24. Rafe
RAFE
Iplan the sledding trip like it's a small-scale operation, because apparently that's the only setting I've got left after years in uniform and one very long career of taking snow seriously.
I check the back hill's grade the day before, walk the run twice to flag the rock outcropping near the bottom, load the truck with two first aid kits, four spare sets of gloves in case anyone's own pair gets soaked through, and a thermos of cocoa big enough to hydrate a platoon.
Gunny watches me pack all of it into the truck bed and doesn't say a single word, which somehow feels worse than if he'd said several.
"You know it's a hill," he says finally, arms crossed, deeply unbothered by my glare. "Snow. Gravity. Kids on plastic. It's been managed successfully by parents with zero tactical training since approximately the invention of the hill."
"I like being prepared."
"You like control. There's a difference, and you've never once let yourself find it." He says it without any heat in it, almost gentle, and goes back to hosing out a fermenter before I can figure out how to argue with something that's clearly true.
Jenna and the twins are waiting at the cabin when I pull in, all three of them already bundled into snow gear that makes them look like a matched set of colorful marshmallows, and Eli's holding a sled in each hand like he's been personally deputized to distribute equipment.
"You brought two first aid kits," Jenna says, peering into the truck bed with something between amusement and genuine concern. "For sledding."
"One's for minor injuries. One's for anything that isn't minor."
"We're going down a hill on a piece of plastic, Rafe. Not storming a beach."
"Complacency's how people end up needing the second kit."
"Complacency is also how people have fun, which I believe was the actual point of today." She's fighting a smile and losing badly, and something about watching her lose that particular fight does more for my morning than the coffee did.
The back hill's a decent grade, steep enough to be worth the climb and shallow enough that nobody's likely to end up in the emergency room, and yesterday's walkthrough already confirmed the sledding line is well clear of any real hazards.
I explain this to Eli in detail on the walk up, using words like "line of travel" and "hazard clearance," and he listens with the serious nodding of a kid who's concluded, for reasons I don't fully understand, that I am the single most trustworthy source of information in his life.
"So we avoid the rock by steering left at the bottom," he confirms.
"Correct. Left at the marker, all the way through."
"Got it. Left at the marker." He says it back to me like he's reading it off a checklist of his own, and something about hearing my own habits coming out of an eight-year-old's mouth lands somewhere I wasn't braced for.
Josie skips the safety briefing entirely, already halfway up the hill by the time I finish explaining hazard clearance to her brother, dragging her sled behind her with the single-minded focus of someone who heard approximately none of what I said and doesn't feel she's missed a single important thing.
"You didn't listen to any of that," I call after her.
"I didn't need to. I'm either going to be fine or I'm going to be hilarious. Both outcomes are good ones."
"That's not how risk assessment works."
"It's how mine works." She plants her sled at the top without breaking stride, entirely unbothered by several years of formal training I could have offered her for free, and I decide, watching her go, that some people are simply born immune to a briefing.
Josie goes first, screaming the entire way down in a pitch that startles a flock of birds off the fence line, and lands in a heap of laughing snow gear at the bottom, completely unhurt and immediately demanding a second run.
Jenna goes next, less screaming, more control, and still ends up sideways in the last ten feet, sliding to a stop on her back with her arms spread out like she's making a snow angel out of sheer momentum.
"Graceful," I call down.
"You go, then, if you're such an expert."
I am not, in fact, an expert, a truth I discover about four seconds into my own run when the sled hits a bump I somehow missed on two separate walking inspections and sends me airborne for a solid half second before I land, hard, and finish the run on my back with snow packed into places snow has no business being.
"That was not tactical," Josie informs me, standing over me with her hands on her hips.
"No. It was not."
"You checked the hill twice."
"I did."
"And you still crashed."
"I did that too." I sit up, spitting snow, and something about the sheer indignity of it, four walking inspections and two first aid kits undone by a bump the size of a dinner plate, startles a laugh out of me that keeps going longer than the joke actually deserves.
Eli's run is the one that gets me. He goes down with total confidence, aimed dead center at the marker exactly like I taught him, and then about halfway down decides, apparently on instinct, to lean hard left in what he later describes with complete sincerity as "aggressive steering," which sends the sled into a spin that catches my legs out from under me as I'm walking back up, and I go down into a snowbank headfirst with my boots the last thing visible above the surface.
"Aggressive steering," Eli repeats, delighted, once I've clawed my way back upright with snow in places I didn't know could hold snow. "It's a real strategy. I saw it on a sledding video."
