Prologue #2
Around ten Cade and I ended up on the back deck with two beers and a view of the pasture going silver under the moon.
Harper had gone to bed an hour before — she'd been up since four that morning, she'd said, kissing her mama on the cheek and waving at the rest of us, and she'd disappeared up the staircase in that yellow dress and the kitchen had been a quieter room ever since.
The brothers had started thinning out. The fire in the pit was down to coals.
Cade was three beers in and that contemplative kind of quiet that he sometimes got, and I was nursing the same warm one I'd been holding for an hour because I didn't want anything in my system that might make me less careful than I needed to be.
He said, "Harper asked about you."
I said, "Yeah?"
I said it like a man asking the time. I said it like a man saying pass the salt . I worked very hard at the way I said it.
"At dinner. While you were out at the smoker with Daddy. She wanted to know if you were seeing anybody."
The deck swayed a little under me. The deck did not actually sway. I was the one swaying.
"Huh," I said.
"I told her you weren't really the dating type."
There it was. There was the door. He'd put it right there in front of me, easy and casual, like he'd hung it for me to walk through.
Cade was not a stupid man. Cade was, in fact, the most observant person I knew, and we'd been best friends for twenty-seven years, and there was a chance — there was a real chance — that he was offering me a way to say it.
Actually, Cade. I am the dating type. I have been the dating type my whole life.
I just have never met a woman who made me want to lose my mind on a porch over a plate of brisket. Until today.
I didn't say that.
I said, "You told her right."
He looked at me a long second over the top of his beer bottle. The moon was full and the light off the pasture was bright enough that I could see his eyes pretty clear. I watched him decide whether to push, and then I watched him decide not to.
"Good," he said. "She's been through some stuff lately.
Some asshole musician up in Nashville broke her heart back in March.
She's not in a place where she needs a man, and even if she was — Boone, you know how I feel.
Harper's not for the brothers. She's not for the club.
She's gonna find herself a nice guy in Nashville who works regular hours and doesn't ride and doesn't bring trouble home to her, and that's gonna be the right thing for her. "
He didn't mean it cruel. He didn't mean it as a warning.
He wasn't even thinking about me. He was talking about his sister the way every big brother talks about his sister when he loves her too much to let her near anything that scared him, and the Iron Thorn scared him, and the brothers scared him, and I knew that, I'd known that for years.
He'd said similar things before about her and other brothers.
It was just the math of how he loved her.
I nodded. I drank my warm beer.
"Yeah," I said. "That sounds about right."
We sat out on that deck another hour. We talked about the body shop.
We talked about the club. We talked about a new build I was finishing up on my own land — a little chicken coop I'd promised my mama before she died and was finally getting around to.
We talked about nothing. The fire died. The moon climbed.
Eventually Cade clapped me on the shoulder and said he was going to bed, and I said I'd head home, and I walked out across the gravel to my bike and I sat on it for a minute before I started it, looking back at the dark house, at the upstairs window I knew was hers because I'd been here a thousand times.
The light was off.
I told myself I wasn't looking for the light.
I rode home. The roads out of the Kincaid place to my own farm were the back roads I'd been riding since I got my permit, and I rode them on muscle memory because my head was nowhere.
I was thinking about her hands. I was thinking about the way she'd looked up at me on the porch.
I was thinking about how I'd said you're the dating type and Cade had said you told her right and I had nodded like a man casually agreeing to amputate his own arm.
I got home. The farmhouse was dark and quiet.
My mama had been gone three years by then, and my daddy ten, and the house had the kind of waiting silence a house gets when nobody has lived in it warm for a while.
I dropped my keys on the kitchen counter.
I poured myself a glass of water. I sat down at the table.
I stayed at that table all night.
I did not lie. Not really. I had not lied to Cade.
I had not said I don't have feelings for Harper .
I had said I'm not the dating type , and that had been technically true in the sense that I hadn't dated anyone in about two years, and it had been catastrophically untrue in every way that actually counted.
Because I was the dating type. I was the marrying type.
I was the come-home-to-the-same-woman-for-forty-years type.
