Chapter 8
Everett
The morning after the storm was the most beautiful morning I had ever woken up to in my own house, and it lasted exactly two hours and eleven minutes.
I want to put that down because the two hours and eleven minutes mattered.
I want to put down that we slept in pieces and woke up at six and lay there in the bed an hour just talking, and that the talking was the kind of talking I had not done with another human being in years — small careful tender things about my mother and her mother and a story I had never told a soul about my father teaching me to butcher a chicken when I was nine, and Harper telling me about her grandmother's hands, and Harper telling me about the first time she had ever rolled out pie crust at five years old standing on a chair at her mama's elbow, and Harper telling me about Diane the waitress in Nashville, in more detail this time, and me telling her about the morning at the kitchen table six years ago.
We talked. We talked the way two people talk who have stopped pretending.
The light in my bedroom went from silver to gold to the warm full yellow of a June morning after a storm, and the field outside the window was steaming, and the cicadas were back in the wet grass, and around seven-thirty I got up and made her breakfast.
I made her breakfast in nothing but my jeans because my t-shirt was still folded on the dresser where I had folded it the night before.
I cracked four fresh eggs into a cast iron pan.
I cooked them in butter. I cut a chunk off the loaf of yesterday's bread Harper had brought out for me earlier in the week and I toasted it on the open burner the way my mama had toasted bread.
I poured two mugs of strong black coffee.
I cut up two peaches from the bowl on the counter.
I plated all of it on the chipped blue plates that had been my grandmother's, and I brought one of the plates and one of the mugs upstairs to my own bedroom and I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Harper Kincaid eat breakfast in my flannel shirt — Dalton Farms t-shirt was in the laundry, she had pulled the flannel off the hook by the door on her way back from the bathroom and put it on over her bare body, and she sat cross-legged in the middle of my bed in nothing but my open flannel shirt and ate the eggs with her fingers because she was too lazy to use the fork, and there was butter on the corner of her mouth, and her hair was every kind of wild from the pillow, and I had been happy in my life before.
I had been happy plenty of times. I had been happy at my mama's funeral when Cade had stood up beside me and put his hand on my back for the whole hour.
I had been happy the day I had patched into Iron Thorn.
I had been happy a thousand small mornings standing at my fence line at sunrise watching the light come up over the back pasture.
I had never been happy like that. I had never been happy in the way that the world goes quiet, and your chest gets full, and you sit on the edge of a bed in your own house and look at a woman in your flannel eating eggs with her fingers and you think this.
This. This is what they were talking about, this is what people meant, all my life when they said it, this is what it was.
That was the two hours and eleven minutes.
Cade walked in the front door at nine-forty-six a.m.
I will tell you the truth about how it happened, because the truth is worse than the version of it that the village will tell.
There was no lock on my front door. There had never been a lock on my front door because my father had grown up with no lock on his front door and his father before him, and the people I knew in this county did not lock front doors during the day, and Cade Kincaid had been walking through my front door without knocking since he was twelve years old.
He had come to bring me a part for my tractor that he had picked up at the body shop because he had told me Tuesday at the clubhouse that he would.
He had not called. He had not texted. He had pulled up in the driveway in his pickup at nine-forty-five with the tractor part in the passenger seat.
He had walked up the porch steps the way he had been walking up my porch steps for two decades and he had opened the screen door and the front door without knocking and he had walked into my front entry, calling out my name —
"Boone! Brought you that —"
He stopped.
He stopped because he could see, through the doorway from the entry into the kitchen, that the kitchen had two plates on the counter, and one mug, and a pan in the sink with butter still in it, and somebody else had clearly eaten breakfast in my kitchen that morning.
He stopped because, just past that, on the staircase coming down — having heard the truck pull up, having heard Boone, brought you that — having recognized her own brother's voice and made the only choice that was hers to make, which was to come down — was Harper.
She was wearing my flannel shirt.
That was the whole of it. She was wearing my flannel shirt and her own underwear and nothing else, and her hair was a pillow tangle, and she stopped on the third stair from the bottom when she saw Cade in the doorway, and Cade stood in the doorway with the tractor part in his hand, and I came out of the kitchen behind Cade because I had heard him and I had not yet heard him stop, and the three of us stood in that configuration — Cade with his back to me, Harper on the stair, me in the kitchen doorway behind him — for about three full seconds.
Cade did not move.
He did not move for a very long time. I have known my best friend for twenty-seven years and I have seen him angry, and I have seen him hurt, and I have seen him grieve, and I have seen him laugh till he could not breathe.
I had not, before that Wednesday morning at nine-forty-six a.m., seen him do what he did then, which was nothing.
He just stood. He stood in my entryway with the tractor part in his hand and he looked at his sister and his sister looked back, and her chin came up, and she did not, this time, try to cover herself with anything, and I have to put that down — Harper Kincaid did not, in any motion of body or face, try to make herself smaller in that moment.
She stood on my third stair in my flannel shirt and she did not apologize with her body for being there.
She said, "Cade."
He said, "How long."
She said, "Six years."
He looked at me.
He turned and looked at me. He did not yell.
I want to put that down for the record. He did not yell.
Cade Kincaid did not, in any second of what was the worst morning of either of our lives, raise his voice once.
He looked at me with a face I did not know how to read, and he said, very flat, very quiet —
"My sister. My best friend."
He put the tractor part down on the side table.
He set it down gentle, the way you set down a thing you do not want to break.
Then he turned around and he walked out of my front door, past me, without touching me, without looking at me again, and the screen door slapped shut behind him, and I heard his boots on the porch and his boots on the gravel and the door of his truck open and shut, and his engine started, and his tires turned out of my driveway, and he was gone.
I followed him.
I made it to the porch barefoot. He was already at the end of the driveway.
He did not stop. I stood on my porch with the morning sun in my face and watched my best friend's tail-lights go around the bend onto the county road and disappear into the trees, and behind me, from the staircase, I heard Harper say —
"Boone."
I went back in.
She was on the bottom stair now. Her arms were wrapped around her middle.
The chin she had held up for Cade was wobbling for me.
I went to her. I sat down on the stair beside her and I put my arms around her, and she put her face against my bare shoulder, and she did not cry.
She did not cry. She held on to me very tight for about a minute and then she pulled back and she wiped under one eye with the heel of her hand and she said —
"I am going to go put on my dress."
"Okay."
"And then I am going to go after him."
"Harp. Wait."
"No."
"Wait. Let me. Let me try first. Let me try first because — because I owe him that conversation, and because he is going to listen to me different than he is going to listen to you on the first run.
He cannot fight with his sister. He can fight with me.
Let him fight with me first. Then he will be ready to talk to you. "
She looked at me.
She nodded.
She went upstairs and put on her yellow sundress and I put on a clean t-shirt and my boots and my flannel and we drove together, in my truck, the seven miles back into town, and we did not say anything to each other the whole way, because there was nothing to say that needed saying yet, and we held hands across the bench seat the whole way.
I dropped her at the back door of the bakery at ten-fifteen.
I kissed the top of her head. I said, "I love you, Harp. "
She said, "I love you, Boone. Bring him to me when you're done."
"I will."
I drove to the clubhouse.
I found him in the back lot working on his bike.
He was not actually working on his bike.
He had the seat off and a wrench in his hand and he was looking at the engine and not moving, and I knew, walking up to him across the gravel, that he had been there about twenty minutes doing exactly nothing. He looked up when I came up.
I said, "Cade."
He said, "Don't."
"Cade."
"Don't, Boone. Not here. Walk with me."