Chapter 20 #2
The willows went dark at their tips and the lake turned copper in the fading light. From the pasture came the sweet, distant sound of a child laughing as a quarter horse decided he was, in fact, willing to be gallop one more time across the field before sundown.
His phone rang in his pocket.
He let it go to voicemail. It rang again.
“You should answer it,” she said into his shirt.
“I really shouldn’t.”
“It might be an emergency.”
“It’s not an emergency. It’s my brother.”
“Then it might be important.”
He sighed against her temple and pulled out his phone. He showed her the screen. RENO STEELE, CALL #4.
“Answer it.”
He swiped. “What.”
She heard Reno’s voice, tinny and indignant, through the speaker and stifled a giggle. Dillon held the phone out so she could listen, his other hand still at the small of her back.
“—been calling you for an hour. Are you dead? Are you in a ditch? Did Tessa finally throw you off her porch with a frying pan?”
“I’m on her porch right now.”
“Oh.” A pause. “Well. Carry on, then. I’ll text later.”
“You called. I answered. Talk.”
“It can wait.”
“I’m not answering your call again.”
“Fine. Surgery’s Thursday morning. Doc says the meniscus is shredded, and there’s a little ligament damage, and he needs to clean it up before it gets any worse. Six to eight weeks of recovery, and apparently, the first two weeks I’m going to be a houseplant.”
“So you’re coming to my place Thursday afternoon?”
“If the offer of your guest room still stands.”
“It stands.”
“Good. Because I’ve been telling everyone in this office you’re my favorite brother, and Hank’s going to be furious when he hears.”
“Hank is going to be the one driving you back from the hospital.”
“That,” Reno said with great dignity, “is an irrelevant detail.”
Dillon glanced down at Tessa. She was grinning up at him.
“Reno.”
“Yeah?”
“Tessa says hi. She’s here with me.”
“Tessa, hi. I’m sorry I’m about to move into your boyfriend’s spare room for two months. He’ll need a lot of help. He’s emotionally very fragile. Please be patient with him.”
“I will,” she said into the phone. “Dillon, your brother is delightful.”
“My brother is a menace.”
“Both states of existence can be true,” Reno replied loftily. “See you Thursday.”
The line went dead.
Dillon looked down at her. “He’s going to be insufferable.”
Tessa smirked. “I predict he’s going to ask you, within forty-eight hours of arriving at your house, what your intentions are toward me.”
“I’ll tell him my intentions are entirely honorable.”
“Rats. I was hoping they were entirely dishonorable.”
“Tessa Lawrence!”
“Dillon Steele.”
He shook his head and pulled her more tightly against him.
“I should warn you,” she said into his shirt. “Iris Green filmed the talent show today.”
“I noticed the camera.”
“I was going to send the video to the memory care home where my grandfather lives. He won’t remember he watched it. But I spoke with the head nurse and she said the staff will play it for him on his good mornings.”
He responded dryly, “If you’re lucky, your mother will be there one of those times to see it and have heart failure.”
Tessa burst out laughing. “What I wouldn’t give to see that!”
Dillon said jokingly but meant it in all seriousness, “I’ll call the nursing home tomorrow and ask the staff to be sure to play it the next time she visits him.”
“Note to self. Don’t answer any phone calls from my mother for at least the next six months.”
They smiled at each other in mutual amusement.
Eventually, Tessa said, “My grandfather used to love listening to me practice violin when I was Makayla’s age. I thought . . . even if he can’t hold onto it, the watching itself counts as some small part of him remembering me.”
His arms tightened around her. “It absolutely does.”
His cheek came to rest against her temple. “I’m sorry he doesn’t know who you are.”
“Me, too.”
“I’ll go with you to meet him sometime, if you want.”
She hadn’t realized, until she heard the words, how badly she’d wanted someone to offer that. “I’d like that.”
He stayed for dinner.
She made grilled cheese sandwiches because the day called for something easy and fun. When she got distracted by Hamlet demanding supper and nearly scorched the first sandwich, Dillon took the spatula away from her and finished cooking them himself.
Makayla came in flushed and dirty and starving and ate two sandwiches in five minutes flat.
They sat at the kitchen table Mick had built and they passed each other ketchup for the French fries, while Hamlet sat under Makayla’s chair gobbling the crusts she snuck him.
The talent show was discussed in great and exhausting technical detail by Makayla, who narrated every measure of the fiddle break to Dillon as if he hadnt been there and seen it himself.
He listened to every word.
