Chapter 5 #2
He was standing at the back. By the front window.
He had his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a clean white t-shirt and the same flannel he had been wearing on Friday afternoon when I had walked out of his kitchen, and he had washed it since, because I could see the wrinkles down the front from where it had dried on a hanger.
He had on his cut over the flannel — the leather one with the Iron Thorn patch and the Chaplain rocker on the back.
His hair was a little damp, like he had just showered.
His face was tired. His eyes were not on the case. His eyes were on me.
I held them.
I held his eyes across my own bakery on the Saturday morning of my grand opening with a sheet pan of cinnamon rolls in my hands and a crowd of forty people between us, and I did the thing I had been not-doing for six years, which was that I did not look away first. I let him look.
I made him be the one to break it. He didn't break it.
He held me back. The room narrowed, the way I have read about rooms narrowing in books and assumed was a thing fiction had made up, and the noise of the crowd faded a little, and Boone Dalton stood at the back of my bakery in his cut on a Saturday afternoon in June and lifted his coffee cup at me in a small quiet toast.
He smiled.
He smiled the smile he had not let me see in six years.
It was a small smile and it was a tired smile and it was a smile that was already, around the corners, halfway to laughing at himself, but it was the smile, and it landed in the middle of my chest the way a punch lands, and Cade, who had been ringing up an order at the register, looked up at me and said, "Sis, you okay, you went white. "
"I'm fine," I said. "It's hot in here."
I set down the sheet pan. I turned around. I went back into the kitchen and stood in front of the open back door for a minute with cool air on my face, and I told myself to get my legs back, and I got them back, and I went back out and worked the front for another two hours.
We sold out at two-fifteen p.m.
Out. Everything. The case was empty by two-fifteen, and there were still six people in line, and I had to apologize and turn them away and promise to put their names in the order book for Monday morning.
Mrs. Trundle, who taught my second-grade Sunday school, made me hand-write her a coupon for a future free cinnamon roll.
I wrote it on a paper napkin. She tucked it in her purse like it was the deed to a house.
I locked the front door at two-thirty.
I leaned my forehead against the glass for a minute.
The street outside was sun-bright and full of people and Cade was hauling the last empty tray to the kitchen, and Briar was on the sidewalk picking up napkins, and Nadia was already taking down the balloon arch we had put up at eight a.m. that morning, and somewhere I could hear Wren laughing about something with Elara.
I had a bakery. I had had a grand opening.
I had sold every single thing I had made.
I had been awake for ten hours and seven of them had been spent on my feet, and my back hurt and my forearms hurt and my heart was pounding in a high happy way I did not entirely recognize, and I had not eaten anything besides three corner pieces of scone, and I needed to sit down.
Knox came through the back door at three-fifteen.
I was at my kitchen sink scrubbing a sheet pan.
He came in the way Knox came into any room I'd seen him in, which was quiet, with his shoulders square and his hands relaxed.
He was a tall lean man with gray starting at his temples and a face that had seen a lot of things in fifty years and decided to keep its peace about most of them.
I had known him my whole life. I had never been alone in a room with him. I dried my hands on my apron.
"Ms. Kincaid," Knox said.
"Knox."
"Boone told me what he did."
"He did, did he."
"He told me yesterday. I want you to know that.
He didn't sneak it past you and then sneak it past me.
He came to me Thursday morning and we made a plan and it worked and he told you the second the threat was off you.
He did it the right way. He did it without you knowing because he believed if he asked you you'd say no, and I think he was right, and I am not standing here defending him for that.
I am just telling you that the brotherhood — the club — was in on it from the beginning, and the club is going to be in on whatever you need next, and you can come to the clubhouse any time you need anything at all.
You're one of ours now. That's what I came to say. "
He held his hand out.
I shook it.
"Thank you, Knox."
"That's a hell of a cinnamon roll, by the way."
"Thank you."
"My old lady wants the recipe."
"Tell your old lady the recipe is a secret and she's gonna have to buy them. Twelve dollars a half-dozen."
He grinned. He had not, I realized in that moment, grinned at me before. "I'll tell her."
He left.
The brotherhood — one of ours now — sat in my kitchen the rest of the afternoon while I cleaned, and at six o'clock Cade said the words I had been half-dreading and half-hoping for all day, which were we're throwing you a party at the clubhouse, sis.
Get in the truck. I was too tired to argue.
I let him drive me. I sat in his passenger seat with my apron in my lap and my hair frizzing out of its braids and watched the trees go by and tried to figure out what I was going to do with my face when I saw Boone.
The clubhouse was full when we got there.
It was full of brothers in cuts and women in summer dresses and someone had hung a hand-painted banner over the bar that said KNEADED OPENS TODAY and someone had set up two folding tables loaded with food and someone — Nadia, of course it was Nadia — had stocked an ice bucket on the bar with three bottles of cheap champagne.
Cade put a glass of the cheap champagne in my hand within thirty seconds of walking in.
Briar came over and hugged me. Wren came over and hugged me.
Elara came over and squeezed my hand and said, very quietly into my ear, "He told you, then.
" I nodded. She said, "He did it the way he did it because he loves you, Harp.
I am not telling you to forgive him. I am just telling you what I know. "
I drank the champagne.
