Chapter 30
Chapter Thirty
WILLA
We go to register the bond on a Tuesday, all of us, because Tuesdays have always been mine and because Inez at the town hall does the bond paperwork on Tuesdays and will not be moved off it for anything short of the Rapture.
It is a strange and wonderful caravan that pulls up to the Magnolia Hollow town hall that morning.
Two trucks. Four alphas, or three alphas and a beta if you are being precise about it, and the law in this county is finally precise about it, there is a line on the new form for a chosen bond, which there did not used to be, which somebody fought to put there, and I think about that, that somewhere a beta like Jonah stood in a town hall some year and refused to be left off the paper, and now my Jonah gets a line.
One omega. One small boy in his good shirt who insisted on coming because Pickett told him Inez likes him and Cooper takes his social obligations seriously.
And one furious tortoiseshell opinion in a cat carrier, because Cooper would not leave Bramble home and nobody had the heart to make him, so the cat comes too, registering her objection to the entire proceeding at a volume that makes the metal detector guard reconsider his career.
Inez has run the records desk at this town hall since before I was born.
She has seen every bond in this county get made official across her counter, the good ones and the doomed ones and the ones that surprised everybody, and she has a face that gives away nothing and a heart, I have come to understand, the size of the building.
She looks at the six of us, and the cat, filing in, and she does not smile, Inez does not smile, but something happens around her eyes, and she pulls the big ledger toward her and uncaps her good pen and says, “Mercer pack. About time. I had you in October.”
“You and the whole feed store,” Beau says.
“I don’t gamble,” Inez says, with enormous dignity. “I observe.” And she starts the paperwork.
Roz is there. Of course Roz is there; I would no sooner register my bond without Roz in the room than I would have walked down a hall to my own wedding without her, because twenty-two years ago a sunny lonely girl and a watchful lonely girl decided to be each other’s people, and we have stood up for each other at every threshold since.
She is leaning on the wall by the window with her arms crossed and her eyes already wet, and I remember, with a turn of the heart, standing in this exact spot a year and some ago while Roz registered her own pack, watching my best friend get everything I had spent my whole life being too afraid to want, and being so happy for her, and so quietly certain it would never be me.
The supporting character at her best friend’s miracle.
And here she is now, leaning on the wall, getting to be the one who watches, and the turnabout of it, the sheer this-time-it’s-me of it, goes through me like warm water.
She catches my eye across the room and does the thing we have done since we were eleven, the whole-conversation-in-one-look thing, and what her look says is, the same words she said to me a year ago when our places were swapped and I was the watcher: about time.
And what my look says back is the thing I could not have said back then without lying: I know.
I let myself want it, in the end. You’d have been proud of how loud I wanted it.
And she has to look at the ceiling for a second, my Roz, the watchful one, the one who clocked my fine a year ago and got in her car about it, and I love her so much I have to look at the window.
Inez reads the form aloud as she fills it, the way she has to, the legal language, dry as a stick, and it should not undo me, it is a government form, and it undoes me anyway, because of where it puts my name.
“The pack of record,” Inez reads, “consisting of Asa Mercer, Beau Mercer, Samuel Mercer, and Jonah Boone, bonded chosen, hereby registers its formation as a family unit centered on,” and she pauses, and she looks up at me over her glasses, “the bonded omega. That’s you, hon.
You want to state your name for the record. ”
Centered on the bonded omega.
I have been a great many things in thirty-three years.
I have been the friend, the best friend, the one you call, the one who shows up, the reliable warm reasonable supporting character in a hundred other people’s stories.
I have been the woman keeping a light on at the edge of the frame.
I have spent my entire life as the person a story happens near.
And a tired civil servant with a government pen has just read out, in the flattest official language the state of Georgia owns, that I am the center.
The thing the whole family is built around. Not near the story. The middle of it.
The old word is right there. Its shape is already in my mouth, the deflecting word, the staying-small word, the word I have used my whole life to wave myself back out of the center of any room I accidentally ended up in the middle of.
