19. Perry
Perry
Kendrick comes home on the first Sunday in August, and I know it the second his truck turns in at the Jubilee Hill gate, because I’ve been half waiting on it for six weeks.
I’m in the round pen working a young horse Wade handed off to me, easy walking work, about all my knee will allow, when the diesel comes up the drive and cuts off by the barn. I don’t have to look. Nobody parks like Kendrick Barnes, hard and fast and a little mad at the ground.
He walks up to the rail and stops, and he doesn’t say a word. Hat pulled low, arms crossed, six weeks of unanswered calls sitting in the set of his shoulders.
“You gonna come in here,” I say, “or stand out there and glare at me till one of us dies of it?”
“Haven’t decided.”
“I called you eleven times.”
“I know. Watched every one of ’em ring.”
“Fair.”
“Don’t.” His jaw works. “Don’t you fair me, Perry. Don’t be reasonable at me. I have driven four states with my whole chest on fire, and I did not come here for reasonable.”
He comes through the gate, into the pen, right up into my space, close enough that I can see he hasn’t shaved in days and his eyes are road-burned red. For a second I’m dead sure he’s going to swing on me, and I set my feet and decide I’ll take the one free shot. God knows I’ve got it coming.
He doesn’t swing. He just stands there breathing hard, close enough to hit and not hitting, and somehow that’s worse than a punch would’ve been.
“You gave me your word.” His voice isn’t steady. “Over a pocketknife. We were nine years old. Your word is the one thing I never once had to check behind in twenty-two years, and you broke it the first month my back was turned. With my sister. The one person on this earth I asked you to leave be.”
“I know it.” I keep my hands loose at my sides.
“There’s no version of this where I’m not in the wrong for how it happened.
I broke my word, I lied to you, and I let you find out from a photograph.
You want to hit me, I’ve got it coming and I won’t get up angry.
I am not going to stand here and defend a minute of it. ”
He grabs a fistful of my shirt. I don’t lift a hand. He holds me there a second, three, his knuckles gone white, and I watch him want to and watch him decide not to, and then he lets go and shoves me back a step and turns and puts both hands on the top rail and just breathes.
When he speaks again the fire’s burned down, and what’s under it is worse. It’s hurt.
“You know what actually kept me up nights?” he says.
“Not the promise. You. I’ve watched you love women and leave them from here to Canada and never lose one hour of sleep.
And I lay in that bunk thinking, he’s going to do it to Kylie.
He’s going to get bored and get gone, and she’ll be the one crying at a truck stop, except she’s my sister, so I get to watch it across the Thanksgiving table for the rest of my life.
” His voice splits down the middle. “I wasn’t guarding my pride, Perry.
I was guarding her. From you. Because I know exactly who you are. ”
It lands like the truest thing anybody’s said to me all summer, because it is, or it was. I don’t flinch off it. I let it stand there between us in the dust of the pen, all of it, every truck-stop goodbye, the whole sorry résumé he’s got memorized because he stood beside me while I built it.
And then I hand him the only thing I’ve got left, which is the plain truth, since I’ve got no charm anymore that’ll do this job.
“You knew exactly who I was. You’re right about him.” I hold his eyes. “But you’ve been gone six weeks, Kendrick. And I’m not him anymore.”
Kendrick barks a laugh with nothing behind it. “People don’t change, Perry. You’re the one who taught me that. Twelve years of watching you not change taught me that.”
“Then let me be the first thing that ever surprised you.”
“I turned down Dallas. The comeback, the sponsor, the title, all of it. I sold my championship saddle off a stage in front of the whole county to save her library. I’m out here at seven every morning bringing your sister coffee fixed how she likes it, and I mean to keep doing it every morning I’m given.
I didn’t get bored, brother. I got home.
” I make myself keep looking at him. “I know you can’t take my word.
I burned that with my own hands. So don’t take it.
Watch me. Give me a year. Give me ten. I’ll spend every one of them proving to you I’m the man who stayed. ”
A horse blows in the barn. Off across the fields Axe is running a tractor. Kendrick doesn’t say anything for a long while.
“You sold the saddle,” he says finally, and his voice has gone rough and far off.
“I was there when you won it. Fort Worth. You were twenty-two and dumb as a fence post, and you rode that bay mare like the devil himself was on your heels, and afterward you sat in the truck and cried where you thought I couldn’t see you.
” He drags a hand down his face. “That saddle is the proudest thing you own in this world. And you sold it off a stage. For my sister.”
“For your sister,” I say.
He shakes his head, slow, and something in him finally gives way.
“She happy?” he asks, and it’s the realest question the man has got in him.