I drank the second glass. I drank the third glass somewhere around eight-thirty when the music had gotten louder and Maverick was attempting to teach Roman to two-step on the makeshift dance floor in the corner and failing, and at nine the air conditioning broke and somebody propped the front and back doors open with bricks to let the night breeze through, and at nine-fifteen I went out onto the back porch of the clubhouse alone, because the noise inside was making my head spin, and the champagne was making the rest of me spin, and I needed two minutes of cicada-quiet.
The porch was empty.
The porch was empty for about ten seconds.
Then the screen door opened behind me, and I knew who it was before I turned around.
He came out and stood next to me at the rail.
He did not touch me. He did not stand close enough to touch me.
He stood at the rail with his hands flat on the wood and looked out at the dark field behind the clubhouse where lightning bugs were just starting to come up out of the grass, and he didn't say anything for a long minute. I did not say anything either.
Then I said, "Boone."
"Harp."
"I'm a little drunk."
"I can tell."
"I'm gonna say something. I'm gonna say it. And you're gonna let me."
He looked over at me. He had on the same flannel he had been wearing all day and his hair was falling a little in his eyes the way it did when he hadn't slept and his blue eyes were tired and steady on my face, and he said, "Okay."
I gripped the rail with both my hands.
I looked at the dark field.
I said: "I have been in love with you since I was twenty-four years old.
You know it. I know it. The only person on God's green earth who doesn't know it is my brother, and I am tired of living my life around what Cade can handle.
I am tired of pretending I don't see what's happening every time you walk into a room I'm in.
I am tired of you looking away from me at Christmas dinners.
I am tired of the polite brotherly thing.
I am tired of carrying a feeling around for six years and pretending I'm not.
I am tired, Boone. I am thirty years old and I am tired, and tonight I am drunk on cheap champagne and I am brave for the first time in my whole life, and I am telling you that I love you, and that I have loved you since I was twenty-four years old, and that if you tell me right now you don't feel any of it back, I will believe you, and I will get on with my life, and you and I will be polite forever, and I will never bring this up again.
But you do not get to do the flour on your nose thing one more time.
You do not get to step back from me one more time.
You owe me that, after six years. You owe me a real answer. "
I had not looked at him while I said it. I had looked at the dark field. I looked at him now.
He was looking at me.
He was looking at me with his curtain all the way down.
I had seen his curtain at half-mast in my doorway two weeks ago and three-quarters down in my kitchen on Friday at the counter.
I had never seen it like this. The curtain was on the floor.
The man behind the curtain — the man I had been waiting six years to meet — was standing on a clubhouse porch in a Saturday-night flannel with the cicadas going in the field behind him, and he was looking at me like he had been working hard for six years not to.
He said, "I feel it."
I made a small sound. I didn't mean to.
He said, "I have always felt it. From the porch with the brisket.
I felt it then. I felt it the next morning at my own kitchen table.
I felt it for six years and it has scared the hell out of me every single day, because I love your brother, Harper.
I love him like he is my own blood. And losing his trust would end me, and that has been the thing I have been holding on to for six years, and that is why I have looked away from you, and that is why I said you've got flour on your nose on a Friday afternoon when there was no flour on your nose.
It was not because I did not love you. It was because I love you so much that the only way I knew to keep loving your brother was to never let myself look at you.
And I am telling you that on a porch on a Saturday night because you asked me for a real answer and I owe you one, and that is the real one, and I am sorry it took six years. "
I had not been breathing.
I started breathing.
I reached over and I took his hand. I took it in both of mine, the way I had taken his hand in the kitchen of the bakery a thousand times in my head and never once in real life, and I held it, and I felt the calluses on his palm from the planing and the planing and the planing all week, and I said, very quiet, almost too quiet for him to hear it over the cicadas —
"Then let me handle Cade."
He looked at me a long second.
He didn't kiss me. We were on the clubhouse porch and Cade was forty feet away in the front room with twelve brothers in cuts and we were not going to do this here, and neither of us was going to do anything stupid on a porch in front of an open kitchen door at nine-thirty at night.
But he turned his hand over inside mine.
He turned his hand and he laced his fingers between mine and he held me back, and he said, "Okay, Harp. Okay. You handle Cade."
We stood there a long minute holding hands in the dark.
The cicadas went and went. The lightning bugs in the field came up and lit and dropped and came up again.
I leaned my head against his shoulder. Just for a second.
Just because I could. I had been wanting to lean my head against his shoulder for six years.
He let me lean.
He let me lean for a minute and a half before the screen door creaked and we heard Nadia's voice from the kitchen yell Harper Kincaid, get in here, we are doing toasts , and I straightened up and let his hand go and we walked back inside separately like two adults who had not been doing anything on the porch.
Cade looked up at me when I came back in. He had a glass of something in his hand. He raised it at me.
"There she is. Bake-em-up Kincaid."
"Don't call me that."
"Sis. To you. To Kneaded. To the woman who fed Clover Ridge today till it tapped out and asked for mercy."
I raised my glass back at him. I looked across the room.
Boone was at the bar getting a beer. He was not looking at me.
He was, very carefully and very deliberately, not looking at me, in a way that I now understood, finally, and that — for the first time in six years — did not break my heart even a little bit.
The bee was in the room. The bee was in the room with both of us. The bee was, I want to put down, very tired of being a bee, and very ready to be something else.
I drank my champagne. I let Cade toast me. I held it together.
Tomorrow, I thought. Tomorrow we figure out what comes next.
I had no idea, on that porch, that tomorrow was going to take three more days.
I had no idea, on that porch, that I had eleven days to figure out how to tell my brother.