14. Perry
Perry
I’ve been in bed three days when my brothers stage what my mother generously calls an intervention and I call an ambush.
I haven’t shaved. I haven’t eaten anything Mama didn’t stand over me to finish.
The contract’s still open on the laptop on my nightstand, still unsigned, and Kylie’s book sits on top of it where I set it the night she left it behind, and I’ve read the first chapter of that L’Amour four times without taking in a single word, just to hold a thing her hands held.
Thursday morning the door swings open without a knock and Axe walks in and yanks the curtains wide.
“Up,” he says.
“Go away.”
“Can’t. Mama made breakfast, and she made your favorite, and she says if you’re not at that table in ten minutes she’s coming up here herself. You do not want that, brother. She’s got a face on.”
The kitchen smells like bacon and coffee and Mama’s biscuits, and under all of it, sharp and sweet, cinnamon rolls, which is a low blow, and she knows it.
They’re all there. Herc at the head of the table with his coffee and his newspaper, looking like a man who was up at four and has already fixed three things nobody else noticed were broken.
Axe dropping into his chair. And down at the far end, quiet, a plate and a work glove and a cup of black coffee, my cousin Wade.
Sienna’s here too, in the chair beside Axe with her sketchbook open, drawing boots in the margins while she listens.
And across from her, in pink boots with the tassels and a cup of coffee she plainly brought in from town special, sits Sasha, Herc’s Sasha, who has apparently decided my personal disaster was worth driving out for.
Wade Reddington is my mother’s sister’s boy, raised half of his life under this roof, and he’s got the gift with horses none of the rest of us got and about a tenth of the words.
He trains the yearlings, dodges the family, and turns up exactly when something’s gone wrong, like he can smell it downwind.
He’s here now. That tells me how bad I look better than any mirror could.
Mama sets a plate in front of me. Eggs, bacon, a biscuit, and one cinnamon roll with the frosting thick, and she doesn’t say a word about the roll, which is a sermon all on its own.
“Eat,” she says.
I eat. You eat when Vivian Sterling tells you to.
“So.” Axe butters a biscuit like he’s got all the time in the world. “You gonna tell us how you managed to lose your girl and your best friend in the same night, or do we get to hear it from the knitting circle like the rest of the county?”
“Achilles,” Mama says.
“What? It’s a fair question.” He points the biscuit at me.
“Perry Sterling, undefeated at charming his way clear of anything, finally ran into a thing he couldn’t charm, and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the one that mattered.
” He takes a bite. “That’s not a dig. That’s the first interesting thing you’ve done in twelve years. ”
Herc folds his paper. When Herc talks the whole table quiets, since he does it so rare.
“You sign the Dallas thing yet,” he says.
“No.”
“Why not.”
I don’t have a clean answer, so I don’t give one.
“You already decided.” Herc looks at me over the coffee, flat and sure. “You decided it the first night you couldn’t make yourself sign. You’ve spent three weeks trying to talk yourself back out of your own heart, and it is exhausting to sit across from.”
“You want to know what I think.” He doesn’t wait to find out.
“I stayed. Axe stayed. We built a thing a man can stand on. You left, and that was fine, somebody in this family ought to go see the world. But you didn’t leave for the world, Perry.
You left so you’d never have to find out whether you could stand still.
Now you’ve gone and found a woman worth standing still for, and you’re fixing to run to Dallas so you don’t have to.
” He picks the paper back up. “That’s not a comeback.
That’s the same running with a nicer sponsor patch on it. ”
Nobody says anything. Wade eats. Mama sets down her cup.
“Your daddy,” she says, and the whole table goes still, because she does not bring him up light.
“Your daddy loved you boys past his own breath. But that man could not sit in a room. Always a horse to see, a deal to close, a road to be on. I spent twenty years loving a set of taillights.” She looks at me, and her eyes go soft and terrible at once.
“His heart quit on him on a highway outside Tulsa, driving through the night to one more thing that couldn’t wait.
Not here. Not with us. On the road. I’ve made my peace with it.
But I did not raise three sons to watch my sweet youngest one grow up to be a set of taillights too. ”
I set my fork down. I can’t feel my hands.
She’s right. They’re all right. Twelve years I’ve called it a dream, and it was a bolt-hole with a buckle on it. I dressed running up as chasing. And the one time in my life I found a thing worth standing still for, I got scared and reached for the very exit my daddy died reaching for.
Down at the end of the table, Wade sets his cup down. He hasn’t said a word all morning. He doesn’t look up when he finally does.
“A horse that’s been run its whole life doesn’t know what to do with an open gate,” he says, quiet.
“Bolts every time. Doesn’t mean it wants to be gone.
Means nobody ever stood with it long enough to show it that staying won’t kill it.
” He takes a slow sip. “Somebody stood with you, cousin. And you bolted.”
The kitchen is dead silent.
