Chapter 11
ELEVEN
Selena
Five Years Later…
The lanterns come on one by one, like someone is stringing a constellation down Main Street and along the riverbank. Paper moons sway over the vendor stalls, the air sweet with kettle corn and woodsmoke, and laughter echoes everywhere.
Our booth is quiet now, the donation jar heavy with crumpled bills and glittering coins.
Wildlife cams I catalog paper, not rivers. He takes three quick breaths because he remembers everything I say, even when he pretends he doesn’t, and he throws.
Five.
He turns very slowly. We don’t move. He blinks, then he whoops so loudly that Camden spills his peanuts.
Second throw: six. Third: six, with a little tail-whip flourish that makes Cyrus clap like an overjoyed seal.
Totals are scrawled on a chalkboard. Names added. The kids hang on the rope line and peer like inspectors. When Cyrus flips the board to show the results, there’s a heartbeat of silence and then…chaos.
They’ve won.
Not just their bracket. When the family cup comes up, a combined parent/kid total where the adults have to match the children’s scores, ours is the number to beat.
Foster looks at me with a challenge in his eyes, like the years have fallen away. “Selena Miller,” he says, formal for the crowd, wicked for me, “how’s your wrist?”
“It’s a deadly weapon,” I tell him, and the crowd doesn’t hear the part where he huffs a laugh against my hair.
Rhodes steps into the water barefoot, pant legs rolled, and kinks an eyebrow. “You gonna let them take it, Carter?”
“Never,” Foster says.
We stand side by side. Foster goes first, and I smile as the stone skips. Seven.
I step into the river to my ankles, and the cold climbs my skin, quick and clean.
Breathe, I tell myself.
I pick a small gray stone, and I don’t think about it. I remember a boy who taught me to keep trying, a Pack that learned to share a river, and two children whose pockets are full of luck.
I throw.
Seven.
By the time the cup is lifted—a ridiculous silver thing shaped like a trout with a wreath around its fins—our kids are screaming, and I’ve lost my shoes.
Camden pretends to be a gracious loser and fails.
Rhodes ruffles our son’s hair until it sticks up like dandelion fluff.
Cyrus says if anyone wants to challenge the outcome, they can take it up with his hat.
Foster makes the children say thank you to the judge, and then he swings Nicole up on one shoulder and Adam on the other (because he’s showy), and they eat it up. He throws back his head, lets out a sweet, silly howl that rises into the dark, and three dozen voices answer back.
We make a mess of the awards table. We take pictures. Penny kisses all of us and announces a cake emergency that involves our kitchen and probably frosting in my hair. The lanterns sway. The music starts up again, and people begin to dance on the packed dirt road.
Eventually, the crowd thins. The booths start packing up.
I drift toward the water, and Foster follows, one hand at the small of my back like he was born with it there.
Our kids are sprawled on a blanket with Penny’s jacket over them, whisper-giggling into the fabric like conspirators with sticky fingers.
“Five years,” he says softly. The river takes it, carries it a little way, and brings it back.
“I know.” I tuck myself under his arm and watch the last of the lanterns reflect in the current. “Do you remember the first time you made me try again?”
“I remember you swore you were done.” He huffs a smile. “And then you weren’t.”
“I’m still not.”
We stand together and listen to the frogs and crickets and the thud of boots on the road, to our kids negotiating which shelf the trout cup will live on, to the quiet hum that lives in my body when he’s close.
Nicole lopes over, hair escaping its braid in wild curls. She presses a stone into my palm, the surface slick and cool. “For your pocket,” she says, like she’s giving me a spell. “We can practice tomorrow?”
“Always,” I tell her.
Adam tucks himself under Foster’s arm and burrows like he thinks his father is a hillside.
We throw the last three stones of the night together. Foster counts the skips under his breath, Adam counts louder over him, and Nicole closes one eye like it helps her see. The stones kiss the water and keep going and going, tiny silver mouths making promises in the dark.
“Again,” Adam says, exactly the way his father said it to me in a different summer.
I laugh, and we do.
Again and again.
Forever.