Chapter Three – Rowan #2
By the time we crest my lane again, the sun’s taken off its morning manners.
Heat is honest work—the kind that gets in your shirt and insists you do something with your hands.
I give her the easy jobs because I’m not built to watch her bleed.
The way she leans into learning is a kind of balm I didn’t know I was short on.
We run salt out to the mineral blocks, check the float valve on the north trough, and scare a blue heron off the fence line by accident. She startles, laughs at herself, then points like she just spotted a movie star. “He’s huge.”
“Thinks he owns the place,” I say. “We let him.”
A breeze noses across the pasture, warm on my forearms. Ivy tucks stray blond wisps behind her ear and fails since the wind has hands. I pretend not to notice.
“Teach me something harder,” she says, chin up like a dare.
“Wire splice,” I decide. I grab the little red joiners from the bucket and walk her back to the sagging section by the stand of sweetgums. “If a storm takes the top line out, you can nurse it till I get here.”
We kneel in the grass. Her knee brushes my thigh and stays. I don’t flinch. I don’t move into it. We exist there, a fraction closer than polite, and the world turns anyway.
“Thumb here,” I say, guiding her grip on the tool. She’s strong—tendons flex under my hand, quick and precise like she’s used to choreography that hurts the next day. “Now pull. Slow.”
She does, breath feathering my jaw. The joiner bites, clicks, and holds. She grins, proud and all teeth, and it almost knocks me backward.
“Again?” she asks.
“Again.”
We work the line until it sings, that hive-deep thrumming a fence makes when it’s right. Sweat glows in the hollow of her throat. I look away like I have sense.
I walk Ivy to the far fence where the pasture thins and the creek bends. Old round bales are stacked like tired moons beside a gray barn that’s seen too many winters. I tap the door with my knuckles, and it answers with a hollow thud.
“You going to fix this one up, too?” she asks, squinting at the warped boards.
“Eventually.” I toe a divot in the dirt. “Be a good spot for kids. Little camp, maybe. Show ’em where food comes from. Feed the goats, plant a row, watch something grow that isn’t on a screen.”
She stops, and when I finally look over, her gaze is steady on me. “A camp?”
“Just an idea.” My voice comes out rougher than I mean. “Been thinking more since Lila married Dean and the boys started tearing around here. Seems like something kids need.”
“You’d be really good at it,” she says, no hesitation.
That lands in a place I keep boarded up. I shrug like it’s nothing, like I didn’t lie awake last night drawing rectangles on an envelope. “I don’t know.”
“I do.” She steps closer, fingers grazing a splintered rail. “You stopped what you were doing to pull a stranger out of a ditch and then made her coffee without asking how she takes it. That tells me everything I need.”
I have to look away, out past the hay to where the grass moves like a slow river. Being seen that cleanly feels like standing in full sun. “It’s just wood and work,” I mumble.
“It’s heart,” she says softly. “And you’ve got plenty.”
Back at the house, I point her to the spigot, and we wash up side by side, our forearms streaked, droplets making constellations on the boards. She watches the dirt swirl and smiles. “I get the appeal,” she says.
“Of soap?”
“Of seeing you did something,” she answers, flicking water at me. “There’s proof.”
Proof. I think about the half-dozen fixes out here no one but me will ever clap for, and the way her saying it out loud lands like recognition in my chest. “Hungry?”
“Always,” she says, then winces. “But… Zoom. Part two. At four.”
“You’ll take it here,” I decide, rinsing my hands. “House router’s stronger when it gets hot.”
Something like relief slips across her face and is gone.
She nods, follows me inside, and sets up at the little table with a laptop that probably costs more than my truck.
I stack mail, rinse a peach, slice it into perfect crescent moons, and set the plate at her elbow without comment right before the waiting room admits Celeste Quinn and Label Ops – East .
She looks up at me a beat too long—thank you without words—then pastes on a professional smile I like less than the sleep-rough one and taps Join.
I take my peaches and my opinions to the porch.
The call runs forty-two minutes. I know because I learn the shape of their voices through the screen door—Celeste’s sweet-knife cadence, a man from the label with a calendar for a spine, and a PR girl who says “just” before every demand.
