17. Last to Know
Last to Know
JAKE
Promised Land Ranch — Late Afternoon
Tommy says yes at breakfast.
He says it the way he says everything, having decided in the night and arrived at the table with the decision already complete. No preamble. Just. “I'm in. Let's figure out the money.”
Jake says yes back. We shake hands across the kitchen table.
Maggie, at the counter, says nothing. She is making coffee, her back to us, and she doesn't turn around, but I can see in the set of her shoulders that she has been waiting for this exact moment for a long time.
We spend the morning working through the initial investment options.
Tommy has more resources than the ledger suggested: a small savings account his father did not know about, a piece of equipment that can be sold, and a neighboring rancher who has expressed interest in a grazing lease on the unused southwest pasture.
The number gets smaller as the morning goes on.
Not solved. Smaller. Closer to possible.
By noon, we have a working outline and a list of next steps, and Tommy looks like a man who has set down something he has been carrying for two years.
At lunch, Maggie says, without looking up from the table: "You two should go to dinner tonight."
Tommy, who has been staring at the spreadsheet I made, says, "Good idea. We're fine here."
He says it with the smooth confidence of someone who has been told to say exactly this.
Lila and I exchange glances.
Maggie takes a bite of her sandwich.
"There's a place in town," Tommy says. "Rosario's. It's good."
"We know," Lila says.
"Then you know it's good." He goes back to the spreadsheet. "Seven o'clock."
Lila looks at her mother.
Maggie looks at her sandwich.
This family is something.
* * *
Rosario's is a twenty-minute drive down a county road I have not been on before and could not find again without directions. It is in a small town with a gas station, a feed store, a church, and Rosario's in that order, and Rosario's is clearly the reason anyone drives through.
The parking lot has six trucks in it when we arrive. The sign is hand-painted. The smell coming through the door is the smell of a place that has been cooking the same things the right way for decades.
I hold the door.
Lila goes through.
She has changed out of barn clothes. She is wearing a bright pink top with dark jeans, and her hair is not quite as spiky tonight. She has makeup on and looks quite stunning in a very understated way.
This creates a problem I did not have forty minutes ago.
I've spent months seeing Lila Chen as capable, stubborn, brilliant, and entirely too easy to think about.
Tonight I notice she's beautiful, and that feels like a complication I should have seen coming.
I follow her inside.
* * *
The woman behind the counter is sixty or so, small and quick, with the authority of someone who has been running this room for thirty years and has never once been unsure of anything.
She looks at Lila, and her face does the thing faces do when they recognize someone they haven't seen in a long time.
"Lila Chen," she says.
"Mrs. Rosario."
"I heard you were back." She comes around the counter and takes both of Lila's hands and looks at her with the frank assessment of a woman who knew this girl when she was small. "You look good. You look like your mother."
"She's at the ranch."
"I know. I talked to her last week. And who is this?"
"Jake Wilder," Lila says. "He's helping with the ranch situation."
Mrs. Rosario looks at me for a moment with the same frank assessment she applied to Lila.
"Wilder Ranch," she says. "Outside Amarillo."
"Yes."
"I know your father." She nods like this confirms something. "Good man. Good ranch." She picks up two menus. "Come. I have the corner table."
She leads us to a corner table that has a candle on it.
I look at the candle.
Mrs. Rosario sets down the menus and goes back to the counter without comment.
Lila sits down.
I sit down.
We look at the menus.
"Your mother called her," I say.
"Yes," Lila says.
"To tell her you were back."
"Probably to coordinate."
I look at the candle again.
"The corner table," I say.
"With the candle," Lila says.
"Does this town have a lot of corner tables with candles?"
"Just the one." She opens her menu. "My mother has been waiting two years for this dinner to happen."
I look at my menu.
"How do you feel about that?" I ask.
She is quiet for a moment.
"I'll let you know after dessert," she says.
