Sophia
Sunday, and I’d been ready for the better part of an hour for a thing I’d been to a thousand times.
That was the tell, if I’d wanted to read it.
Sunday dinner at the ranch wasn’t a dress-up.
It was jeans and whatever clean shirt was nearest and whoever turned up; I’d come in off a night shift in scrubs before and all that changed was Aunt Lou getting a plate in front of me faster.
There was nothing to get ready for. And yet here I was at the bathroom mirror at four in the afternoon, dressed an hour ago, doing and undoing my hair as though the fate of nations hung on it.
There was exactly one thing the matter with me, and he was in my bedroom putting on a shirt.
Through the wall I could hear him — the drag of a drawer I kept meaning to oil, the wardrobe door, the small grunt a big man makes pulling a shirt down over shoulders the shirts of this world were not built for.
His razor was on my shelf, two of his shirts in my wardrobe, and he hadn’t slept on his own side of the road in days; the ugly parts-supplier mug had stopped being a guest in my drying rack and turned into a staple.
I gathered my hair up, the lavender tie still round my wrist, couldn’t commit to it, and stood there with the whole lot half-fisted on top of my head. I glance at myself in the mirror and let out a small snort at how ridiculous I looked.
He came to the doorway working a cuff. He didn’t say anything.
He crossed the small room and stood behind me and reached up and took my hands gently down out of my hair, so the whole of it fell loose down my back.
Then he gathered it in one hand, moved it off my neck, and looked at me in the mirror — not at the hair, at me, a look that took the air clean out of the room — and said, low, “So beautiful.”
He bent his head and put his mouth to the side of my neck, slow, and said the rest of it into my skin. “Always beautiful.”
And I melted back into the size and the warmth of him and watched the woman in the mirror go soft and stupid and smiling, because there is not a woman breathing who does not want exactly that, exactly like that, from her man — and somewhere this week I’d stopped pretending I was the exception.
For about four seconds. Then the nerves came back up the way they’d been coming all afternoon, and I caught his eye in the glass and started talking.
“Okay. So. You should probably know what you’re walking into.
” His mouth stayed warm against my hair, but he let me go.
“There’s Aunt Lou and Owen — Owen’s easy, Lou decides about a person inside one Sunday and there’s no appeal.
And Liam, obviously. And then there’s the boys, because I’ve basically got five brothers, if you count the Blackwood ones, which I do, because they count me.
Wyatt and Clay and Hunter and Luke — Luke’s in Dallas, so four tonight — and five brothers is a lot of brothers even with one of them in Dallas, and they are, every one of them gets…
protective, is the word is the word I’ve always used, Liam the worst of them, and Liam’s been strange all week on top of it, so… ”
“Sophia.”
“…and the wives are wonderful, but they’ll be watching too, and I’ve never done this, not once, never brought a single soul up that drive, so the whole table is going to lose its mind quietly and pretend it isn’t, and—”
He turned me round by the shoulders, away from the mirror, and put a hand along my jaw and tipped my face up to his. “Baby.” His thumb moved once on my cheek. “It’s okay. Breathe.”
I breathed.
“Brothers I can do. I’ve got plenty of them. People are people. It is going to be fine.” The corner of his mouth went. “Stop stressing.”
I breathed again. He watched me do it, unhurried, until it took. “Okay,” I said.
“Okay.” He kissed my forehead, and let go, and went to find his boots, and I left my hair the way he’d left it, down, and went to find my shoes and my nerve.
The gravel drive ran up between the two lines of fence Owen and the boys re-strung every spring, and Caleb slowed the truck for Sully, the old ranch dog asleep in the middle of it, who had never moved for anybody and wasn’t about to start.
Louisa was off the back porch before he had it in park, tea-towel still in one hand, coming down the steps at the clip she’d come down them for me my whole life.
By the time Caleb came round the front of the truck she had both his hands in both of hers.
“Caleb. You’re very welcome, sweetheart.
I’m Louisa.” She held them a half-second past a handshake, looked up into his face, and gave him a small nod — the same one I’d watched her give Stephy at this door years ago, and Ivy after her.
Owen was a step behind, hat on, hand out. Caleb took it, and Owen’s other hand came down square on his shoulder, once. “Glad you could come, son.”
Then the shriek, because Maisie always shrieked before she ran — “Aunty Sophhhhh” — and a small body in pink boots crossed the yard at a dead sprint and hit my legs, and I had her up on my hip before I’d decided to, seven years old and furious with love and already a long way into a story about a frog.