* * *
And that is when the screen door of the big house bangs, and Kylie comes down off the porch. She has been watching from the kitchen window this whole time, biting her nails to the quick, and now she crosses the yard and stops a few feet from her brother.
“Ask me yourself,” she says.
Kendrick turns to his little sister. “You happy, Ky?”
“I’m so happy it scares me.” Her chin’s up, but her eyes have gone wet.
“And I know what you did, Kendrick. You told him to look after me and to stay away from me in the same breath, and you did it because you love me. But I am not twelve years old anymore. I picked him. Eyes wide open, knowing every single thing you know about him. And if he breaks my heart, that is mine to survive. Not yours to prevent.” She reaches out and takes her brother’s hand.
“But he isn’t going to. Look at him, Kendrick. He is not going anywhere.”
Kendrick looks at her. He looks at me. He looks back at her, lit up in that yard in a way I have never once seen her, and I watch twenty-two years of big-brothering lose the fight to the plain fact of it.
“If you hurt her,” he says to me, and doesn’t let go of her hand, “there is no rodeo on God’s earth far enough for you to ride to. You understand me.”
“I understand you. And I’m counting on you to come collect if I ever do. That’s the job.” I hold out my hand. “You in?”
He looks at my hand. He lets out a breath I think he’s been holding six weeks.
“Yeah,” he says. “I’m in.” And instead of the hand he hauls me into the rough, backslapping, half-violent hug of a man who has decided to forgive you and is furious about it, and he mutters low against my ear, “You scare me like that again, I will bury you behind this barn,” and I laugh, and it is the first easy breath I have pulled since the night the whole thing came apart.
We stand there in the pen a minute, two grown men not looking at each other, both of us wiping at our faces and blaming the dust. The young horse ambles over and lips at Kendrick’s sleeve, and he huffs out a wet laugh and scratches its nose, and just like that the worst of it is done.
Six weeks of it, gone in the space of a hug and a horse.
Kylie’s crying too, out in the open, watching her brother take her man back, and she scrubs at her face with the heel of her hand and calls us both idiots, and neither one of us has the standing to argue it.
* * *
Later, the three of us end up on the tailgate of Kendrick’s truck with cold drinks and the sun going long and gold over the pasture, and it’s easy. It is the easiest thing in the world. I keep waiting for it to start feeling like a cage, and it just keeps on feeling like a porch.
Kendrick tells a story about a bull in Cheyenne that put me in the dirt so hard the medics came out with a board, and he tells it mean and loving and gets every detail right, and I let him, because a man who is ribbing you about your worst wreck has forgiven you. That is the code, and we both know it.
“Kylie tell you she cried when the board voted to keep the library?” he says. “Bawled like a baby, right there in the meeting.”
“I did not.”
“You did,” Kendrick and I say together, and she throws a bottle cap at each of us, and it is so exactly like being nineteen again that my chest aches with it. Except this time she’s mine, and he knows it, and there’s not one single thing left in the world any of us is hiding.
“So what are you going to do with yourself,” he says. “A man can’t just heal up and carry coffee. You’ll lose your mind by October.”
“Wade and I have been talking.” I roll the cold bottle between my hands.
“He’s got the horses. I’ve got the mouth.
We’re going to start a thing out here. A little rodeo school for the county kids, the ones whose folks can’t swing the fancy camps.
Teach ’em to ride and rope and fall off and climb back on.
” I shrug. “Turns out the one thing I’ve always been good at is getting people to show up somewhere.
Might as well aim it at something that stays put. ”
“A rodeo school.” Kendrick almost smiles. “Perry Sterling, community pillar. Your daddy would never believe it.”
“My daddy would love it,” I say. “He just never could sit still long enough to build one.”
“He’s going to run the people side,” Kylie says, proud, leaning into me. “Wade won’t say ten words to a paying customer. Perry won’t stop. It’s perfect.”
“It’s a disaster waiting to happen,” Kendrick says, and drains his drink. “I’m in. When do we start.”
Kylie leans into my side, and I feel her smile land against my shoulder, and her brother shakes his head at the pair of us.
“Ada’s girl and the Sterling boy,” he says. “This whole county called it before either one of you did.”
“The whole county is nosy,” Kylie says.
“The whole county is usually right.” I put my arm around the woman I am going to marry, and I watch the sun go down over the only patch of ground I have ever wanted to be standing on.
And the ache I hauled around for twelve years, the one I used to outrun from one town to the next, is just gone, not quieted but gone, filled all the way in.
For the first time in my whole life I have got nowhere left to run and not one inch of me that wants to.