16. Kylie
Kylie
By eight o’clock Books and Boots has swallowed the whole courthouse square, and I have not stood still since noon.
A kid has knocked over the lemonade stand.
The band’s bass player is arguing with Deputy Gil about where the amp cord runs.
Two church ladies are locked in a quiet, vicious standoff over whose pie gets the high shelf.
I’ve made change, calmed a toddler, re-hung a banner that fell, and told Harold Fenwick’s wife three separate times that yes, we are just thrilled the board could come out.
I’ve got blisters inside my good shoes and my mother’s reading glasses shoved up in my hair for luck.
Three members of the county board showed, which the volunteers took as a good sign and I took as a threat.
They’ve stood by the coffee urn all night in a little cluster of folded arms, watching my town have the time of its life and writing nothing down.
All evening I’ve been performing for that cluster.
Look how much we matter. Look how full the square is. Please, God, look.
I’m behind the donation table running four things at once when Novaleen grabs my elbow.
“Sugar. Your auctioneer’s dying up there.”
I look at the stage. She’s right.
We need eight thousand dollars tonight. Not because eight thousand saves the library, but because eight thousand is a number too loud for the board to wave off as sentiment. Tickets and the bake tent got us halfway. The live auction was meant to carry the rest.
It is not carrying the rest. Poor Marv from the hardware store volunteered to run it, and Marv can build you a deck but he cannot move a crowd, and right now he’s begging somebody, anybody, to bid on a quilt the church ladies spent four months on while six hundred people study their own boots.
“Do I hear forty?” Marv pleads. “Forty dollars? Thirty?”
At the edge of the light, Harold Fenwick stands with a cup of my lemonade and the patient face of a man watching a movie he already read the ending of. He catches me looking and lifts the cup an inch, a toast to the inevitable, and my stomach drops clean through the grass.
And that’s when a cane taps up the stage steps.
* * *
Perry limps to the middle of the stage, holds his hand out to Marv for the microphone, and Marv gives it up like a man handing off a live snake.
“Evening, Langston.”
The square goes quiet. That easy front-porch drawl has been on their radio twice a day for a week telling them to come out here, and now it’s got a body, and the body is the Sterling boy who ran off to be famous, standing in their courthouse lot on a cane.
“I’ve been watching Marv try to give away a quilt for ten minutes,” Perry says, “and that quilt is a work of art, and you are all sitting there like it’s a dish rag. Miss Ruthanne. Stand up. How long did that quilt take you ladies?”
Ruthanne pops up, thrilled to her bones. “Four months!”
“Four months. Of her eyes, in bad light.” He sweeps the crowd. “Who in this square has got a hundred dollars and a conscience?”
A hand goes up. Another. “Two hundred!” Perry points into the dark. “Two-fifty in the back. Do I hear three? Three hundred for a quilt that’ll outlive every soul here.” He brings a borrowed hammer down on the podium. “Sold, to Deputy Gil, who does not sew.”
“I’ll learn!” Gil bellows, and the square howls.
He auctions a day of fence-mending from his brother Axe and sets three widows bidding against each other until Axe goes the color of a brick.
He auctions Novaleen’s Sunday dinner cooked in your own kitchen and nearly starts a fistfight.
Somebody’s grandbaby buys a pony ride and pays in quarters, solemn as a banker, and Perry takes the quarters like they’re gold and tells the whole square the boy drives a hard bargain.
He never once sits down, though I can see what standing is costing his knee, sweat cutting a line through the dust on his temple, his knuckles gone white on the cane.
The chalkboard total climbs, four thousand, then five. The county that sat on its hands ten minutes ago is up on its feet, hollering, waving folded bills over their heads.
I look at Fenwick. He isn’t toasting anymore.
He sets his cup down and steps toward the stage, and for one cold second I think he means to say something, kill the momentum, remind everyone a good time is not a budget line. He opens his mouth.
Perry sees it. He sees a whole crowd at once, it’s his one gift in this life.
“Mr. Fenwick!” he calls, warm as June. Six hundred heads swing around to find the chairman frozen mid-step.
“Real glad you came out, sir. You’ll want to write this next number down for the meeting.
” The crowd laughs, hard and pointed, and Fenwick’s mouth closes, and he steps back into the dark he came out of.
Then Perry holds up one hand, and the square hushes, and something in his face shifts, and I know, like you know weather, that he is about to do a thing that scares me.
“Last item,” he says. “This one’s mine.”