I had known that about myself since I was a boy.
I had watched my daddy love my mama for almost five decades and I had wanted that for myself my whole life, and I had been waiting — patient, quiet, unworried about the timing — for whoever it was supposed to be.
I had thought it would announce itself differently.
I had thought it would be a woman I met somewhere reasonable, on neutral ground, where there were no complications.
A woman I could court honest, take to dinner, drive home to her own porch, and slowly, in the right way, with the right amount of time, become something to.
I had thought it would not be a woman whose brother was, more than anyone except maybe Knox, the closest thing I had to family.
I sat at the kitchen table till the sky outside the window went gray.
I went over every version of the conversation I could've had on that deck.
Cade, I have to tell you something. Cade, I think I might be — Cade, listen, I know how you feel about your sister, but — And in every version of the conversation, I watched Cade's face do that thing it did when somebody he loved disappointed him, and I watched a friendship that had carried me through every hard thing in my adult life break in my hands, and I could not do it. I could not do it.
So I made a decision instead.
I made it at that kitchen table as the sun came up over the back pasture and the chickens I didn't have yet started cackling in my head in a coop I hadn't finished building.
I told myself: Everett Dalton, you are going to lock this down.
You are going to be a brother to that girl.
You are going to be polite when you see her, helpful when she needs help, and otherwise you are going to keep yourself a respectful country mile away from her, and you are going to wait this thing out, however long it takes.
Because she is going back to Nashville in two days, and she is going to meet that nice regular-hours man Cade was talking about, and she is going to forget the look she gave you on the porch, and so will you.
I really did believe that. Sitting there in the gray light, I really did.
I want to put that down, because looking back now from this side of it, the man at that kitchen table seems like a fool, and I don't want to be unkind to him.
He was doing the best he could. He was trying to be a good friend and a good man and he was trying to handle a thing he didn't know how to handle, and I want to be gentle with him, because he had six years of hell waiting for him that he didn't know about yet.
He didn't know that Harper wouldn't meet the nice regular-hours man.
He didn't know that she'd open a bakery in Nashville with a partner, and the partner would burn it down around her ears, and she'd come home, broken and beautiful, and rent a storefront sixty feet from the Iron Thorn clubhouse and start over again with butter and sugar and a sander and a stubborn jaw.
He didn't know he'd spend Christmases watching her across her mama's dining room and pretending not to.
He didn't know he'd spend every barbecue, every Sunday dinner, every funeral, every wedding, every passing year, hauling around inside him the same dumb porch feeling that had landed in his chest at twenty past five on a Saturday afternoon.
He didn't know that six years was a long time.
He didn't know that he wasn't actually going to wait it out.
He didn't know that the line he was drawing for himself at that kitchen table — the polite country mile, the brotherly respect, the door staying shut — was a line he'd hold so hard it would start to take a piece of him every year.
He didn't know any of that.
He just sat there at the table while the sun came up, and he made his promise, and he believed it.
The screen door of the Kincaid house had slapped shut behind her that afternoon. The sound had stayed in my head all night. I can hear it right now, six years later, sitting on my own porch on a different evening writing this down in my own head like a confession.
Harper Kincaid is moving back to Clover Ridge.
Cade told me yesterday. He told me at the clubhouse, in front of half the brothers, casual as a man telling you it might rain.
He said, "Boone, you got a free afternoon Saturday?
Harp's coming home for good. Storefront on Main.
I could use a hand with the U-Haul." And every brother in the room was watching him, not me, because there was no reason to watch me, because nobody in the room knew what was about to happen to me, and I said, "Yeah. I'll be there."
I said it the same way I'd said you told her right on a deck six years ago.
I am thirty-six years old. I am the Iron Thorn's chaplain.
I have held men through funerals. I have stood between people and the worst nights of their lives.
I have a body that has been worked hard and a face that has, on more than one occasion, taken a fist on behalf of someone who needed me to take it.
I am not, generally, a man who flinches.
She is going to be sixty feet from me every day for the rest of my life.
God help me. The bee is coming back.