12. Josie
JOSIE
By nine the party’s a living thing. Bass so deep I feel it in my sternum, in my teeth, somebody’s turned it up twice since dinner, and the room’s gone loose and loud the way club parties do right around full dark—Reyes holding court by the smoker, Dot cutting cake nobody has room for, Tucker with his shirt somehow already half unbuttoned, a horseshoe tournament allegedly forming and dissolving out by the burn barrel every twenty minutes.
I’ve hugged more people tonight than in the last six months combined.
Paige held both my hands and made me promise we’re doing the county fair together next month; Ruth showed me forty pictures of her kid asleep in a dog bed; some cousin of Casey’s cried on me a little, happy-crying, about love generally.
It’s a good party. It’s maybe the best party.
My mason jars look like fireflies down the long tables and three separate women have asked me where I got the idea, and the answer is a magazine at the dentist, and I’ve said it three times like it’s a secret recipe.
And I still haven’t said it.
I’m carrying a cup of wine I have no intention of drinking—poured it myself an hour ago, my little prop, because a woman my age at a party with an empty hand gets asked questions, and a woman with a full wine cup gets left alone.
I’ve been walking it around all night like a stage actress.
Sip-faking. One more night, I keep telling the poppy seed.
One more hour. Then your daddy knows first, before Dot, before Casey, before anybody, the way it’s supposed to go.
Paige catches me by the cake table somewhere in hour two, squeezes my arm, leans in under the bass.
“Three years and he still looks at you like that. You know that? Across the room, all night.” And there’s something in how she says it—warm, and real, and about one degree off, like a note held a beat too long—and her eyes go across the room to where Beau’s working his third circle of handshakes, and come back, and she smiles at me brighter than before.
“Anyway. You look gorgeous. Fair next month, you promised.” And she’s gone into the crowd before I can do anything with any of it, and I don’t do anything with it, because tonight my hands are full of my own life.
The flash finds us once, mid-evening—me and Levi jammed together by the cake table while Dot does logistics, his arm around my shoulders, me saying something up at him and him bending down to hear it over the bass—and I catch the camera lowering afterward, Marley behind it giving me a little there-it-is nod across the room, and I make a mental note to ask for that one printed.
A candid. Us, not performing. The kind of picture you frame and keep on a hallway wall for forty years and your kids roll their eyes at.
I want that picture so much it startles me. Tonight of all nights—I want the whole wall.
The nerves have stopped being champagne and started being something with edges.
Every twenty minutes I pick my moment, and every twenty minutes the party eats it.
First it was Dot needing hands for the cake table.
Then it was the cake itself, which required witnesses, apparently, all of us, assembled.
Then Wyatt telling the story about Levi’s first winter run, which I’ve heard eleven times and still love, but it ran long, and by the end of it Levi’d been pulled clean across the room to look at pictures of somebody’s rebuilt Shovelhead.
Now it’s Tucker. I had him. I literally had Levi’s sleeve in my hand, tugging him doorward—two minutes, that’s all I need, two minutes of quiet air?—
“Steal you for a sec?”
“Steal me for the rest of my life, baby.” And he’d pulled me in against his side, mouth in my hair, and my whole body did its usual traitor thing, settling into him like a docked boat—and I actually had him, one step, two steps toward the door?—
—and Tucker materialized out of nowhere already talking about the straight pipe on his project bike, latched onto Levi’s arm like a barnacle with opinions, and Levi threw me this look over his shoulder. Sorry. One sec. That look.
And didn’t move.
That’s the thing, and I’m standing here with my hand still half-raised in the air where his sleeve used to be, feeling it click over from frustrated to something clearer: he never moves.
He’ll apologize with his whole face and stay planted, because it’s the club, because it’s family, because that pull always wins.
Three years of watching it win—over dinners that went cold, over a weekend in Missoula we planned twice and took never, over every quiet thing I’ve ever tried to build a fence around.
I don’t even resent it, most days; it’s not another woman, it’s a hundred people who’d take a bullet for him, how do you resent that.
But tonight I’m standing in the middle of a party holding the biggest news of both our lives, watching the pull win again, and I love that about him and I could scream about it, both at once, that’s allowed.
So. Okay.
New plan, and the new plan settles over me calm as anything, calmer than I’ve felt all night: I’m done waiting for the perfect quiet moment, because there is no quiet within a hundred yards of this party and there’s not going to be.
I’ll say it right here. Right in the middle.
Bass and brisket and Tucker’s shirt and all.
It doesn’t have to land the way it landed in the mirror—soft light, held breath, movie version.
It just has to land. He just has to hear it.
Everything after that takes care of itself.
And honestly—I look around the room while the decision sets, and it firms me up more, not less.
Because maybe this is better than the movie version.
This is who we are, isn’t it? We’re not a soft-light couple.
We got together at a bonfire with somebody’s dog stealing hot dogs off a card table.
He told me he loved me—the hands version—in a rainstorm at two a.m. with jumper cables.
Every big thing that’s ever happened to us happened in the middle of noise and family and engine grease, so maybe the poppy seed announcement is supposed to happen twelve feet from Reyes’s smoker while Tucker talks about baffles.
Maybe I’ll tell the kid that part someday.
You were announced at full volume, sweetheart. It’s a family trait.
I set my prop wine down on the end of a table, next to a mason jar. Done with the act. Whole hands for this.
I take one breath that goes all the way down, and on the way across the floor I catalog him the way I did the very first night I ever saw him, at that bonfire, before I knew one thing about him except that the whole party bent around him like water around a rock: the size of him, the way he stands planted, beer loose in one hand, head tipped down to hear Tucker over the noise.
My whole future, standing in a crowd with no idea it’s about to double.
My heart’s going so hard now I can feel it behind my eyes.
Three steps out he sees me coming and his face does its thing—opens, glad, automatic, the way it’s opened for me across a hundred rooms—and his arm’s already lifting to make the space against his side that’s mine.
And I cross back to him, hook myself into his side under his arm where I fit, and he pulls me in automatic without even breaking off nodding at Tucker—his hand finding my hip like it’s magnetized, three years of muscle memory—and my heart rate goes up like a flushed bird, so hard I can feel it in my ears, in my wrists, everywhere.
Here. Now. Say it.
I tip my mouth up near his jaw, just for him, under all the noise.
“You always say the club’s your family, right?”
“Mm-hm.” He’s nodding at something Tucker’s saying. Half here. Half his beer gone.
I press on anyway. Poppy seed, don’t say I never gave your daddy a chance.
“What if we started our own?”