He nods to the dark behind the stage, and Buck walks out carrying something across both arms, and the whole square gasps before I even make out what it is.
It’s his saddle. The championship saddle. Tooled leather and hand-worked silver, the rig from his first big win, the one thing Perry Sterling owns that he would not sell to God on a bad day.
I’m out from behind my table without deciding to move, a fistful of somebody’s pledge cards in my hand and no memory of standing.
I know that saddle. He showed it to me once, three weeks and a lifetime ago, lying in the grass by the creek, telling me the story of the ride that won it with his eyes lit up like a boy’s. He would sooner sell a lung.
“Some of y’all heard I got an offer,” Perry says into the hush. “Comeback. Big sponsor. A shot at a world title.” The square has gone dead still. “I turned it down Monday.”
The gasp is bigger, and I feel it go through my own chest. I knew it already, he told me across a desk. But him saying it to six hundred people is a different animal than him saying it to me, and this one makes it true in a way the first one never managed.
“I’m not going back on the circuit. I’m staying right here.
” He runs a slow hand down the leather. “And a man doesn’t need a championship saddle if he’s not fixing to ride for a championship.
So I’m gonna sell the last piece of that life to save the best thing left in this town. Who’ll start me at a thousand.”
The square erupts.
Anson shouts a thousand before Perry finishes the sentence.
A rancher in the back yells twelve hundred.
Somebody offers a bull calf. The bids come so fast Perry can’t call them, cash and pledges and a woman waving her church envelope over her head, and the chalkboard total blows past eight thousand and keeps climbing, nine, then ten, and I am crying right out in the open now and I do not care one bit who sees.
The saddle goes to Anson for three thousand dollars. And then Anson climbs up onto the stage, red-faced, and hands it straight back.
“I don’t want your saddle, you fool boy,” he says, too close to the live mic, so the whole square hears it. “I want you to keep it and stay put. Consider it bought and paid for.”
The square comes apart at the seams.
* * *
He finds me after, when the final number is chalked up impossible and the band has started and the square has gone to dancing.
He comes down off the stage slow, hunting me through the crowd, and when he finds me he stops a few feet short, giving me the distance I asked for, breathing hard, gone gray around the mouth from an hour on that knee.
“You didn’t have to sell your saddle,” I say. It isn’t what I mean. I don’t know what I mean.
“I didn’t sell a saddle.” He’s still catching his wind.
“I sold an exit. I carried that thing around twelve years telling myself it was a trophy. It was a getaway car, Kylie. I just auctioned off my getaway car in front of your whole town.” A tired ghost of the grin.
“I’m running clean out of ways to leave. On purpose.”
I should say something level. I keep a lifetime of cool, level things stocked for exactly this moment. What comes out instead is the true thing I’ve been jamming in a drawer for three weeks.
“I don’t know how to trust it,” I say. “I dreamed you too long. I can’t tell the dream from the real thing anymore, and if I let myself believe this and I’m wrong about you, it will take me apart. I won’t come back from it.”
“Then don’t trust the words.” He takes one step and spends half the distance.
“Trust the saddle. Trust that I called Dale. Trust that I’ll be at that library every morning with your coffee fixed right until you get so sick of me you file a formal complaint.
I’ll bring you the proof, Kylie. Every single day. However long you need it.”
I look at him standing there, gray and soaked through and wrecked from an hour of handing my town its backbone, leaning on a cane because he would not sit down while there was still a dollar left to raise for me.
He auctioned off his whole past on a borrowed stage and he’s asking me for nothing.
Just to watch. Just to let him prove it.
The band’s gone to something slow. The whole square is dancing on the grass my mother walked me across when I was five years old, and Perry Sterling just set fire to the last exit he had, in public, for me.
I don’t say I forgive him. I’m not there yet.
But I close the last of the distance he left, and I reach up and take the cane out of his hand so he has to lean on me instead, and I feel the shock go through him, feel him go dead still, like a man who didn’t dare to hope.
“One dance,” I say. “You get exactly one. On the bad knee. Then you sit down before you fall down. And tomorrow you bring me my coffee, and we will see.”
“We’ll see,” he says, and he’s smiling at me like the buckle never mattered, like Dallas never called, like the only prize ever worth winning is standing in front of him in a lemonade-stained sundress with his cane in her hand.
I’ve wanted that exact smile aimed at me since I was twelve years old.
It lands heavier than I ever dreamed. It lands better, too.
And we dance, slow and crooked, holding each other up in the middle of the thing we saved.