Epilogue #2
The picnic was in the town park, on the big lawn under the old sycamores along the creek.
The whole town came. The whole Iron Thorn family came — Knox and his old lady; Silas and Briar and the baby Lark on Briar's hip in a yellow sundress, screaming with delight at every passing dog; Maverick and Wren with their dog who was the size of a small horse and unfailingly polite; Axel and Elara with Mister the one-eyed border collie; Roman and Nadia, with Nadia holding the clipboard she always held, which today contained the rotation schedule for the dunk tank she had volunteered to run.
Diesel and Razor and their wives. Tobias, the older brother who had retired from the patch but still came around the clubhouse Sundays, with frosting on his Iron Thorn cut from a cupcake the baby Lark had pressed against him; Hawk and his wife; Cade with a girl on his arm I had not met before, a brunette schoolteacher from one town over named Maggie that he had been seeing two months and had brought to her first big Iron Thorn event with a face I recognized very well, the face of a brother in the early part of figuring out that this one might be the one.
Harper ran the dessert table.
She had not, originally, wanted to run the dessert table.
She had said Boone, I bake for a living, I am taking a day off, and then Nadia had asked her two weeks before the picnic if she would run the dessert table, and Harper had said yes, the way Harper said yes to everything Nadia asked her to do, and she had baked for three days before the picnic with the radio on in our kitchen and a small private joy on her face that I had watched in passing every time I'd come in for water.
She had made eight pies. She had made fourteen dozen cookies.
She had made a sheet cake the size of a Volkswagen door, frosted in cream cheese frosting, with strawberries from Briar's garden arranged on top in a pattern that spelled CLOVER RIDGE.
She had made three trays of cinnamon rolls because the people of this town would have rioted if she had shown up at a town picnic without cinnamon rolls.
She set up the dessert table at ten a.m. under one of the big oak shades, and she had been working it ever since, and at three in the afternoon she was still going, and her face was sun-pink and her hair was coming out of its braids and she was happier than I had ever seen her in any season of any year of her life.
I stood at her elbow.
I stood at her elbow because that was where I lived now.
I stole a strawberry off the sheet cake and she slapped my hand.
I stole a piece of cookie and she slapped my hand again, harder.
The third time I tried it she caught my wrist in her flour-dusted hand and held it and looked up at me with mock fury and said, Everett Dalton, if you steal one more cookie I will divorce you, and I said, Mrs. Dalton, I will take that risk, and Cade, who was at the lemonade table six feet away, snorted.
Maggie laughed. Lark, who had toddled over to the dessert table with a half-eaten piece of cornbread in her fist, looked up at us with serious blue eyes, and Harper crouched down and offered her a frosted cookie from the tray on the corner, and Lark took the cookie and ate the cookie and walked off with the cookie crumbs down the front of her sundress, and Briar came after her, laughing, picking her up around the middle and swinging her up on her hip.
Tobias came past with frosting on his cut and a small toddler-shaped handprint on the leather where Lark had previously assaulted him, and Harper laughed, and Tobias gave her a long suffering look that said I have been a man of dignity for sixty-two years and this small person has ended that dignity in one weekend , and Briar said, Tobias, let me get that off you, I am so sorry , and Tobias said, let her have her victory, which was the funniest thing I had heard him say in three years.
Knox came up at four-fifteen.
He had a paper plate with three of Harper's cinnamon rolls on it.
He had a small smile on his face. He looked at me.
He looked at Harper. He said, "Brother. Sister-in-law.
I was wrong, last spring, when I asked you on the phone if you were doing it as a brother of the club or as something else.
I want to say so. I was wrong because the answer was both.
I was treating that like an or . It was an and . I am sorry for the question."
I said, "Knox. You don't owe me that."
He said, "I owe everybody I get something wrong with the correction. I am giving you yours. Now eat one of these cinnamon rolls. Your wife is a national treasure."
He left.
Harper was looking at me. I was looking at Harper.
We had been doing the looking thing for a year now.
The looking thing did not get old. The looking thing got better.
The looking thing was the thing I had been not-doing for six years, and the thing I had spent the last twelve months looking my fill of, and the looking thing was — I was about to say the looking thing was the best part of being married , but it was not the best part.
The looking thing was the part that I had been most starved of.