"It's a real way to end up needing the second first aid kit."
"Did it work, though?"
"You took me out from a standing position on flat ground. I'd call that a resounding success by whatever standard you're operating under."
He looks so genuinely proud of this that I don't have the heart to explain the several ways it violated basic sledding safety, and Jenna's laughing hard enough at the sight of me that she has to sit down in the snow to manage it, and Josie's narrating the whole disaster to nobody in particular with the enthusiasm of a sports broadcaster covering a historic upset.
We break for cocoa around midafternoon, all four of us crowded onto the tailgate with steam rising off four mugs into air cold enough to bite, and I sit there with my hands wrapped around the warmth and my whole body aching in ways I haven't felt since actual training exercises, and something in my chest goes quiet and strange, settling into a shape I don't fully recognize.
"You're doing the thinking face," Josie says, studying me over her mug.
"I don't have a thinking face."
"You do. Mom has one too. It runs in families.
" She says it so casually, so entirely without weighing the size of what she's just implied, that I nearly choke on the cocoa, and Jenna's eyes cut to mine for exactly one second before she recovers and changes the subject to whether we've got enough daylight left for one more run.
I don't say anything, because there's nothing safe to say to that, but the word sits there anyway, quiet and enormous, while the twins argue about who gets the good sled for the next attempt.
The word is families, and it won't let go of me.
Somewhere between the first crash and the second mug of cocoa, without any moment I could point to, I stopped thinking of this as time spent with people I care about and started thinking of it as mine.
I swore off exactly this six years ago, standing over a bag with somebody else's name on it.
Grief makes you certain of things you shouldn't be certain of, and I was sure I'd never again let my whole life depend on people I could lose.
I built the brewery instead, something steady and containable.
I never planned on four snow-soaked people crowded onto my tailgate becoming the thing everything else gets measured against now.
It should terrify me. Some distant part of it does.
But mostly, watching Eli try to talk Josie out of the good sled using logic that would not hold up in an actual court of law, I just feel lucky, which might be the single most destabilizing realization of the entire year, including the one I had on a ranch overlook eleven days ago.
We get one more run in before the light starts going gray and flat, all four of us piled onto the big sled for a group attempt that ends, predictably, in a pile of limbs and laughter about two-thirds of the way down, nobody hurt, everybody soaked through to whatever layer was supposed to be waterproof and clearly wasn't. By the time we trudge back to the truck the sky's gone the color of a bruise and everyone's shivering despite the cocoa, boots heavy with wet snow, sleds dragging behind us like tired dogs.
"That was the best day," Josie announces, climbing into the back seat with the absolute conviction of someone who has personally ranked every day of her life and means it.
"Better than Oktoberfest?"
"Different category. Oktoberfest had funnel cake. This had aggressive steering." She says it like the two are equally valid metrics, and I decide not to argue the point.
Eli's loading the sleds into the truck bed, wrestling with a bungee cord that's clearly winning, and I go to help him, both of us cold enough that neither of us is talking much anymore, just working through the last logistics of getting everything secured before we all freeze solid standing in the driveway.
"Thanks for today, Rafe," he says, cinching the cord tight. "That was really fun. You're the best at planning stuff like this, even when the plan doesn't totally work."
"High praise, considering the plan resulted in two people in a snowbank."
"Yeah, but it was a fun snowbank." He grins up at me, snow melting in his hair, cheeks bright red from cold, and then something shifts in his face, some thought catching up to his mouth half a beat too late. "I'm glad you're my..."
He stops.
Just like that, mid-word, mid-breath, the sentence hanging open like a door he suddenly wasn't sure he was allowed to walk through, and his whole face goes red for reasons the cold can't take credit for, and he looks down at the bungee cord like it's suddenly the most important object in the state of Colorado.
"Glad I'm your what, bud?"
"Nothing. Never mind." He yanks the cord tighter than it needs to be, not looking at me, and climbs into the truck without finishing it, and I stand there in the driveway for a second with cold working its way into my boots and something considerably warmer working its way into my chest.
Nobody says anything about it. Jenna's face, when I glance over, tells me she heard it too, the same unfinished word landing somewhere behind her eyes that it landed in mine, and Josie's gone quiet in the back seat, which means she caught it too, even if she's smart enough not to say so out loud.
We drive home with the heater blasting and four wet, exhausted people not talking about the thing that just happened. It rides the whole way back with us anyway, like a fifth passenger nobody buckled in and nobody's willing to name.