Chapter 5
SPARK
“We’re staying the night,” Boulder says, not a question, already dragging the porch swing chain out of a coil so it swings clear.
“Okay.” I’m too tired to argue. Some part of me is glad not to climb back in the truck yet, not tonight.
My hands won’t stop shaking, so I give them a job.
I feed the chickens, late enough that they tell me about it.
I check their water trough for ice, coil a garden hose nobody’s touched in weeks and hang it back on its nail.
Anything to keep myself busy and my head somewhere other than those trucks, the sound of them still rolling around loose in me like it hasn’t finished leaving yet.
Boulder won’t go near the house. I didn’t pay attention to it earlier, too busy packing to watch him, but I catch it now.
He finds reasons to be at the barn, the shed, the far fence line, anywhere but past the porch.
When the light shifts gold and long across the yard, he still hasn’t set one boot past the third step.
“What happened in there?” I ask standing at the bottom of the steps with my arms crossed against the cooling air. “You look at that door like it’s got teeth.”
He doesn’t answer right away. He keeps coiling the hose I already coiled, hand over hand, like the work matters more than it does.
“Old business,” he says finally. “Not today’s story.”
“But it’s a story.”
“Some other time.” Not a no, exactly. Pushing harder tonight won’t change it. I let it go. For now.
I mention the truck’s heater to fill the quiet, the fan bearing that’s been grinding since spring and never got fixed.
He doesn’t say anything back. An hour later I find him under the hood with a flashlight in his teeth and grease to his elbows, one hand working a belt free while the other braces the housing, and when I ask what he’s doing he just says, “Fixing it.”
Looks like that’s the whole conversation. He goes back to the belt like I’ve already left. I stand there a minute longer than I need to, watching a man who would rather take a whole engine apart than cross a porch.
It’s full dark before it catches up to me.
I’m sitting on the porch steps with Wade’s parts notebook open on my knees, his handwriting cramped and familiar down every column, torque specs and oil weights in his own hand next to a grocery list scrawled sideways in the margin, and I get three pages in before the letters blur and I can’t make them come back into focus.
The tears get there before I realize it, quiet at first, a hiccup I try to swallow that turns into three more I can’t. I press the notebook shut against my chest like that’ll hold anything in, and I hate that Boulder’s twenty feet away and can probably hear every ragged breath of it.
He doesn’t tell me it’s okay, doesn’t ask what’s wrong when the answer’s sitting right there in my lap.
He crosses the yard, ducks into the truck cab, and comes back with the old wool blanket off the bench seat, drops it over my shoulders without a word, heavy and rough.
Then he goes inside and comes back with two plates of something simple, eggs and the last of a loaf of bread he must have found in the pantry.
He sits on the step below me, half turned toward the lane instead of toward me.
I eat because he put the plate in my hands and because my body still knows how. The crying runs itself out slow, leaving me hollowed out and heavy-eyed, breathing like I carried something up a long hill.
“He was already sick,” I say into the dark. “I should’ve made him see somebody.”
“He wouldn’t have gone.” Boulder doesn’t look at me when he says it, keeps his eyes on the tree line. “That’s not yours to carry.”
He says it like he means it and isn’t only being kind. I don’t believe him but it helps anyway.
I don’t remember deciding to lean into him. One minute the plate’s warm in my lap, the next porch boards are going farther away and his arms are coming under my knees and my back. I’m too tired to do anything about it.
He carries me up the stairs, slow, turning sideways at the landing so my boots don’t catch the rail, into my room.
He sets me down, works my boots loose without jostling me, and pulls the quilt up to my chin, tucks it once at the shoulder, sure-handed, like this isn’t the first time he’s had to be gentle.
“Sleep,” he says, low. “I’ve got the door.”
I mean to ask what that means. I mean to ask a hundred things, starting with what door in that house he’s really guarding against and ending with why a man who first wouldn’t set foot past the porch step is the only person I’ve felt safe with since I found Wade on that kitchen floor. But I don’t. I go under.
The last thing I see before I do is him settling into the doorway with his back against the frame, facing out toward the dark like he intends to stay that way until the sun comes up and proves to him it’s safe to stop.