Epilogue
“She’s going to fall off,” I say.
“She’s not going to fall off.” Perry doesn’t even glance at me. He’s watching the little girl on the fat old pony like she’s riding for a world title.
“Perry. She’s six.”
“She’s a natural. Look at those hands.” He cups his own around his mouth. “Chin up, Miss Josie! You’re the boss, not the pony!”
Josie, six years old and fearless, lifts her chin and beams, and the pony plods on another ten feet, and the dozen parents lining the rail of the Jubilee Hill round pen break into applause like she just covered a rank bull for eight full seconds.
It’s the first Saturday in June, one year to the day since a whole town packed a courthouse lot to save my library, and the Jubilee Hill Youth Rodeo Club is holding its opening day.
Forty kids signed up. It was supposed to be twenty.
But Perry cannot say no to a child, and Wade cannot say no to Perry, so here we are, forty deep and clean out of ponies.
“You’re out of ponies,” I tell him.
“We’re not out of ponies. We’re rich in children.” He finally looks at me, and there’s the grin, the real one, the one I’ve been collecting a whole year now. “How’s the library table doing?”
“Sold out of tote bags by ten. Signed up nine new families for cards.” I can’t keep the pride out of it. “Your mother’s minding it so I can supervise you.”
“Somebody has to.”
Over by the barn, Sienna and Sasha have set up a lemonade stand that is really a boot-and-tote-bag stand, because neither of those women can stand near a fundraiser without monetizing it, and they’re doing a brisk trade in tiny fringed vests no child on earth needs.
“Your fiancé,” Sasha calls over, “just let a four-year-old name a pony Sparkle Diablo.”
“He contains multitudes,” I call back.
“He contains a four-year-old,” says Sienna.
* * *
Wade leads a string of ponies past us, quiet as ever, three kids up top and a fourth walking alongside firing off questions he answers in words of one syllable.
“How come the brown one’s named Biscuit?”
“Looks like a biscuit.”
“How come you don’t talk much?”
“Talkin’s overrated.”
The boy weighs this with tremendous seriousness and plainly decides it is the wisest thing he has heard in his whole short life.
Wade catches my eye over the kid’s head and does the thing that passes for a smile on him, which is nothing at all with his mouth and something small around the eyes, and moves on.
“He’s good with them,” I say when Perry comes back to the rail.
“Better with them than with grown folks. Grown folks he’s got no use for.” Perry watches his cousin go. “Somebody’s gonna have to crack that man open one of these days.”
“Not it,” I say.
“Not it,” he agrees, and we both mean somebody, someday, just not us.
Though I’ve caught Wade twice this spring lingering at the back of my library with a book he won’t check out, on the busy afternoons, when there’s somebody new behind the desk covering story hour. Wade Reddington does not linger anywhere. I filed it. I’m a librarian. I file everything.
* * *
Kendrick’s running the registration table, which mostly means flirting with the young mothers and misplacing the sign-up sheet.
“You lost the sheet,” I tell him.
“I did not lose the sheet. I strategically relocated it.” He grins, my brother, home for the stretch between circuits, brown and easy and all the way back to himself. “Relax, Ky. It’s a pony club for six-year-olds. It’s not the Pentagon.”
“Miss Kylie! Miss Kylie!” A little boy skids up, breathless, dirt to both elbows. “Is there gonna be story time after? Coach Perry said there’s story time.”
“Two o’clock, baby. In the shade by the barn. Go ride first.”
He tears off. Kendrick watches him go and shakes his head. “Story time. At a rodeo school. Your fella has lost his entire mind.”
“He built it in,” I say, because that’s the part I still can’t get all the way through without my throat closing.
Perry built his rodeo school, and then, without asking me, built a story time into the middle of it, a shady corner and a crate of books hauled out of my library, because half these kids have never once owned a book of their own, and somewhere along the line he decided that was not going to stand.
“Ada would’ve loved that,” Kendrick says, quiet for once, watching the children line up at the book crate.
