Chapter 11 #2
Waylon picks up his little plastic fork and chows down on more food, all while we’re emotional.
I hold my nephew against my chest and he settles, the way babies do when there's nowhere left to fall.
Dakota watches me do it with something soft and broken open on her face.
For one suspended minute the three of us are just sisters at a table with a baby and a toddler, and the dead woman, the grave, and the men on the run are all a hundred miles away.
I want to freeze it here.
This exact minute.
Before we do what turns us into our father.
But minutes don't freeze, and Braxton starts rooting at my shirt, looking for something I can't give him.
Grace takes him back to nurse while Waylon stays with us, and the warmth drains out of the booth by degrees as we all remember why we came.
We pull ourselves together over cold hash browns, and then it's time, and we all know it's time.
Dakota picks up her phone, takes Shiver off speaker, and stands.
"I'm gonna go do it now," she says. "Before I lose my nerve. Y'all—just—be here when I get back."
She walks out to the diner lot, and through the window we watch her.
She stands by her truck in the morning sun with the phone to her ear, and we can't hear a word, but we can see all of it.
The way she squares her shoulders, the way she starts talking with her free hand moving, the way she nods at whatever he's saying, wipes her eyes once, laughs at something, a real-sounding laugh she's pulling up from nowhere to sell it.
My sister is out there in a gravel lot lying through her teeth to save our father, my mother, and four men who buried a body, and doing it so well it breaks my heart.
Grace and I don't talk.
We only watch her, Grace's hand still in mine, Braxton snuffling between us, Waylon still chowing down on food, and I think about how strange it is that the worst thing our family ever did is what's finally pulling us back together.
Through the glass, Dakota goes still. Listens a long moment.
And then she nods, once, hard, and lowers the phone and just stands there a second with her back to us.
When she turns around and walks back toward the diner, her face is wrecked and lighter all at once, and I know before she says it.
"It's done." She drops into the booth and puts her face in her hands a second, then comes up. "He bought it. All of it. Said—" a shaky laugh, "—said he was glad it turned out to be nothing sinister, that most of his cases don't end happy. Wished me well. Closed the file."
She exhales like she's been holding it for as long as she’s been mad at me. "It's done. He's gone. He's not looking anymore."
Nobody cheers.
It's not that kind of win.
But Grace reaches across and squeezes her hand, and Shiver's voice off the phone says quietly, "You did good, Dakota. You protected this family. Mom would—" he stops. "She'd understand. Whatever else, she'd understand us kids lookin' out for each other."
We sit with it a minute, the four of us, with what we just became, keepers of the same secret that broke us.
I don't feel clean.
I don't think any of us do.
But I feel, for the first time in months, like I'm on the inside of my family instead of frozen out of it—even if the price of the ticket was picking up the shovel.
We linger over the wreckage of breakfast until Braxton's fussing turns serious and Grace has to go. Waylon is an easy little guy, as happy as can be.
There are hugs in the parking lot that would've been unimaginable a month ago, Dakota holding on to me a beat longer than I expect and muttering, "I'll call you, I mean it," and then they're gone, and I'm standing in the diner lot in the full morning light feeling scraped out and stitched back together at the same time.
I go back inside before I leave.
"Can I get a to-go order?" I ask the waitress. "Two of the big breakfasts. Waffles, sausage, the works. And a short stack with extra syrup for a picky nine-year-old."
Because Thunder's still getting around slowly in the mornings, the hip at its worst before he's moved on it, and Raine's a bear before school.
It'd be a kindness to drop breakfast by so neither of them has to cook.
That's what I tell myself.
The truth is bigger and I carry it out to the truck with the warm styrofoam boxes.
The truth is that an hour ago I sat in a booth and helped my family bury the last thread that could've sent Thunder to prison.
I did it without a single second of hesitation, and part of the reason my hands were so steady is that every time I pictured that investigator finding what's out past Big Spring, I didn't just see my father in cuffs.
I saw Thunder.
I saw Raine growing up visiting her daddy through glass.
I chose him.
Again.
In a diner booth, quiet, without anyone knowing what I was choosing.
And now I'm bringing him waffles like it's nothing, like I'm only a girl being sweet to a banged-up man and his kid, when the truth is I'd bury a body myself before I'd let anyone take either one of them from me.
I drive to the back of the property with breakfast going cold on the seat.
Today I protected the people I love, and I got my sister back over cold waffles, and I'm bringing the man I love and his little girl a hot breakfast on a hard morning.
Today the dark stayed buried.
I'll take the day.
I've learned to take the days.
Thunder opens the door before I knock, hair a mess, hip stiff, and his whole tired face changes when he sees the boxes in my arms.
Raine shrieks, "Miss Presley bought breakfast!" from somewhere inside.
I step into the warmth and the noise of the only place that's felt like home all year.
Nobody in this cabin knows what I did this morning.
That's the deal now. That's who I am now.
A girl with a family stitched back together on one side and a body buried on the other, standing right in the middle, holding it all together with both hands.
Just like my father.
I set the waffles on the table and kiss Raine's head and let Thunder pull me in against his side, and I don't say a word about any of it.
I'm getting so good at not saying a word.