39. Josie
JOSIE
The wedding is going to be small, and it is going to be ours, and Dot Pruitt is already crying about it and it’s only Tuesday.
“I’m not crying,” she says, crying, dealing cake samples across the back booth like a card shark—six little plates, plastic forks, a legal pad with her rankings already secretly filled out because she pre-tasted everything at six a.m., I’d bet the diner on it.
“It’s the lemon. Lemon does this to me.”
“You haven’t tried the lemon yet, Dot.”
“I’m anticipating.”
October. That’s the date we set, second Saturday, when the cottonwoods along the creek go gold and the pass hasn’t closed yet and the light in the valley does that thing in the late afternoon like the whole world’s been dipped in honey.
Nothing fancy—that was the first and only rule we both said at the same time, laughing.
Clubhouse and the field behind it. Reyes on the smoker.
Folding chairs, mason jars, the string lights that have seen some things.
I’ll be five months along and I’ve already told Casey I’ll be wearing whatever dress still zips, and Casey wrote lol into the actual planning notebook like a line item.
“Maid of honor gets final cake vote,” Casey says now, fork raised, deadly serious. “That’s bylaws.”
“You made up those bylaws.”
“I’m the bookkeeper. I keep the books. All of them.”
“What’s the almond one scored?” Dot demands, leaning over the legal pad.
“Seven and a half. Docked for the frosting, which is trying too hard.” Casey writes it down with the good pen. “The lemon’s at nine. The chocolate’s at six because Tucker will get it on everything within forty feet and we have to think about the photos.”
“Who’s shooting the photos?” I ask, and it comes out easy, actually easy—we hired a kid from the college in Bozeman, sweet, cheap, allergic to drama, and the question just lives in the world now like a normal question, and both of them answer at once and neither one flinches, and that’s its own little quiet milestone nobody toasts: the word photographer, back to being a word.
“And your dress fitting’s the ninth,” Casey adds, flipping to her tab—she has tabs—“which I moved from the second, because—“ she gestures at my midsection with the pen, delicately—“projections.”
“Projections.”
“I ran the numbers. You’re a growth market.”
“I’m marrying into a family,” I tell the ceiling of Dot’s diner, “where the maid of honor calls my body a growth market.”
“You’re marrying into a family,” Casey corrects, not looking up from her tabs, “where the maid of honor has a contingency column. Ask Dot who’s driving you to the church if the truck won’t start in the cold. Go ahead. Ask who’s on the list.”
“Who’s on the list?”
“Reyes, then Tucker, then—and I want to be clear I fought this—Tucker’s cousin with the El Camino.
” She turns the notebook around so I can see it.
There is, in fact, a column. There’s a column for weather, a column for Dot’s oven, a column labeled TUCKER, GENERAL.
My wedding has a risk register, and I look at it, this absurd, thorough, deadpan love letter in spreadsheet form, and have to blink hard at the pie case for a second.
“It’s the hormones,” I announce.
“Sure it is,” says Casey, and slides me a napkin without looking up.
She’s been Casey about the whole thing, which is to say: dry as August, secretly thrilled, organized like a military operation.
Three years of being my best friend in this valley—unofficial, both of us pretending we were just women who did invoices together—and when I asked her official, actual maid of honor, real wedding, she looked at me for a second with her whole deadpan gone and said, “Well, finally,” and had a binder going by that Friday.
And I sit here in the back booth of Dot’s with lemon cake on a plastic fork, Dot arguing frosting with Casey over my head, October coming, and I do the thing I keep catching myself doing lately—I check the ground.
Old habit. All those months of checking—under every good morning, every easy laugh, hand into the dark feeling for the drop, waiting on the shoe, cataloguing his kindnesses like evidence for a trial I kept postponing. I check now the way you press a bruise to see if it still?—
It doesn’t. That’s the report from the back booth on this ordinary Tuesday: solid.
Floor all the way down, every direction I press.
Not because I forgot anything—I remember all of it, the drink table lives in me and probably always will, a little—but remembering’s different than bracing.
He paid in the room where it cost most, and he keeps paying in the room where it counts most, which is the kitchen, the porch, the dark—I love you now like punctuation, like he’s making up a deficit on a schedule only he can see—and somewhere between the clinic and the mic and the morning he brought me crackers before I even said the word nauseous, my feet quit checking the floor.
Solid ground. Turns out you don’t notice it arriving. You just notice one Tuesday that you’ve been standing on it a while.
