Epilogue 2
Wade
The wedding-date bracket pays out to Loretta — of course it pays to Loretta.
She had "the second Saturday of certification season" locked in since spring, and when Jake demands to know her methodology she says, "Forty years of watching Callie's kind of stubborn and Dean's kind of patient, sugar.
Also I asked the caterer." The crowd howls.
Money changes hands. Kowalski's mother enters the payout in the scrapbook, which now requires two volumes.
And then Callie — my future sister-in-law, standing on a hay bale with a sparkler in one hand because this family cannot be trusted with elevation or pyrotechnics — makes it official: "After certification season," she announces, to cheering, "which for those of you holding new bracket positions—" she means everyone.
Wanda opened the board an hour ago—"is next spring.
One year. Y'all can start the casserole planning now, I know you've been waiting. "
One year. The whole county's clock, set in front of the whole county.
Somewhere east of here, in an office I've never seen, a man who bids on hurting people is reviewing his invoices, and the state's threads keep pulling, and the folder with the LATER tab sits locked in my desk getting heavier.
That's next year's weather. I've learned a few things about borrowing trouble from a woman who audits her own happiness weekly — you can note the clouds without living in them.
Tonight is string lights and new puppies and my mother dancing with my father to a fiddle waltz, and I am off the clock.
Almost off the clock. Some things I still monitor.
Which is how I see it happen: Tank, threading the party crowd with the deliberation of a dog on a mission, right past Delaney — right past her, his own person, his chosen one — to where I'm standing at the rail of the puppy window.
He performs one lap of inspection. Circles. And sits down on my feet.
All of him. Ninety pounds of failed bomb dog, on my boots, leaning back into my shins with a sigh like a couch settling, facing outward — on watch, on shift, guarding what I guard.
Across the crowd, Delaney sees it and puts her hand over her mouth, and I stand very still, the way you do when something wild decides you're safe, and Jake (who misses nothing, who has never once missed anything) raises his cup and announces to the general assembly: "It's official, the dog signed off," and the party drinks to me being sat on, and I look down at Tank's enormous contented head and understand I have just received the highest security clearance this family issues.
"Noted," I tell him.
My parents dance three waltzes, and during the second one I watch my father say something into my mother's hair that makes her laugh her 1971 laugh, and I think about 1998, and the LATER tab, and how much this family has survived that I only know the shape of, and then Rosie catches me watching and points one finger at me over Dad's shoulder, mid-waltz, an unmistakable maternal semaphore meaning stop working, and I stop working.
Winnie falls asleep under the pie table at 9:40 and is extracted by Cash with the practiced tenderness of a bomb tech, one hand cradling her head, her crayon clipboard still clutched to her chest. The junior-handler sign-in sheet, reviewed later, will show forty-one visitors to the whelping room, each name checked twice, plus one entry near the bottom in careful five-year-old block letters: brISKIT — NO.
Denied at the door. There's a note. The note says PURPITRATER.
The party winds down the way good ones do, in shifts and hugs and to-go plates forced on everyone by Rosie. Dean finds me at the rail last, two of Loretta's coffees, and we stand watching Willa's pups sleep in a pile in the barn our two families built.
"So," he says. "Engagement parties. Weddings. You taking notes, big brother?"
"I don't know what you mean."
"Uh-huh." He grins into his coffee, the flyboy grin, the one that got him grounded twice and married once, almost. "For the record, when it's your turn? I'm giving the toast, and I'm telling the goat story."
"Which goat story?"
"Wade," he says. "All of them."
Down the yard, Jake has cornered Cash by the drink coolers, and I catch the shape of it on the night air — the eval, big man, June's certified now, you're out of excuses, when are you gonna let Doc look at that knee, and Cash says nothing, which is standard, and looks off at the dark pasture in a way that is not standard at all, a way that has a whole story pressurized behind it, and Jake, for once in his charmed life, reads the room and lets it go.
Not tonight. Tonight the barn is full, the fence is down, the board is fresh, and the woman crossing the yard toward me in my jacket has her hand out for mine like it's procedure.
It is. It's in the record.
Pending review — approved.