Somebody looks at me too long, somebody says something kind, somebody points at me, and I say it, I say I’m fine, which has never once in my life meant I am fine.
It has meant please look away. It has meant don’t make me the subject.
It has meant I am the one who tends the story, not the one it is about.
I do not say it.
I stand in the middle of the Magnolia Hollow town hall, centered on, the bonded omega, with four men and a boy and a furious cat and my oldest friend in the world all turned toward me, and the old word comes up the way it always comes up, automatic, armor, and I look at it, and I set it down, and I say my actual name instead, out loud, for the record, in a voice that does not wobble.
“Willa June Tate.”
And that is the sound of a wound closing.
Not loud. Just a woman saying her own name in a public building and meaning it, claiming the center of her own life on an official form, declining, at last, after thirty-three years, to wave herself back out to the edge where it is safe and small and lonely and fine.
Inez writes it down. It is on the record now, in the big ledger, in her good pen, permanent.
Willa June Tate, the center. You can look it up.
Over by the window, Roz makes a small sound, the sound a person makes when they have watched their best friend spend two decades calling herself fine and have finally, finally heard her call herself something true instead, in a town hall, on the record, where it counts.
Four men turned toward me have gone quiet too, and Cooper is watching me with his solemn face, and the whole room is pointed at me, every soul in it, and the old reflex to deflect, to joke, to hand the attention to somebody more deserving of it, does not so much as twitch.
I stand in it. I let them look. It turns out being looked at is not the dangerous thing I spent my whole life treating it as.
It turns out being looked at, by the right people, in the right light, is the warmest thing there is, and I have been hiding from it like it was weather.
Then Asa clears his throat, in the particular way he has, and says there is one more piece of business, and he slides a second folder across Inez’s counter, and I do not know what it is until she opens it, and then I have to put my hand on the counter to stay standing.
It is guardianship paperwork. For Cooper.
And it has all of our names going on it, the whole pack, and there is a line, Asa has had Inez add a line, for me.
For Willa June Tate, schoolteacher, to be made, with the others, one of the people legally responsible for one quiet eight-year-old boy who draws bees in the margins and bottle-raised a goat and has spent his whole short life watching the road for people who do not come back.
“You don’t have to,” Asa says, low, just to me. “It’s a lot to put on paper. But the boy picked you out the first month, and I’m done leaving the most important things unsaid, so. If you want on it. You’re on it.”
Cooper is looking up at me. He has gone still, the careful still, the bracing still, the old habit of a boy waiting to find out if the warm thing is going to stay or go, and I get down on my knees on the town hall floor so I am under him, looking up, the way you make yourself small for a scared thing, the way I have learned is the only way to talk to this particular boy, and I say, “Cooper. Do you want me on it?”
And Cooper, eight years old, in his good shirt, with his whole family and a cat and a government employee watching, thinks about it the way he thinks about everything, all the way to the bottom, and then he says, “You’re already on it. The real one. The paper’s just so other people know.”
I sign every line they put in front of me.
I sign the bond. I sign the guardianship.
I write Willa June Tate over and over in a town hall ledger and on a folder that makes me a permanent fixed unleavable fact in the life of a child who needed exactly one of those more than anything in the world, and somewhere in the signing I stop being a woman who keeps a light on for people who drive away and become a woman other people drive home to.
Bramble yowls through all of it like the whole thing is beneath her.
Inez stamps the forms, both sets, hard, the good heavy civic thunk, and she caps her pen, and she looks at the whole loud sprawling impossible family of us, the four men and the omega and the boy and the cat, and Inez, who does not smile, almost smiles, and says, “Welcome to the record, Mercer pack.” And then, to me, quieter, just for me, the way Pickett does it, the way this whole town does the things that matter, sideways and dry and meaning everything: “Took you long enough, honey. Some of us have been keeping a light on for you a good while too.”