Bonus Epilogue
Donovan
There is a particular sound a tattoo machine makes.
I want to be clear that I have never actually heard it up close before today.
I’ve heard it the way you hear a lawnmower two streets over.
Ambient. Somebody else’s problem. In twelve years of professional football, I have shared locker rooms with roughly four hundred heavily inked men, and I have made it my life’s work to be somewhere else when the buzzing started.
Today, the buzzing is four feet away, and it is for me.
“You’re pale,” Jude observes.
“I’m not pale.”
“He’s pale,” JD says.
“He’s a little pale,” Hayes agrees, from a folding chair he dragged over from the waiting area specifically so he could sit directly in my line of sight.
“Y’all can leave.”
“Absolutely not,” Jude says.
“There is no chance,” JD says.
“I moved a client meeting,” Hayes says.
“You’re our bud, we’re supporting you,” JD says.
I close my eyes. “I hate all of you.”
“He’s sweating,” Jude says. “Look at his hairline.”
“That’s because it’s hot in here,” I say.
“The AC is on, man. It’s actually a little too cool in here,” Hayes says. “Zane, what’s it set to?”
“Sixty-eight,” Zane says, without looking up from where he’s laying out his stuff on a tray, all of it wrapped and clean and terrifying.
“Sixty-eight,” Jude repeats, delighted.
My wife, who is sitting on a rolling stool beside the chair with our daughter asleep on her shoulder, does not say anything. She just reaches over and puts her hand flat on my chest, over my heart, and holds it there.
My heart is going like I’m at the two-minute warning down four.
“You okay?” she asks quietly.
“Sure.”
“Donovan.”
“KitKat, if I answer that honestly, I’m going to have to leave this building.”
She nods. Rubs a slow circle with her thumb. “Okay. But I want to remind you that this was your idea. I do not need you to do this.”
For the record: I have taken a helmet to the sternum from a three-hundred-and-forty-pound nose tackle.
I have had a finger dislocated on the sideline and popped back in before the next series.
I played the entire second half of a divisional game on an ankle that later turned out to have a hairline fracture in it, and I threw for two hundred and eleven yards doing it.
I am no stranger to pain.
But needles... needles are a different story.
Trypanophobia is a real thing. I looked it up when I was nineteen and cried about it, which is a sentence I will deny in a court of law.
Emmy is at the front counter with a clipboard and an expression of scientific interest. “Would it help if I explained the mechanism to you?”
“No.”
“Because a lot of the anxiety response is anticipatory. If you understood the actual depth of penetration—”
“Emmy.”
“It’s one to two millimeters,” she says. “Statistically, it’s nothing. Your body has experienced significantly worse. I could pull the concussion data—”
“Please don’t pull the concussion data,” Kathryn says.
“She has the concussion data,” Zane says mildly. “She has all the data. Don’t get her started.”
Emmy points her pen at him. “You love the data.”
“I love you, and you love the data,” Zane agrees.
“Exactly,” Emmy says with a smile.
“So walk me through it again,” Zane says. He’s got a stencil in his hand and the calm, unbothered manner of a man who has talked down bigger cowards than me. “You’re sure about the placement?”
“Left pec. Over the heart.”
“That’s a tender spot for a first.”
“He’ll be fine,” Jude says. “Right, big guy? You’ve got this.”
“Jude, I swear on everything—”
“I’ve got nine hours in my left sleeve,” Jude says to no one. “Nine. Sat right through it. Emory brought me a sandwich.”
“I’ve got a full back piece,” JD offers.
“You do not have a full back piece.”
“I have a partial back piece.”
“He has a shoulder,” Hayes says. “It’s a Terminator thing. Don’t ask him about it, we’ll be here all day.”
“It’s not a Terminator thing—”
And they’re off, and for about ninety seconds, I actually forget where I am, which I suspect is the whole reason my wife texted all three of them the time of the appointment without telling me.
* * *
Kathryn
He almost leaves twice.
The first time is when Zane peels the stencil off and Donovan sees the outline sitting there on his chest, purple and permanent-looking, and something behind his eyes just—goes.
He sits up. He says, “Actually, you know what,” in a voice I have never heard from him, not once, not in twenty-some years of knowing this man.
The second time is when the machine actually turns on.
“Nope,” he says. “Nope. Nope.”
“Donovan.”
“KitKat, I love you, I love you more than my own life, and I am going to go be sick in the alley.”
“You are not going to go be sick in the alley.”
“There’s precedent.”
“There’s what?”
“There’s precedent,” JD says. “College. He told us.”
“Sophomore year,” Jude confirms. “Behind a pizza place in Austin.”
“I was nineteen—”
“He named the alley,” Hayes says. “In the story. He gave the alley a name.”
I hand the baby to Emmy—who takes her with the specific stiff-armed competence of a woman who is very good at everything except this, and who immediately begins explaining infant visual acuity to a four-month-old — and I put both hands on my husband’s face.
“Hey. Look at me.”
He does. Those molten chocolate eyes, wide and genuinely frightened, in a face that has been on an actual Wheaties box.
“Tell me why you’re doing this,” I say.
“Because I said I would.”
“That’s not why.”
He breathes out. His hand finds my hip, that big palm spanning me the way it always does, like he needs to physically confirm I’m there.