Then Axe, gentle for once: “That’s the most words I’ve ever heard him say.”
“Don’t get used to it,” Wade says, and goes back to his eggs.
Sasha sets her coffee down. “Can I say the part nobody’s saying?
” She doesn’t wait for leave to, which is why I like her.
“That library isn’t only her mama’s. When I was a lonely kid getting shipped down here every summer, that cool little room full of books was the one place in this whole county I fit.
Ms. Cool Beans, hiding in the stacks.” She taps a pink nail on the table.
“So when you go to help save it, cowboy, get it through your head you’re not doing her a favor.
You’re paying down a debt half this town owes that building. Do it right.”
“And take her flowers,” Sienna adds, not looking up from her sketch. “Real ones. Not gas-station flowers. You’ve got exactly one shot at looking sorry and you will not waste it on carnations.”
“Noted,” I say.
I stand up from the table. My knee howls and I don’t care.
“Where you going,” Axe says.
“Town. I need to think, and I can’t do it with all of you looking at me like a graveside.”
Wade almost smiles. It’s the largest thing his face does all morning.
Novaleen’s bakery is the oldest storefront on the square and smells like cinnamon and warm sugar and strong coffee, and it has smelled that exact way my whole life.
I come in on my crutch with three days of beard on me, and Novaleen takes one look from behind the case and plants both hands on her hips.
“Well,” she says. “Look what the cat dragged in and then thought better of.”
She boxes my cinnamon rolls without my asking, cream cheese frosting, same as she’s done since I was tall enough to see over the counter. But she doesn’t hand them across. She holds the box hostage on top of the case.
“You know what I heard,” she says.
“I imagine I’m about to.”
“I heard Ada Barnes’s girl has been down at that library past midnight every night this week, working herself to the bone to save the place, chin up, eyes red.
And I heard the reason her eyes are red is standing in my bakery right now hunting a cinnamon roll to make himself feel better about it.
” She slides the box an inch closer, then stops it dead. “That true?”
“It’s true.” I make myself hold her eyes. “All of it. I hurt her, Novaleen. I’m not going to stand here and pretend I didn’t.”
Her whole face changes. She’s known me my entire life. She pushes the box the rest of the way into my hands.
“Well, now. That’s the first grown thing I’ve heard come out of your mouth.
” She goes back to wiping the case, not looking at me.
“Question is what you mean to do about it. That girl’s mama kept this whole town’s children in books forty years.
Kylie’s cut off the same bolt. She is not a summer, Perry Sterling.
She’s a life. You either know that or you don’t. ”
I take my rolls out onto the square, and from Novaleen’s step I can see the library.
The SAVE OUR LIbrARY banner in the window, the one I helped her tape up crooked.
The half-built stage in the courthouse lot for a fundraiser eight days out.
The whole thing she’s pouring herself into while I lay in bed feeling sorry for myself.
And there’s a lamp on in the back of the library.
Middle of the afternoon, sun blazing, and she’s got a lamp burning at her mother’s desk, and I know without laying eyes on her that it’s Kylie in there, fighting a war she never asked for, alone, because the man who swore to help her went and turned himself into one more thing she has to survive.
I sit on the bench outside Novaleen’s with a box of rolls I don’t open, and I make the call I’ve been dodging for three weeks.
Dale picks up on the second ring. “Perry Sterling. Tell me you signed.”
“I’m not signing, Dale.”
The line goes quiet. Then: “Say that again.”
“I’m not going to Dallas. No comeback. Tell Stetson thank you, and tell them to go find another golden boy.”
“Perry. Listen to me. This is the offer of a lifetime. This is the world title. This is everything you’ve bled for out here for twelve years. You’re throwing it away for what? A knee that might not come back right anyhow? A girl?”
“A knee that for sure won’t come back right if I rush it, and the Dallas timeline rushes it.” I watch that lamp in the library window. “And yeah. A girl. A town. A whole life. All of it, Dale. I’m staying.”
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Probably. First one I ever made on purpose, standing still.” I hang up.
And then I sit on Novaleen’s bench in the sun and do the one thing I’ve always been good at, the gift I never had to earn. I start working out how to get people to show up somewhere.
Kylie’s got eight days and half a stage and a whole town that loves her and doesn’t yet know how to save her. I’ve got a name in this county, a family with more pull than sense, and nothing left to do all summer but spend every bit of it on her.
I can’t undo what I did. I know that. She may not take me back, and she would be right not to. But she is going to keep that library if I have to drag every rodeo hand and country DJ and washed-up bull rider in three states into Langston to do it.
I pick the cinnamon rolls up off the bench. I know exactly where they’re headed, and it isn’t me.
I’m going to go help a woman save the thing she built, and I’m going to do it whether or not it saves the two of us, because for the first time in my whole running life I want to build a thing instead of leave it.
Starting with the one she built first.