Epilogue
The kitchen floor was oak.
Warm-toned. Honey-colored. Installed over a weekend in August five years ago by a man who measured twice and cut once and didn’t let Meghan help because she’d already tried to use the miter saw and he had decided that was enough of that.
She’d sat on the porch with Junebug and listened to the noise—the prying, the hammering, the occasional word she pretended not to hear—and by Sunday evening, the linoleum was gone.
Wyatt had stood in the doorway and looked at the new floor for a long time. Meghan had come up behind him and rested her chin on his shoulder, and neither of them had said anything, because the floor said it for them.
The kitchen was his now. A room where someone was living, not only remembering.
The coffeepot was still in the same spot. That hadn’t changed. Some things didn’t need to.
Meghan pulled into the drive at 5:20. The salon had been busy—summer always was—and she’d stayed late to clean up after a color appointment that had run long. The drive from town took twelve minutes. She didn’t time it anymore. Her car knew the turns.
The left past the Jennings mailbox. The dip where the gravel washed out after every rain. The final curve where the property came into view—the white farmhouse, the barn, the fenced pasture, the porch with the two chairs.
She parked next to the truck. HAYNES FARRIERY was still on the door. Wyatt had never repainted it. She’d stopped expecting him to.
The porch was occupied. Lily must have heard the car from the barn, because she was already on the top step by the time Meghan parked—overalls, bare feet, purple popsicle evidence on her chin. She’d been in the barn with Wyatt. She always wanted to be in the barn with Wyatt.
Her hair was dark, like Wyatt’s, and needed cutting. Meghan had been saying that for a week. Lily had trouble sitting still, which made the the project complicated.
“Mama.”
Lily spotted her and stood, one hand on the porch railing—the railing Wyatt had fixed twice now, once with cheap screws and once with good ones. Her face did the thing Wyatt’s face did. The almost-smile, caught for one second before it broke through.
“Hi, baby.”
Meghan climbed the steps and picked her up. Lily’s arms went around her neck, sticky with something. Popsicle, probably, based on the purple evidence on her chin. Wyatt’s doing. He had a weakness for the grape ones that he blamed on Lily entirely.
“Daddy’s in the barn,” Lily said.
“I see that.”
“He’s checking Junebug.”
“He does that.”
Meghan carried Lily to the fence. Junebug was there, in his spot, old gray head over the top rail.
Twenty-seven years old now. His muzzle was white, his back swayed, and he moved slower than he used to.
But he was here. Every morning, in his spot, watching the house, waiting for whoever came to the fence first.
Lily reached out and touched his nose. Junebug lowered his head and held still, patient and tolerant.
Pop had found him at an auction at six years old, underfed and skittish.
Now he was the oldest horse in the county, and he let a two-year-old pat his nose with grape-stained fingers without so much as a flicker.
Wyatt came out of the barn, rasp in one hand, leather apron still buckled on. He saw them at the fence and crossed the yard, and Lily lunged for him before he was close enough to catch her. He caught her anyway. He always did.
“How’s Junebug?” Meghan asked.
“Good. Feet are solid.”
“And the bay mare?”
The bay mare was nine now. Fully trained, calm, the kind of horse you could trust with a beginner or a child. She’d come a long way from the barn doorway where she used to stand, watching and deciding. These days, she grazed in the open pasture and came to the fence on her own.
“She’s good,” Wyatt said. “She let me pick up all four without arguing.”
“Progress.”
“She’s been making progress for five years. At some point, we just call it done.”
He shifted Lily to his left arm and put his right hand on the small of Meghan’s back.
They walked to the porch together, the three of them.
Lily talked the whole way. About a bug she’d found on the step, or the popsicle, or Junebug, or all three at once in the way two-year-olds talked about everything simultaneously.
Meghan climbed the steps and pushed open the screen door.
The kitchen was warm from the afternoon sun.
The oak floor caught the light from the window, golden and clean.
The coffeepot was on the counter. The mugs were in the cabinet.
The clipboard was on the shelf in the barn, and the tools were on the wall, and the truck was in the yard.
Wyatt set Lily down on the floor. She walked immediately to the window and pressed her face against the glass, looking for Junebug. He was at the fence. He was always at the fence.
Meghan stood at the kitchen counter and looked out the window.
The same view. The pasture, the fence, Junebug, the mountains beyond.
She’d stood here for the first time five years ago, holding coffee in this kitchen, looking at this view, standing on cracked green linoleum in a house that belonged to a man who had died two years before she ever walked through the door.
The linoleum was gone. The coffeepot was in the same spot. The view was the same. The man she loved was unbuckling the apron in the hallway, and their daughter was pressing grape-stained fingers against the window, and the old horse was at the fence, and the mountains held all of it.
Meghan filled the coffeepot. She set out two mugs while she listened to Lily narrate the view from the window in a stream of words that made sense only to her.
Everything that needed to change had changed.
Everything else had stayed.