Chapter 6 #2
They sent us a professional, and then when we made him, he didn't run—he just melted back into paper and quiet, and quiet from those people is worse than loud.
Loud you can see coming.
Quiet means they're still deciding what we're worth to them, and how much of the ranch they had time to photograph before Spur bent his mirror down the road.
I think about that silver truck sitting a quarter mile back, patient as death.
Raine was at Mama Lou's, thank God.
But she won't always be.
Most nights my little girl's asleep down that hall, and a man with a ghost on his roads doesn't get to lose himself like that, doesn't get to stop watching, not even for a woman, not even for one hour in a hot bath.
That can't happen again.
Not while there's a ghost on our roads.
But that's a problem for tonight, for after, for the part of my brain that never really shuts off no matter how much I might wish it would.
Right now I've got a hip to ice and a house to make halfway presentable and a nine-year-old to break the news to.
I do that last part the second Mama Lou drops her off, because I can't hold it in and honestly I don't want to. "Raine. C'mere a sec."
She comes, kitten under her arm, braid coming loose, giving me the wary look she gives me when she thinks she's in trouble for something she hasn't been caught for yet.
"You're not in trouble." I lower myself down onto the couch carefully, so we're closer to eye level. "I got news. Miss Presley's comin' to supper tonight. Here. She's bringin' the food and everything."
For a second she just stares at me like she's making sure she heard it right.
Then she detonates.
"She's COMING? Tonight? To OUR house?" She's up on her toes, Biscuit protesting loudly. "Is she gonna see my room? Can I show her the tooth I saved? Daddy, she likes cows and horses and everything, we gotta—I gotta clean my room, is she gonna sit by me, what's she bringing?—"
"Breathe, wild thing."
"I am breathing!"
No, she isn’t.
She's vibrating in place like a struck fence wire, lit up brighter than I've seen her since before the whole ranch went dark and tense and careful, and watching my kid come alive like that over the idea of that woman at our table does something to me I don't have a clean word for.
"Go clean your room, then," I tell her, rough around the edges. "Since you're so worried about it."
She's gone down the hall at a dead run before I finish the sentence, hollering something at the cat about company coming.
Presley shows up at six with two grocery sacks and a foil pan.
Raine meets her at the door like she's the second coming.
I hang back in the kitchen doorway and let it happen, because there's nothing for me to do here but watch, and watching is suddenly the best job I've got.
My girl takes Presley by the hand, just grabs it, the way kids do, no permission asked, and hauls her down the hall to show her the clean room and the saved tooth and the cat who did, in fact, get big.
Presley goes, laughing, letting herself be dragged, and the sound of the two of them carries back to me while I lean on the counter and try to keep my weight off the bad leg.
Supper's chicken and dumplings, and it's good, and Raine talks the entire time exactly like I warned her she would.
She tells Presley about school and about Nash and about how she's decided she's going to be a large-animal vet now, like Miss Grace, except also a barrel racer, and possibly the President.
Presley takes every word of it dead serious, asks follow-up questions, treats a nine-year-old's rambling like it's the most interesting thing she's heard all week.
She's good at this.
Better than good.
She leans in and she listens, and she teases Raine right back, and my kid blooms under it like a plant that finally got put in the window.
I don't say much. I don't need to.
I sit at the head of my own table with my hip aching and my daughter glowing and a woman across from me who keeps catching my eye and looking away, and I think that this is what I've been missing and couldn't name.
Not the sex, though God knows I missed that too.
This.
The full table.
The noise.
The kid and the woman and a hot meal I didn't cook alone.
"Daddy, you're not eating," Raine informs me. "You're just looking at everybody."
"Man can look at his supper."
"You're not lookin' at your supper." She rolls her eyes at Presley, conspiratorially. "He's being weird. He's been weird all day."
"Has he?" Presley doesn't look at me when she says it, but her mouth curves. "Weird how?"
"Good weird. Like Christmas weird." Raine shrugs and goes back to her dumplings. "I like it better than the sad weird."
And there it is.
Out of the mouth of a nine-year-old again, the truth nobody at the table was going to say.
Presley's smile falters just a little and she busies herself with Raine's glass.
I look down at my plate so nobody has to deal with my face.
Later, after Presley's gone home—after Raine hugged her at the door for a solid ten seconds and made her pinky-promise to come back, I tuck my kid in and she catches my hand before I can turn out the light.
"Daddy. Is Miss Presley gonna come back?"
"I think so, baby. If we're good to her."
"I'm always good to her." Deeply offended. Then, quieter, already half asleep: "I'm glad she came. You didn't look sad the whole time. Not even once."
I sit on the edge of her bed a minute after she goes under, and I don't trust my own voice, so I don't try to use it.
There’s a ghost on the roads.
A secret with a fuse on it.
A family of mine that doesn't know the half of what's coming.
And I haven't felt this good in longer than I can rightly remember.
A man takes the wins where he finds them.
Especially the kind that clean their room without being asked twice.