my lap. I feel every eye in that lamplit room land on me, soft and terrible, and I understand, in the worst possible company, in front of the six women who have watched me love that boy since I was a girl in pigtails, that I am the last person in this county to find out he’s leaving.
Fourteen years. Fourteen years I kept his secret without his ever asking, shelved his westerns, learned his coffee, loved him quiet and asked him for nothing.
And when it finally, impossibly turned real, when he finally put his hands on me and called me his, he still didn’t reckon me worth two minutes and the truth.
I was worth a comeback story to the rodeo channel before I was worth a warning to my face.
I don’t cry. I want that on the record. I have spent a lifetime keeping my face steady at that circulation desk, and it does not fail me now.
“End of the month,” I say. My voice comes out even. “That’s wonderful for him.”
Deborah reaches over, quiet, and lays her hand on my knee and says not one word, which is the kindest and the cruelest thing anybody in that room could do, and I nearly come apart on the folding chair with a half-mended scarf in my two hands.
Miss Cora, God love her, changes the subject loud and fast to the Deekes twins’ standing war over a deviled-egg dish, and the circle closes ranks around me the way this town knows how, and lets me knit three bad rows in peace while my whole chest folds quietly in on itself.
Nobody makes me talk. Nobody says his name again.
When it breaks up, Deborah walks me out to my car with her arm threaded through mine, slow, like I’m elderly or wounded, which I suppose I am.
At the door she stops and takes both my hands.
“You listen to me, Kylie Barnes,” she says.
“Whatever that boy does or doesn’t do, you are not a thing anybody gets to keep in the dark.
You hear?” I nod, since I can’t trust my voice, and she lets me go.
I make it into the car before it lands on me all the way.
I sit in the church lot with both hands on the wheel and I don’t start the engine.
The clues come up out of the drawer and lay themselves down in a row, neat and damning and plain now that I’m finally looking straight at them.
Dallas Ortho. A facility. A timeline. Commit.
Give me a little more time, Dale. The book he handed me like a man setting down a weight he can’t take where he’s headed.
The phone turned face down. Insurance stuff. Nothing I need to worry over.
He’s known for weeks. He’s known since before the creek, maybe since before the library.
He’s had his mouth on me and his hands in my hair and a road out of my life mapped in his back pocket the whole while, and he stood at the back of my meeting and watched me get up in front of forty people and hope.
And the worst of it, the part that puts my forehead down on the steering wheel, is that I knew. I knew the first morning he burned my eggs. I told myself the forecast and then I walked out into the weather anyway, arms wide open, like every fool who ever loved a man already half gone.
Here is the thing nobody tells you about being the good girl your whole life.
You get very, very good at being fine. You learn to keep your face at the desk and your voice level and your wanting folded up small enough that nobody has to trouble themselves over it.
I could do that now. I could be fine about this clear through to Christmas, and it would take almost nothing anybody could see.
But I keep thinking about Anson standing up in my library with his hat in his hands.
About forty people clapping for Ada’s girl.
About how it felt, for one week of my life, to be a woman who stood up instead of a woman who got stood up.
I found her a week ago, and I am not handing her back. Not for him. Not for anybody.
I could drive home. I could let him have his two weeks and his easy exit, let him kiss my temple and slip out of town like he slips out of everywhere, and never once make him say the word to my face. That’s the Kylie of a month ago. Quiet. Accommodating. Grateful for whatever scrap she gets handed.
That woman found her voice this week, at the bottom of a thing worth fighting for. I am not going to spend it staying quiet about the one that matters most.
Maybe he leaves anyhow. Probably he leaves anyhow.
Men like him always do, and I’ll have loved him and lost him and made a spectacle of myself besides.
But I would rather stand in the wreck of a true thing than keep tending the pretty corner of a lie.
My mother did not raise me to be the last to know my own life.
I start the car.
I know exactly where he is. At the ranch, at that kitchen table, most likely with the vendor list in front of him and that easy smile already loaded in the chamber.
I’m going to go make him take it off.