26. Building China
Building China
Falon
My head pounds as Frank crows from what felt like my dresser.
He's right outside the window doing whatever Frank does at five-thirty in the morning, which is apparently announcing the dawn to anyone within a half-mile radius, though it isn’t actually dawn.
I open my window and throw my Kleenex box at him, then pull the covers over my head.
I lie there and stare at the ceiling and debate whether to make Frank into soup or allow him to live.
Of course, I would never make him into soup; I love him too much.
Although at times like these, I’m tempted.
At five-thirty in the morning, the sun isn’t even up yet.
Then I thought about the fact that yesterday I kissed Bo Gates on a dance floor in front of half of Everwood, and then he left me standing there in the middle of the dance floor, Bo-less and alone.
The silence of the predawn morning summons the fragments of last night.
You were supposed to watch out for her. That was the deal.
Deal? What was I? An auction piece?
I know.
I should have told you.
Yes, you should have.
I've been turning those four lines over since midnight. Arranging them in different ways, trying to find a version that doesn't mean what my gut says they mean. I haven't found one yet.
The thing about growing up as someone's little sister is that you get very good at reading between the lines on what people say and what they mean.
Tyler never said I love you. He showed it in different ways, like the way he checked the tire pressure on my truck before every long drive.
Mom never said I'm proud of you. It was implied in the way she spoke to others. Bo?—
I stop.
As Frank continues crowing outside my window even after the Kleenex box, I give up and get up instead.
The ranch doesn't care about my feelings. The horses still need feeding regardless of what happened on a dance floor last night, and Hank will still eat through the fence rail if I don't get out there, and Frank is still going, so I pull on my boots and my oldest jeans, and I go do the work.
Mischief gives me trouble at the gate, which is expected. Annabelle leans her head over the stall door and breathes warm air on my neck, which helps a lot. Muddy follows me around the yard like a small shadow, and I love it. He’s done it since I got him.
I'm halfway through the morning cattle feed when I hear Tyler's voice.
He comes around the side of the farmhouse. His hair is a wreck, and his cast looks at odds with the man I know him to be.
“I’d been knocking at the front door for half an hour. Should have known you’d be out doing chores at o’crap o’clock in the morning.” He's in jeans and a t-shirt, and he looks like he slept about as well as I did, which is to say not at all.
I keep working. “The animals can’t feed themselves.”
"Falon."
"I've got twenty minutes of chores left," I say. "You can wait, or you can help."
On a ranch with a cast, there isn’t much he can do except throw some chicken feed, but he opts to wait.
When I come out of the barn, he's sitting on a partially broken round bale of straw, the way he used to sit when we were kids, when he was seventeen and thought he knew everything about everything. He looked smaller back then. Not so much anymore.
I lean against the gate and look at him.
"Say what you came to say," I tell him, folding my arms.
He looks down for a moment. Then at me. "I handled it wrong."
"Which part?"
"Most of it." He exhales. "I came home, and I saw you and him and I, I didn't think. I just reacted."
"You've been reacting to my life for a long time, Ty."
He flinches. Good. I'm not going to soften it for his ego, because it's true and we've been dancing around it for years, and I am twenty-three years old, and I am done dancing.
"I know," he says. Quiet. Like the words cost him something. "I know I have."
"You made a promise with Bo when you were both teenagers about my life.
My life, Tyler. And nobody asked me." I keep my voice even because if I don't, it'll crack, and I'm not ready for that yet.
"Do you understand how that feels? Finding out that the people I love most were making decisions about me like I was something to be managed? "
"I was trying to protect you."
"No, you were trying to control me. To keep me in your little box, where I was safe for you. Not me.” I take a deep breath and push my tears back even as my eyes sting a little.
“I know you thought you were protecting me.
" And I do know that. That's the thing. "But there's a difference between protecting someone and keeping them from their own life because it makes you feel better. "
He goes quiet for a long moment. A muscle works in his jaw, and I can see the wheels turning in his head.
"He said that too," Tyler says. "Last night."
"Did he?"