When Makayla finally broke off, mid-sentence, into a yawn that nearly knocked her off the chair, Dillon volunteered to clean up the kitchen while Tessa put her to bed. Tessa followed Makayla upstairs and hung up her recital clothes while Makayla got into pajamas.
It had been a while since she’d tucked in Makayla, and it was lovely to pull the blankets over her and sit on the edge of the bed wish her sweet dreams.
Makayla, half asleep already, said, “Mom?”
“Mm-hm?”
“Is Dillon going to be here in the morning?”
Tessa thought about it.
She thought about all the things a mother is supposed to consider.
She thought about modeling and example and what an eleven-year-old understood about adult relationships and what she did not.
She thought about Mick. She thought about how careful she’d been, since Mick died not to expose her daughter to anything that might shake her sense of safety.
She thought about the man downstairs whistling off key as he washed the dishes he hadn’t been asked to wash.
“He’s going to drive home tonight,” she said, smoothing the hair off Makayla’s forehead. “But he’ll be back tomorrow.”
“For dinner?”
“For dinner.”
“Okay. Mom”
“Yes?”
“I love him.”
Tessa kissed her daughter’s forehead because she could not, for a moment, trust her voice.
“I love him, too,” she said finally. “Sweet dreams.”
Makayla was asleep before she reached the door.
She walked him to his truck a little before ten, because he had to be at the Beecham ranch at six the next morning and because, as he said quietly when he kissed her one last time, he didn’t trust himself to stay another half hour.
She watched his taillights until they disappeared. She’d barely sat down in her rocking chair before Brown Dog flopped on the porch beside her.
“You,” she said to him, “are a busybody.”
He thumped his tail twice.
She bent down and scratched between his ears, and they sat together for a while, listening to the crickets and a wind moving up out of the south. Eventually, Brown Dog yawned and ambled back across the property line to Arlo’s porch, where Arlo was sitting, watching her without making a show of it.
She lifted a hand to him.
He lifted one back.
With a smile and a sense that all was right with the world, she went inside and went upstairs to bed.
The next week was busier than she could’ve predicted. Reno had his surgery on Thursday and came home to Dillon’s in a knee brace the size of a small tree, full of opioid-driven opinions, which Dillon shared in the form of long-suffering text messages that made her laugh out loud.
She drove over Friday night with a casserole and found Reno propped up on the couch with a paperback legal thriller. And in less than a minute, he’d asked her exactly what her intentions were toward his brother.
She told him the same thing she’d told Dillon.
Reno laughed so hard he choked on his ice water and Dillon had to thump him on the back.
The Maddoxes invited her and Makayla to dinner on Sunday to thank them for helping with Hope’s birth and for giving Murphy a good home.
Pete shyly gifted Makayla a worn Western saddle that had belonged to his daughter when she was about Makayla’s age, and Makayla cried, and Marla sent them home with a pie.
Charlotte and Tessa the following Monday and signed the final contract with the New York bridal store, which had agreed to every one of Tessa’s amendments, and they celebrated with the mediocre champagne sold at the Cobbler Cove Grocery, and which always tasted, to Tessa, like victory.
On Tuesday, Lincoln Sutter called Reno while Tessa was at Dillon’s house to confirm that the dismissal of Stillwater Basin Energy’s claim was now final and unappealable. He also mentioned lightly —in exaggeratedly casual passing—that Craig Westerfield had been transferred to a posting in Alaska.
Tessa and Reno both laughed until they nearly cried. Dillon merely smiled in cold satisfaction.
On Wednesday morning, she walked outside in her nightgown and her pink rubber boots, with a cup of coffee in her hand, expecting to settle into her chair for her morning ritual.
There were three chairs on the porch.
She stopped in the doorway.
The new one was larger than hers, the seat clearly built for a man with broad shoulders and long legs, the wood the same warm honey-amber as her own, the rockers the same gentle, balanced curve.
She set down her coffee on the porch rail because her hand had begun to shake.
She walked over to the third chair and ran her hand along its back and arms.
It was perfect.
She crossed the wet grass in her pink boots without bothering to put a sweater on.
Arlo was sitting in his own rocker on his own porch with Brown Dog at his feet. Didn’t look surprised to see her.
“Mornin’.”
“Arlo, it’s perfect.”
“Mm.”
“How did you finish it so fast?”
He took a slow sip of coffee. “Had a head start.”
“What kind of head start?”
“Started one for myself a few years back. Never got around to finishing it.”
She stared at him.
“You,” she said slowly, “gave Dillon your unfinished chair?”
“I got this one already. From Fern. Don’t need two.”
“Arlo Pickett, you absolute softie.”