* * *
The food is excellent. The kind of excellence that makes you stop talking for a few minutes when it arrives, which is the highest rating a meal can receive.
Mrs. Rosario comes by twice, not to check on us but to observe us. I recognize this because Pete does the same thing, and I have had thirty years to study the technique.
Lila eats with the focus of someone who spent a week on ranch food and is rediscovering that restaurants exist. I find this unreasonably endearing and say nothing about it.
"Tell me something I don't know," she says, somewhere into the second course.
"About what?"
"About you. Something that isn't the ranch."
I take a minute to think.
"I wanted to be an astronaut until I was eleven," I say. "I wrote to NASA. They sent back a polite form letter."
"You wrote to NASA."
"I listed my qualifications. Good at math. Had seen a lot of sky."
"Those are not astronaut qualifications."
"I know that now. I was nine."
She smiles. A real one. Not almost. Full and brief and gone quickly, but real.
I collect it the way I have been collecting her almost-smiles for months, except this one is different, and we both know it.
"Your turn," I say, before she can think about it too much.
She considers.
"I almost quit drums when I was sixteen," she says. "A teacher told me I didn't have the instincts for it."
"Clearly wrong."
"Clearly. But I spent about three weeks believing him." She looks at her plate. "My father is the one who told me the teacher was an idiot. Not in those words. But that was the substance."
"What words did he use?"
She almost smiles again. "He said, ‘Some people hear music the way other people hear traffic. It is not a skill they have. It is not something they can teach.’”
"He was right."
"He was right about a lot of things I wasn't paying attention to."
I let that sit.
"Tell me something embarrassing," she says. "Something Pete hasn't already told me."
"Pete has told you things?"
"The tractor. The water tower cat. Calamity in general."
"Right." I think. "I once got lost on my own ranch. I was eight. My father found me sitting at the stock tank completely calm because I figured if I stayed near the water, someone would come."
"That's good survival instincts."
"I was three hundred yards from the barn."
She laughs.
Not almost. Not close to a laugh. An actual laugh, warm and unguarded, and it is the best thing I have heard in a long time.
I look at my food.
I am in significant trouble.
If she keeps laughing at me like that, I'm going to start telling her every embarrassing story I've ever survived.
Because now I know exactly what I'm trying to earn again.
"Your turn," I say. "Something embarrassing."
"I once told a producer his tempo was wrong, and the engineer played it back, and I had been hearing it wrong the whole session."
"What did you do?"
"Said: you're right, let's move on."
"Did anyone else hear it?"
"Three people. Dale still mentions it approximately once a year."
I smile. She watches me smile and doesn't look away immediately.
Neither do I.
Then she looks at her food.
"Your father knew," I say. "About the drums. About what you were." She looks at the candle.
"I don't know if I ever told him that mattered."
"How do you know that? He named the ranch for hope," I say. "He told a teacher who tried to take something from you that the teacher was wrong. A man who does both of those things knows exactly what he is giving his daughter. He just couldn't say it out loud."
She is very still.
"You don't redirect," she says.
"What?"
"When something gets real. You stay with it. My father always redirected."
"I know."
"You're very different from my father."
"Is that a good thing?"
She looks at her plate for a moment.
"Yes," she says. "I think it is."
Mrs. Rosario brings dessert that neither of us ordered. She sets it down and goes away without a word.
Lila looks at it. "My mother definitely called ahead."
"Definitely," I say.
We eat the dessert.
* * *
LILA
Rosario's / Promised Land Ranch
The thing about being back in a place where people knew you when you were young is that you become that person briefly again. Not entirely. Just around the edges.
Mrs. Rosario knew me when I was eight and came in with my father on Saturday mornings. She would give me a piece of bread to keep me occupied while the adults talked. She remembered my name tonight before I said it. She had the corner table ready.
My mother planned this. I have known my mother my whole life, and I have never once managed to get ahead of her plans. Apparently, this is not going to start tonight.
The corner table has a candle.