“Ada would’ve run it herself and bossed him half to death doing it,” I say, and my brother laughs, and for a second our mother is so present in the sunshine between us that neither of us can say another word.
* * *
At two o’clock I stand at the edge of the barn shade and watch Perry Sterling, former circuit star, current coach with an optional knee brace, lower himself into a folding chair with a dozen sunburned kids in the dirt around him and a battered Louis L’Amour open in his big hands.
And he reads out loud.
He doesn’t hide it anymore. That’s the thing that still stops my heart cold.
The man who spent fourteen years slipping into my library so nobody would catch a bull rider reading now reads westerns to half the county’s children every Saturday, doing all the voices, the drawl and the growl and the villain’s hiss, and he does not care one bit who sees him do it.
“Coach Perry,” a little girl asks, “did you ever ride a real bull?”
“I did, darlin’. Rode a lot of ’em.”
“Did you win?”
“Sometimes.” He turns a page. “But I’ll tell you the best thing I ever did on a Saturday, and it wasn’t on any bull.”
“What was it?”
He finds me over their heads. “Married the librarian,” he says. “Now hush and let me read.”
The kids groan like kids groan at anything to do with kissing, and Josie announces that she is never getting married, not ever, and Perry tells her that’s a fine plan and she should go inform every boy in the county of it personally.
“What happens in the book?” a boy demands.
“A man with no home and no people buys a worn-out ranch that nobody else wants.” Perry’s eyes come up and find me again, just for a breath. “And he stays. And he makes it his.”
“That’s it? That’s the whole story?”
“That’s the best story there is, partner,” Perry says. “Took me thirty-one years to figure that one out.”
* * *
After, when the kids are carted off sunburned and happy and the ponies are turned out to grass, Perry finds me in the empty round pen with a Novaleen’s box in one hand. He opens it. Two cinnamon rolls, cream cheese frosting, thick.
He hands me one. “How’d we do, Mrs. Sterling.”
“I’m not Mrs. Sterling yet. Wedding’s in October. You have to wait.”
“Feels like waiting’s the whole job these days.” He takes a bite. “Fourteen years you waited on me. I figure I owe you at least till October.”
“I picked October because that’s when the leaves turn, and because Novaleen can do the cake without the frosting sliding off it in the heat.”
“Romantic.”
“I’m marrying a man who reads Louis L’Amour to toddlers and names ponies Sparkle Diablo. I don’t need romantic. I’ve got ridiculous.”
“You’ve got both,” he says, and he’s right, and he knows he’s right.
I lean on the rail beside him, and we eat our cinnamon rolls in the long gold light, and I think about a morning a whole lifetime ago when I carried this exact box across his mother’s kitchen and he looked clean through me like I was the furniture.
“You know what’s funny,” I say.
“What’s that.”
“First time I brought you these, you didn’t even know my name.”
“I knew your name.” He says it around a mouthful of frosting. “I just didn’t know yet that it was the most important word I was ever gonna learn.” He looks over at me. “I’m a slow reader, Barnes. But I always get there in the end.”
I have to look out at the pen a second and get my face back under me.
He tips his hat back and looks out at the little arena he built with his own two hands, at the ponies grazing, at the whole green weight of a life he very nearly ran clean away from.
“Can I tell you a secret,” he says.
“You don’t have any secrets left. That was the deal.”
“Got one.” And he leans down close, just like he did across a library desk when I was twelve years old and he was seventeen and golden, the afternoon I fell for him and never once climbed back out.
“I am the luckiest man in the state of South Carolina. I am never leaving this town as long as I live. And I would wait another fourteen years for you if that’s what it took.
” The grin goes soft at the edges. “Our secret, Barnes?”
And I laugh, and my eyes sting, and I reach up and kiss the frosting off his stupid perfect mouth, and I give him the only answer I have ever had for this man. The same one I gave him at twelve years old, from behind a desk, without a single word.
I keep it.