The fall run told me first, honestly. The Saturday after the kickoff, after everything, I stood in the clubhouse lot at seven a.m. with Dot and the other old ladies and the coffee urns, half braced for a thin turnout—and every bike in the valley was there.
Every one. Forty-some machines idling in the cold morning gold, Reyes sweeping the line, Tucker riding tail, Shane’s sidecar rig gleaming, Jonah so proud of his first full run he could barely sit still on his seat—and my man at the front of all of it, route in his cut pocket, leading his family down a road a week after handing them every reason not to follow.
Wyatt rolled past me last, slow, and tipped two fingers off his brow at me like men do at a job well done, and I stood in that lot and cried into a coffee urn, pregnant and ridiculous, watching forty taillights take the county road north.
Nobody hung back. That’s what the room decided, in the end. Nobody hung back.
And the Sunday after they got home, he took me out.
One last ride—that’s how he put it, standing in the kitchen with both helmets already in his hands, mine still smelling like the inside of my own summer, because I haven’t been on the back of that bike since before the party.
Not banned, exactly. Just—neither of us had reached for it, the pillion seat sitting back there empty all through the wreck and the rebuild like a room nobody opens.
“Doc says gentle’s fine till you show,” he said, ears going faintly red, which means he’d asked Nell, which means he’d stood in that clinic and asked Nell Sutter if his old lady could ride, God help him. “So. Last one till spring. If you want it.”
If I want it. Three years of my whole body knowing the answer to that question.
We went out the lake road, slow, easy, gentle as a man carrying full glasses—no leaning hard, no opening it up, just that low rolling burble through gold September light with my arms around his waist and my knees tucked against his hips and my cheek between his shoulder blades where it’s lived since the first month.
And here’s what nobody tells you about the back of a bike: you can’t talk.
That’s the whole sacrament of it. There’s nothing to do back there but hold on to the man and feel him breathe and watch Montana go by over his shoulder, and every mile of it says the thing louder than the mic night said it—trust, weight, lean where he leans, live where he lives.
I cried a little into his cut around mile ten.
He knew. He didn’t stop. He just took one hand off the grip and held my wrist against his stomach for a second, thumb moving, and put it back, and rode us home.
Last ride till spring. First ride of the whole rest of it.
The baby went public two weeks ago, at Sunday dinner, and we did it my way—which is to say, Levi stood up banging a fork on his glass like a best man, could not hold a straight face for even four seconds, and announced to the whole long table, “Josie’s got an announcement,” which is not standing up himself, which earned him the elbow he took.
And I looked down that table at all their faces—Dot already crying before I said one word, she claims she “had a feeling since July,” which, Dot has a feeling about everything since July—and I said the line.
The real one, retired now from active duty, dusted off for one last mission: “You always say the club’s your family, right? We’re starting our own charter.”
Wyatt got it first. Watching Wyatt Doss get it—the beat, the blink, the slow grin coming up through the beard like sunrise over a ridgeline—was worth every single thing it cost to keep that line alive long enough to land it right.
The table did not hold. Dot’s good gravy boat did not survive Tucker.
And Levi sat back down next to me in the middle of all that roaring with his arm around me and his hand splayed warm over the front of me, in front of everybody, not hiding one thing anywhere, and put his mouth to my ear: “Best charter in Montana.” So.
And the other thing—the thing I notice mostly by its absence now, the way you notice a headache gone: he says it all the time. I love you at the door in the morning, into my hair at night, over the phone before hanging up like a man closing a till, counting it out loud.
Casey caught one of them last week at the shop, Levi passing through the office with a love you, Jo, thrown over his shoulder casual as a wrench handoff, and after he’d gone she looked at me over her glasses and said, “Who taught him words,” and went back to her spreadsheet, and that’s as close as Casey Doss will ever come to writing a poem about us.
The bell over the door jangles and half the shop walks in—lunch rush, grease and sunburn, Tucker loudly requiring pie—and Levi’s in the middle of them, laughing at something Tucker’s saying, head back, that big easy laugh that used to be rare as rain and isn’t anymore.
And he looks up. Straight to me—no searching, like he already knew which booth, like he tracks me the way I’ve always, always tracked him—and catches me watching him.
Neither of us looks away. Three years and a wreck and a rebuild, and neither one of us looks away, and across the whole crowded diner he smiles at me slow, like a private thing in a public room, like a man with nothing left hidden anywhere in this valley?—
“Lemon,” Dot announces wetly, banging her fork down. “It’s decided. I’ve decided. Lemon.”