Jake looked at the candle, then at me, and I looked back at him, and neither of us said what we were both thinking: We have been set up by a sixty-year-old woman with arthritis who has been waiting for this for two years.
Instead, we looked at our menus.
I have been looking at Jake Wilder in work clothes for weeks. Barn clothes, fence clothes, the worn practicality of a man who spends his days doing physical things.
Tonight, he is in a clean shirt, his hair is slightly different, and he is, I am registering for the first time with some inconvenience, objectively attractive in a way that the barn context had helpfully obscured.
The barn context is not present at Rosario's.
I read the menu very deliberately.
* * *
He told me about writing to NASA when he was nine.
Listed his qualifications. Good at math. Had seen a lot of sky.
I have been containing the Jake Wilder effect for months with significant effort. The effort has included: not looking directly at him when he smiles, keeping the clipboard as a physical barrier in professional contexts, and reminding myself regularly that warmth is not the same as direction.
The clipboard is not here.
He told me about the NASA letter with the completely straight face of someone telling a true story about themselves that is slightly embarrassing and entirely charming, and I smiled before I could stop myself, a real one.
The kind that happens before the decision to allow it.
He noticed. I saw him notice.
He did not make a thing of it. He just said, “Your turn.”
I told him about my father teaching me piano. I don't know why I told him that. It came out the way things do when you are in a place where someone you loved was present, and the walls still remember him.
He said, “He knew.”
He said it without hesitation, without softening it into a question, without redirecting. Just: he knew. As if it were simply true, and he did not doubt it.
I sat with that for the rest of the meal.
My father knew.
Jake Wilder said it plainly at a corner table with a candle, in a restaurant my father used to bring me to on Saturday mornings, and I believed him.
That is something that happened tonight that I did not expect.
* * *
The drive back is quiet in a good way.
The Panhandle is dark. The county road. Twenty minutes of stars overhead and the flat land going by, and Jake driving the way he always drives. Easy. Present.
We pull up to the Promised Land Ranch gate, and he stops the truck.
I get out to open it.
I close the gate and turn around, and he is standing there. He gets out of the truck.
The night air is cool and still, and it smells like the Panhandle, red dirt and dry grass and the clean mineral smell of land that doesn't apologize for being itself.
He is looking at me. Not the way he looks at the fence line or the cattle or the ledger books.
The way he looks at things, he has been paying attention to for a long time, and has finally stopped pretending he is not paying attention.
The distance between us is small. It gets smaller. I am not sure which one of us moves. Maybe neither of us. Maybe the night just does it.
His hand comes up and rests against my jaw, warm and steady.
I forget to breathe.
He doesn't pull back immediately. Neither do I.
The stars are out. The gate is behind me. The name on the gate is my father's name.
I step back.
Not because I want to.
Because I need one more day to be sure that what I am feeling is mine, and not just the land, the night, and everything that has happened in the last two days.
A strand of hair has come loose, and the wind keeps pushing it across my face.
His hand almost reaches for it.
Then he doesn’t, and lowers it instead.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't ask if I am okay, or what just happened, or whether I want to talk about it.
He just waits.
"I know," I say. It is not a sufficient sentence, and we both know it.
"I know too," he says.
I get in the truck.
He drives up to the house.
My mother is probably already in bed, but the porch light is on, and that is its own kind of thing.
I lie in the guest room, look at the ceiling, and think: tomorrow.
One more day.
Then I will know for certain.
JAKE
I sit on the porch for a while after she goes inside.
The Panhandle night is quiet. The cattle are settled. The stars are doing what they always do out here, twinkling in the dark sky.
I put my hand on the porch rail and think about the gate. The distance got too small. She is stepping back.
She stepped back.
She did not step away. There is a difference, and it matters. I know the difference because I have been paying attention to Lila Chen for months, and I know what away looks like on her, and this was not it.
This was: not yet.
Pete's voice in my head, reliable as the north fence: the long way around.
One more day.
I go inside.