The best part was harder to name and quieter than that.
The best part was the small mornings at the kitchen counter with the kitten asleep on the fridge.
The best part was the walk down the path through the wildflowers.
The best part was a hundred small things and the looking thing was one of them.
Cade came up at four-thirty. He had Maggie's hand in his.
He said, "Sis. Brother. Maggie has not had the cinnamon roll yet."
Harper said, "Maggie. I am going to fix that."
She handed Maggie a cinnamon roll. Maggie ate the cinnamon roll.
Maggie made the noise, the noise everyone made the first time, the noise that was a religious conversion happening in real time on a paper plate, and Cade laughed at her and Maggie blushed, and Harper looked at Cade — and Cade looked at Harper — and Cade said —
"Sis. I am happy you are happy. I want you to know that. I have been wanting to say it for a while and I have not had the right moment. I have it now. I am happy you are happy. That is all I ever wanted. Mama would be very proud of you."
Harper's eyes filled.
She came around the table. She hugged her brother in front of the whole town.
Cade hugged her back. Maggie smiled at me, the small private smile of a woman who was meeting her boyfriend's whole life on a single Sunday afternoon and finding all of it good.
I shook Cade's hand. He clapped my shoulder. He said, into my ear, low —
"Mama would have liked her, you know."
I said, "I know."
Late, near sundown, when the picnic was thinning out and the families were packing their blankets and the brothers were loading the empty trays into the back of Roman's truck, Harper and I walked away from the table down to the creek behind the park.
The creek was high and clear and the late light was making the water gold, and somewhere across the water a bullfrog was warming up for the night.
We sat down in the grass at the bank. She leaned against me.
I put my arm around her. We did not say anything for maybe five minutes.
I said, "Harp."
She said, "Mm."
I said, "I have been thinking about something I want to put down."
She said, "Put it down."
So I will.
I spent six years standing on the wrong side of a line I drew myself.
I spent six years thinking the line was made of friendship and brotherhood and duty and the right kind of restraint, and I spent six years thinking I was a good man for holding it.
I want to put down that I was wrong. The line was not made of any of those things.
The line was made of fear. The line was made of me being afraid to want a thing that big out loud, and dressing the fear up in the clothes of honor so I would not have to look at it square.
Harper Kincaid did not, on a clubhouse porch on a Saturday night last summer, cross the line for me.
She did not pull me across it. She did not push me across it.
What she did was look me in the face and tell me, in plain words, that the line was not there.
That it had never been there. That she had been on the other side of it the whole time waiting for me to figure out that I had drawn it on my own porch six years ago and that nothing about the line was real except the fact that I had agreed it was.
And the second she said it — the second she said let me handle Cade — I knew the line was paper.
I knew it was nothing. I had been standing six inches behind a piece of paper I had drawn myself for a third of my adult life, and a woman with flour in her hair on a Saturday night had shown it to me by walking through it.
That is the part I want to put down. The line was paper.
And that woman — that woman with flour in her hair and the whole town in her kitchen — she is the reason I finally understand what people meant when they told me, my whole life, that love was not something you held back.
Love is not something you ration. Love is not something you discipline.
Love is not something you keep small and behave-able and reasonable.
Love is the thing you let do its work on you.
Love is the thing that, if you let it, will lift you up off the porch you have been sitting on too long and walk you, careful and slow, across a paper line that was never there, into a kitchen that smells like bread and cinnamon, into a bed under a quilt your grandmother made for your mama in 1962, into a wildflower path between your home and your wife's bakery, into the rest of your life.
Love is not something you hold back.
Love is something you let rise.
That is what she taught me. That is what she has been teaching me for a year, every day, in small bread-smelling lessons in our own kitchen and on the path through the wildflowers and at the supper table when the kitten is asleep on the windowsill and the lamps are low.
I sat in the grass by the creek with my wife at sundown on the second Sunday in May, and the bullfrog started up properly across the water, and the late light went pink and then purple and then the deep gentle blue of a summer evening, and Harper Kincaid Dalton leaned her head against my shoulder, and I said —
"You good, Harp."
She said, "I am good, Boone."
I said, "Me too."
We sat there in the grass till the lightning bugs came up.
Then we walked back through the wildflowers home.