Sophia #2
Across the table Stephy gave him a look I knew from the inside, the one that translated cleanly to if you have nothing nice to say then shut your mouth, and every last one of the boys had stopped eating to stare at him like he’d grown a second head.
“That’s a question for a teenage daughter, brother,” Clay said, around a mouthful, deadpan. “Not a grown-ass woman. Relax.”
Liam grunted — which was Liam conceding — and went back to his dinner, and the table came apart laughing, and Caleb, who had said not one word, who had let my whole family handle my whole family, put his hand on my knee under the table for a second and took it back.
It came round again, the way everything at that table came round, and landed where Hunter had been holding it.
“So that Panhead,” he said, leaning past Jessica.
“What’d you do with the front end?” And Caleb told him — leaned his forearms on the table and got specific in a way I had not heard him be with anyone but me, rake and trail and a springer he’d built up out of nothing — and Hunter lit up and Clay leaned in, and for a good stretch of that dinner the strange new man at my family’s table was just somebody two of my brothers wanted to talk to about engines.
And through all of it Liam ate his dinner and stayed out of it. Hunter tried once to draw him into the bike talk and got a grunt that closed the subject. Just my brother being my brother, I told myself — he ran cold on every man I ever stood beside — and I reached for the potatoes.
The men took their coffee out to the porch and the kitchen filled up with women and steam.
Aunt Lou ran a dish operation the way other people ran a small country.
I always washed. Stephy dried what she could reach without bending.
Callie stacked and Jessica put away. Maisie had been installed at the table with a coloring book and was honoring strict instructions to stay out from underfoot by announcing each color at the top of her voice.
The window over the sink had gone blind with steam, and out past it I could hear the low rumble of the men — Owen, Wyatt, Hunter — and under it Caleb, saying less, which was just how Caleb was.
“So what’s up with your brother,” Callie said, to the room, drying a glass.
“He’ll come around,” Stephy said, easy.
“Oh, he’ll come around.” Jessica set a plate in the rack. “We all always knew Liam was going to be a nightmare about the first man she brought home. But — did you wear a helmet?” She dropped it into Liam’s flat register, dead-on. “Soph, did he forget you’re not thirteen? Men are so weird.”
“Word,” all four of us said, at the exact same instant — and then looked at each other and lost it, Maisie included, who had no idea what was funny and laughed hardest of any of us.
I laughed too, with my hands in the water, and let it carry me a little way past the thing that had been sitting wrong in me since the yard.
Because Jessica had it half right and didn’t know it.
It wasn’t the overprotective; the overprotective I’d had my whole life.
It was that my brother and the man I’d brought home had shaken hands like they’d done it before — each with the other’s name already in his mouth, no introduction wanted, none given — and I was the only soul in that yard it should not have made sense to, and I’d let it go by.
I’d told Liam more than once, in plain words, to stay out of my business.
No running plates on the men I saw. No “just checking.” He’d grumbled, and gone quiet instead of turning up with a folder, and I’d let myself believe he’d heard me.
Now I stood at the sink and turned it over and couldn’t make it sit flat.
Either he’d kept out of it and the two of them had crossed paths some ordinary way nobody had thought to mention — or he hadn’t kept out of it at all.
Something was up. I rinsed the plate a good deal longer than the plate needed and could not, for the life of me, put my finger on what.
Later, the dishes done, I took my wine to the front of the porch where it was quieter, where the men’s voices came around the corner of the house low and easy and the September dusk was letting itself down over the paddocks the slow way it did out here.
Caleb found me at the railing. He came and set his forearm along the top rail beside mine — close, so the heat of him crossed the inch of evening between us — and looked out at the dusk with me.
“You alright?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I like your family.”
“I know.”
“They like me.”
“I know,” I said, and there was a smile somewhere under it I didn’t bother keeping off my face out here, where only he could see it.
He let a moment go by. Then, lower, looking at the paddock and not at me: “Your brother doesn’t. Yet.”
“He will.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
He turned and looked at the side of my face in the last of the light. I kept my eyes on the dark. Down past the barn a horse shifted and went quiet again.
“Alright, beautiful,” he said.
And the word crossed to me then, warm and low and his — the same word he’d laid on the back of my neck at four o’clock and undone me with.
Except this time, with my arm against his and my brother out past the barn refusing to find him at all, something in me caught on it going by.
The smallest hitch. Like missing a step in the dark and finding the floor was right there after all.
I found the floor. I let the hitch go.
I leaned my shoulder into his arm, and he took the weight of it without a word, and we stood at the rail and watched the dark come the rest of the way in.
He hadn’t said much since we pulled out of the drive, and it wasn’t an empty quiet. Caleb gone quiet was a different animal from Caleb gone absent. The highway ran out black ahead of the headlights, the radio down low on some old song neither of us was hearing, his hand warm and heavy on my thigh.
I watched the dark fields go by my window.
Aunt Lou had sent us off the porch with a foil parcel the size of a tire and a kiss on Caleb’s cheek he hadn’t seen coming.
Owen had shaken his hand again at the truck, longer than the first time.
Liam had said goodnight from the barn door with a lifted hand and not come down, and nobody had made him.
“Thank you for coming,” I said.
“Thank you for asking me.” Simple, eyes on the road.
“I’m sorry about Liam.”
His thumb moved once on my leg. “Don’t be. He’s doing what a big brother should be doing.” The headlights ate another stretch of dark line. “It’s not about me. Not the way you think.”
I let it go by — took it for a generous man giving my difficult brother more rope than my difficult brother had earned — and turned my head to look at him in the green wash off the dash.
I thought about all he had done for me — all the small ways he had been showing up for me. And the sentence came up my throat.
It had been coming up my throat for weeks — since the first time his name had got out of me as the man and not the road, in his father’s yard, with no decision behind it at all — and I had not once let it past my teeth.
I closed my mouth on it.
Not because it wasn’t true, but because it was. And a thing that true wanted the right minute set under it, and a truck doing sixty past a black field with a sad song on wasn’t the minute. That was the reason I gave myself, and I half believed it, which was enough.
He glanced across the cab at me; he’d felt me turn. He didn’t ask. He simply left the quiet I’d opened for it sitting there empty between us.
I put my hand over his on my thigh and squeezed once.
He turned his hand and laced his fingers up through mine and held on, hard, the both of us looking straight ahead now — the highway empty, the fields black, the foil parcel sweating on the back seat — and neither of us said the thing we were each, I was so sure, only waiting for the right order to say.