Ivy agrees when she needs to, pushes back twice (soft, smart), and the third time says she’s on a break and means it with her whole mouth.
When it ends, quiet rushes into the house like wind through a new opening.
She appears in the doorway with her laptop tucked to her ribs, eyes a little too bright. I don’t ask if she’s okay. I hand her a cold bottle of water and a dish towel for show, because sometimes you need something to hold to remind your hands what they’re for.
“They want me in Nashville next week,” she says, tone carefully even.
I take a drink so I don’t say the wrong thing.
“You want quiet or company?” I ask instead. It costs me.
She opens her eyes and lets me see the truth without the paint. “Company,” she says, then glances at the door. “Until you get bored with me not being sparkly.”
“Sparkly’s a seller’s trick,” I say. “I’ll take you when you’re matte.”
Her breath catches. Mine, too. We stand in that for three counts, and then I ruin it by remembering I’m an adult with chores and a huge reason I should say no to everything I’m feeling.
“I have to pull the bush hog around and make a pass on the back easement,” I tell her.
“You can ride if you don’t mind being dusted. ”
“I don’t mind at all,” she says, grabbing the worn-out baseball cap hanging by the back door. She steals it fair and square. “Let me earn my company.”
We rumble the tractor down to the low strip where the property shrugs its shoulders against the creek.
She sits sideways on the fender, one hand on the guardrail, the other on my bicep because gravity votes that way when we take the turn.
I forget how to shift for two stalls, then blame the soil when it bucks.
She laughs against my shoulder and doesn’t move her hand.
“You do this every day?” she asks over the clatter.
“Only on days that end in y,” I call back.
Dust turns us into something out of a sepia photograph—edges softened, lines honest. The mower coughs once and then settles into a rhythm, knocking back weeds in tidy testimony that someone gave a damn today.
We do two passes and call it. We aren’t trying to win a ribbon, just keep erosion from eating the land.
On the slow drive back, she points at the bend where the creek fattens and then slips narrow under the footbridge.
“You said to sit there when the tide turns,” she says. “Why?”
“Because you can feel the river change its mind,” I answer, not trying to make poetry and stumbling into it anyway. “Feels like somebody bigger than you just took a breath.”
She goes quiet. When we park by the barn, she hops down, dusts her thighs off, and gives me a look I can’t file yet. “Show me.”
We take the path under the pines, light falling through in fat coins, insects sawing a steady note.
The creek’s high from last night and moving with purpose, shadowed by overgrown banks.
We sit on the flat rock that’s been a bench for five Wright kids and half the cousins in three counties.
I’ve carved hearts here I don’t admit to.
I’ve thrown stones, insults, and prayers.
“You’re not going to narrate?” she teases, fingers skimming the surface.
“You’ll hear it,” I say.
We do.
When the tide of the bay pushes back up the little artery, there’s a stitched moment where the surface goes slick as breath—no ripples, no run—and then the water decides.
It shivers, then turns. You can watch the eddies reverse like someone flipped a diagram upside down and dared the world to keep up. Ivy inhales like the relief hurts.
“There it is,” she whispers.
“Yeah.”
We don’t talk for a while. It’s good not to.
Pines whisper to each other in a language I pretended to understand as a kid and now respect enough to leave alone.
A heron reels out a croak that’s eighty percent prehistoric.
My shoulder brushes hers on purpose or because the rock slopes. She doesn’t move.
“Rowan?” she says finally.
“Yeah.”
“Do you ever feel like… nothing you say in the city is real? Like words bounce off glass and come back at you wrong?”
“All the time,” I say, even though my city is a low building with bad coffee and county paperwork. “That’s why I talk to fences.”
She laughs, not because it’s funny but because I offered a crack for her to climb through. The sound lands on my sternum and makes it easier to stand when we do.
“Come on,” I say. “Before the humidity remembers us.”
We jog the twenty yards to the house, laughing like kids running to beat the porch. We make it under the eaves and stand there grinning and breathing hard like we just outran something bigger than weather.
“Shower,” I command. If she stays right here any longer, I’m going to say a thing I can’t unsay. “I’ll make dinner.”
“You can’t always bribe me with food,” she says. Then she softens it herself with, “Okay, you can. Thank you.”