“Because you built me a helmet before you’d even forgiven me,” he says.
The whole shop goes quiet.
“You spent four years of your life on something to keep my head safe when you were still mad at me. When you thought I picked somebody else over you.” His jaw works. “I can sit in a chair for twenty minutes, Kathryn. That’s the least—that’s the absolute least I can do.”
Behind me, JD says, very softly, “Goddamn, man.”
“Shut up,” Donovan says, without heat.
“No, that was good. That was really good.”
“Shut up.”
I take my glasses off and set them on the tray table because they’re fogging, because I’m crying.
“Okay,” I say. “Then lean back on the chair.”
He leans back.
Zane looks at me and I nod. The tattoo gun starts, and Donovan’s entire body goes rigid, every muscle in that ridiculous frame locked down at once, and he grips my hand hard enough that I make a noise.
“Sorry. Sorry, baby—”
“It’s fine. Squeeze.”
“I’ll break your fingers.”
“Here, break JD’s fingers.” Jude pushes JD forward.
“What the hell, man?”
“I work with my hands,” Jude says. “I can’t do it.”
But their antics make my husband laugh. It comes out cracked and shaky and it’s the best sound in the world.
And then, because the universe has a sense of humor, the man who has taken more physical punishment than anyone I have ever met turns his head, looks up at the ceiling, and says, “I’m going to talk now, and I’m not going to stop, and nobody is allowed to comment on the content.”
So he talks.
He talks about the first time he saw me in a yellow sundress. He talks about fourth grade and the ducks at Bluebonnet River, and how I made a poster board that said “SAVE THEM” in letters that got progressively smaller because I ran out of room.
He tells Zane, who did not ask, about the day we assembled two hundred jars of matches at his father’s cabin, six matches per jar, precisely six, because his wife is incapable of imprecision. He explains what a perfect match means, in case anybody in the room hasn’t put it together.
Nobody comments on the content.
Jude turns around and looks at a wall of flash art for a while. Hayes takes his hat off and turns it over in his hands. JD films exactly four seconds of it and then puts his phone away and doesn’t take it back out.
It takes twenty-two minutes.
When Zane wipes it down and sits back, there it is over my husband’s heart: a single wooden match, struck, small and clean and simple. The flame is yellow.
Donovan looks down at it for a long moment.
“That’s it?” he says.
“That’s it,” Zane says.
“That’s—I mean, that wasn’t—” He sits up. He touches the skin next to it. Some color is coming back into his face. He looks around the shop at four men who have watched him nearly vomit twice in half an hour, and I watch the exact instant the fear converts into something else entirely.
“I could do another one,” he says.
“No,” all five of us say.
* * *
Donovan
“Sit down,” my wife says.
“I’m fine, I feel great—”
“You have adrenaline poisoning. Sit.”
“I want to get her name.”
“Not today.”
“Maggie,” I tell Zane. “M-A-G-G-I-E. Right under—”
“Not today,” Kathryn says, and pushes me back into the chair with one hand, which works, because it always works.
Then she does something strange. She looks at Zane. Zane looks back at her. And Zane—who has said maybe forty words this entire afternoon—allows himself one small, criminal smile and says, “You ready?”
“What?” I ask.
Kathryn takes Maggie back from Emmy, kisses her head, hands her to Jude, who receives my daughter with the absolutely unbothered ease of a man who raised three girls and has a baby daughter at home.
“What is going on?” I ask again.
“I booked two appointments,” she says.
“Kathryn Foster Jewel.”
“You didn’t think I’d let you do this alone.” She’s got that look. Chin up, eyes bright behind her glasses, prickly and fearless and mine. “I have known you were going to be a disaster about this for twenty years, Donovan. I planned accordingly.”
It takes six minutes. She doesn’t flinch once, because of course she doesn’t. When it’s done there’s a match on the inside of her wrist, the twin of mine, the flame the same soft yellow.
I hold her hand up and look at it for a long time.
“We match,” I say. Brilliantly.
“That was the idea.” She tips her head. “How are you feeling?”
“Like a god.”
“Mm.”
“Like I could do anything.”
“You went white as a sheet and threatened to be sick in an alley.”
“I do not recall that.”
“There are witnesses.”
“There are four liars,” I say, “and one of them is holding my child.”
Jude, holding my child, does not dignify this.
Later, out on the sidewalk in the last of the light, with a clear sticky bandage over my heart and a bag of aftercare instructions I fully intend to follow to the letter, I catch my wife’s hand.
I turn it over and see her new ink covered in the same clear bandage.
I press my mouth to the skin above the bandage so as to not touch the altered skin.
“Hey, KitKat.”
“Hmm?”
“It is a truth, universally known,” I say, “that a man who’s got your name on a list somewhere is going to want it on his skin eventually.”
She snorts. “That’s not how that quote goes.”
“Semantics.”
And she laughs, and our daughter squawks, and behind us three grown men start arguing about whose tattoo hurt worse, and I stand there in the middle of my whole entire life thinking that I would sit in that chair again tomorrow.
I would not enjoy it.
But I would sit in it, if only to wear my wife’s name somewhere on my skin.
***
I hope you loved the Hotties of Saddle Creek.