And then they were all coming, the way the Blackwoods came at everything — at once, from three directions.
Wyatt and Ivy round the side of the house, Ivy a couple of weeks behind Stephy and with one hand at the small of her back.
Wyatt put his out plain. “Wyatt. Glad to meet you, Caleb.” He meant it — Wyatt always did.
Clay was on his heels, leaner and quicker, taking Caleb’s hand and looking him over.
“Clay. So you’re the one.” Callie elbowed him in the ribs.
“Ignore my husband. I’m Callie. We’re all completely normal, I promise you. ”
Hunter came off the porch wiping barbecue sauce off a thumb.
“Hunter.” He gripped Caleb’s hand and skipped the pleasantries entirely.
“You run Black Iron, out on Route Nine. There was a chopped Panhead in your window a while back — that one yours?” Caleb said it was.
“Knew it,” Hunter said, like a thing had been decided, and Jessica leaned past him to take Caleb’s hand herself.
“I’m Jessica, and I’m apologizing in advance — he is going to talk bikes at you until you beg him to stop. ”
Stephy hadn’t come down the steps, because Stephy was not coming down anything.
She was at the porch rail with both hands on it and the baby out front of her like a dare.
“So you’re the man,” she said, looking him over with frank relish.
“You’re going to help me out of every chair I sit in tonight, and I am going to like you for it. ”
“Yes, ma’am,” Caleb said.
“Don’t ma’am me. Steph.”
And I stood in the middle of my whole family with Maisie on my hip and the frog going strong, and watched them take him — one after another, each with the exact thing that was theirs to give — and I had to put my face down into Maisie’s hair for a second so that nobody saw me blink.
The only one who hadn’t come was Liam.
His truck was nosed in by the barn, the dust not long settled. He came round the corner of the porch with a feed sack over one shoulder, set it down, wiped his palm on his jeans, and crossed to us.
“Caleb.”
“Liam.”
They shook hands. And it was nothing — a handshake, dry, over in a second — except that I was standing right there and hadn’t said a word — hadn’t put a name to either of them, hadn’t done the thing you do, the this is Caleb, this is my brother Liam — because neither of them had waited on me to.
They’d each had the other’s name ready. They shook hands like two men confirming a thing, not starting it.
It went by so fast and so ordinary that the day closed over it before I’d finished noticing. Maisie took my face in both hands and turned it back to hers. “Aunty Soph. The frog.”
“The frog,” I agreed, and carried her up the steps, and Caleb came up behind me with his hand at the small of my back, and behind us Liam shouldered the feed sack again and went the other way, toward the barn.
Aunt Lou’s table on a Sunday was a geography you were born knowing.
Owen at the head, as always. Louisa at the foot, nearest the kitchen, because she’d be up and down a dozen times no matter how many of us swore we’d fetch it.
The rest of us filled in down the two long sides by a logic nobody had ever written down, and everybody obeyed.
I put Caleb beside me. Liam sat down the long side across from us, past a centerpiece of the last dahlias Aunt Lou had cut that morning.
The food came down in the relay it had run my whole life — Owen carving, Louisa conducting from the foot, dishes hand to hand, Maisie opening hard negotiations for a roll she had no intention of eating — and into the warm loud middle of it Caleb folded without a seam.
Stephy got me first.
“We don’t see nearly enough of you out here lately, Soph,” she said, sweet as pie, reaching for the beans. “Busy, are you? Lots going on?” And she did a thing with her eyebrows, up and down, slow, looking dead at me, and the whole table became suddenly fascinated by its plates and fooled no one.
I went hot to the ears. “I’ve been around.”
“Mm. Around.” More eyebrows.
“Stephy.”
“I’m only saying we miss you.” She was thrilled with herself. Beside me Caleb lost a quiet fight with his own smile.
To get off myself — a thing I do under fire — I said it to the table at large. “He took me out to the falls on the bike last week. Up the ridge road. It was—” and I meant it, so it came out plain, “—it was beautiful up there.”
“On the bike,” Liam said.
I should have heard it coming. “On the bike.”
“Did you wear a helmet?”
The table didn’t go quiet so much as go alert. I set my fork down and looked at my brother. “Are you serious right now?”
For one glorious second Liam looked like a man hearing his own question land. “What,” he said, with markedly less conviction. “It’s a reasonable question.”