"Yeah, more or less." He looks out toward our parents' house and toward the fields our family has worked for 30 years. "He was right."
I blinked. I wasn't expecting that.
"I was scared," he says. It's not an excuse, though he’d always used it as one.
"When I'm out there, everything changes.
Every day, something is different, and there's nothing I can do about any of it.
And then I'd come home, and you'd be here, and everything would be exactly like I left it, something I could count on.
" He looks at me. "That wasn't fair to you. "
"No," I say. "It wasn't. But this isn’t just about when you are out there.” I gestured to the world as a whole. "You’ve been doing this since I was five. But I’m not five anymore. I’m old enough to run this ranch on my own.
I’m old enough to join the army. I’m old enough to decide if Bo is good enough for me or if I want to be reckless and date Kevin.
” I give an involuntary shudder. “You don’t get to decide that for me. ”
"And Bo—" He lets out a sigh. "Bo is the best man I know, Falon. That's why I asked him to watch out for you. Because I trusted him more than anyone." He shakes his head. "I just didn't think about what would happen if watching out for you turned into something else."
"There you go again, planning it all out, huh? That’s the thing, Tyler. You didn't think about what would happen if watching out for me turned into something else.” I repeat his words back to him, emphasizing that he should watch out for me.
“I won’t apologize for asking him to watch out for you, you’re my little sister, whether you like it or not, but I can see now that I can’t tell you who you can and can’t date.” He scrunches his nose like he hates the fact that he has to say it.
“And now?"
He's quiet for a beat. "Now, I think maybe it makes sense. The two of you." He says it like it hurts a little. Brothers. "I don't love it. But I think it makes sense. The two of you have had eyes for each other since you were fourteen."
"Tyler." I wait until he looks at me. "If you make me choose between you and Bo, I will choose. And I will never forgive you for making me do it.” I am so serious. I don’t think Tyler has ever seen me like this because he blinks at me, and his expression is shocked before he hides it behind understanding.
He holds my eyes for a long time. Then he nods. Once. The same tight nod he gave Bo last night on the dance floor, and I realize that the two of them are more alike than either of them would ever admit out loud.
"I'm going to need some time," he says.
"Yep," I say, knowing that there is a good possibility that Tyler was about to be estranged if he made me choose.
He jumps off the straw bale, careful with his arm, and stops in front of me for a second. Then he pulls me in with his good arm, and when he lets go, he doesn't say anything else. Just walks back toward our parents' house.
“Oh, Ty,” I call out. He turns. “How did you come across this new revelation?” I ask, trying to keep the smirk off my lips. There was no way he came to this conclusion on his own.
He scrunches his nose again and looks over the fields, not at me. “There is a slight possibility that maybe Mom and Dad got hold of me last night. Right after Bo did.”
He waves me away as he walked away.
I stand there in the yard for a minute after he's gone.
When I go inside to make coffee and try to figure out what to do next, I realize that I just did something that I have never done. I stood up to Tyler. Huh, things do change.
The next few days are strange.
Bo is still here. That's the thing I keep running into.
Every time I think about what I heard through the screen door, every time those fragments line up in my head, I round a corner, and there he is.
Making dinner. Working on Hank's corral, again.
I swear that goat is part shredder. Sitting on the guest house porch with Rowdy in the evening, like everything is normal, like nothing changed on the Fourth of July.
He tries to explain. More than once.
The first time is over dinner. I came in from the fields, and the smell of pot roast, which he knows is my favorite, wafted through the screen door. He sets it on the table and sits down across from me and says, "What you heard wasn't all of it."
"I know," I say.
"Then let me tell you the rest."
"No." I pick up my fork. "This is really good."
He looks at me for a long second, trying to read me. I don't give him much to work with. He lets it go for the night.
The second time is in the barn. I'm working on Annabelle's foreleg, where she's been favoring it, and he comes in and leans against the stall door and watches me for a while and then says, "I didn’t watch out for you because Tyler asked me to, Falon."
I don't look up. "I know that too."
"Then why?—"