Chapter Three
Jules
THE COFFEE WAS ALREADY made when I got to the kitchen, which meant someone had been up before me, which meant I was not, technically, the most unhinged person on this property at five in the morning. I chose to find this comforting.
The ceremony meadow was visible through the window over the sink.
White chairs in even rows, nobody in them yet, the wildflower garlands not on the arbor yet either.
The chairs hadn't been there at midnight.
I didn't go looking for who'd put them out.
I considered this a sign of excellent judgment and absolutely nothing else.
Bobbie-Jean wandered through in a silk robe. FiFi was wearing a sleep bonnet.
This was new information.
"Sweetie, you don't have to be up this early," Bobbie-Jean said.
"I really do," I said.
I absolutely didn't. My body had made its own decisions about sleep somewhere around two in the morning, and those decisions had involved a man at a fence post considerably more than they'd involved any actual sleeping.
She poured herself a mug, kissed FiFi on the sleep bonnet, and drifted back toward the hall. I pulled up my phone and got back to work.
Cooper Ralls — Stoney's nephew, ring bearer, owner of one gerbil — arrived at a dead run six seconds later.
He was six years old and in dinosaur pajamas and an expression that said catastrophe. He skidded to a stop at the kitchen island and looked up at me with enormous eyes.
"Turbo got out," he said.
I knew who Turbo was. I had a capture list that included Turbo — and, as of yesterday, one mini donkey named Brisket. I had contingencies A through C, none of which had accounted for Turbo being out of his cage at five-twenty-two in the morning.
"Okay," I said, in the voice I use when an animal has made a decision I can't immediately reverse. "Let's go find him."
Here is the thing about a gerbil on the loose on a property with a macaw, an orange tabby with authority issues, a Pomeranian and a Chihuahua in custom carriers, and a Great Dane in a sleep bonnet: the situation escalates before you've finished processing it.
Turbo had gotten from Cooper's room, down the back stairs, and into the mudroom by the time we located him.
Butterbean, eight pounds of orange tabby and no discernible governing principles, was already there, watching Turbo from the top of a feed bin with the patience of someone who'd cleared his whole morning for this.
Sarge materialized in the doorway, assessed the situation, and looked at me in a way I chose to interpret as solidarity.
Then Chanel the Pomeranian appeared. Then Birkin, shaking.
I deployed the client-voice. I asked everyone to remain calm, which is a thing you can say to people and which has never once worked on a cat. Butterbean turned and looked at me with the expression of a cat reviewing my qualifications and finding them insufficient. Turbo shot behind a boot rack.
Judge Judy started narrating from somewhere outside.
Bobbie-Jean appeared again in the robe, FiFi behind her, sleep bonnet tilted.
Cooper was crouched behind the boot rack.
I had my hand out flat the way you do when you're trying to convince a thirty-dollar gerbil that you're trustworthy, very still, not thinking about anything else, and for a moment it was actually working.
Then Butterbean moved.
Turbo moved. Sarge moved on instinct. Chanel and Birkin made a sound I can only describe as bilateral. In the scramble I ended up with an orange cat scaling the left side of me like a fire escape.
Butterbean reached the top of my shoulder, surveyed his new elevation, and made a decision I won't describe in detail except to say the smell was immediate, and the silk top was not going to recover. Butterbean had not been in the brief.
Butterbean looked at me, unrepentant.
I looked at Butterbean.
The mudroom had gone quiet. Turbo was sitting in the middle of the mudroom floor eating what appeared to be a piece of biscuit that had been in Cooper's pajama pocket this entire time.
"Found him," said a voice from the back doorway.
Dutch. Jeans, chambray shirt, work boots still damp from the morning grass, no hat.
He took in the mudroom in one look: the small dogs, the cat on my shoulder, Turbo eating a biscuit in the middle of the floor.
His expression said he had a complete picture of the sequence of events and found it satisfying.
He crossed to Turbo, crouched down, and had him cupped in both hands inside of sixty seconds. He stood and held the gerbil out to Cooper.
Cooper's face went so relieved it was almost worse than the crying.
"He had the biscuit the whole time," Dutch said, to no one in particular.
Cooper carried Turbo back upstairs in his hands, reverent and careful, the crisis resolved.
I stepped back against the wall and let my camera come up: Cooper's face in the hall light, Turbo tucked between his palms, the particular seriousness of a six-year-old who has gotten his thing back.
I'd know later it was one of the best frames of the weekend. Right then I just took it.
Dutch was already heading back toward the door.
"Sarge," he said, without quite looking at me, "I need you to tell this woman there's no point chasing that gerbil in those shoes."
Sarge, who was sitting on my left foot, offered no opinion.
Dutch went back out into the morning.
I got Butterbean off my shoulder and went to find a hose.
The main barn was around the back of the house, which required crossing forty yards of open property in a ruined silk top at five-forty-five in the morning.
The barn had a hose. The hose confirmed what the smell had already communicated: the top was a loss.
I stood at the side of the barn in wet silk and the intact linen skirt, dog hair on everything, hair completely Texas by now, mascara that had not survived the gerbil situation, and the general presentation of someone who had prepared extensively and arrived anyway.
My phone rang. Olivia.
"Mrs. Whitestone is escalating. She says if you can't be reached she's going to—"
"Tell her I'll handle it Tuesday. I'm working."
“She’s already called twice this morning—”
I looked at the barn wall. “Just handle it.”
I hung up.
The hose dripped. A horse stamped somewhere in the near pasture. I folded up the silk top and set it on a fence post and looked at it for a moment, which was not useful. Then I went inside the barn.
There was a hay bale in the back corner of the barn, off the main aisle, in the quiet. I sat down on it. I set my camera on the hay beside me. I put my hands in my lap.
The cry showed up without warning. I'd gotten so good at not seeing it coming that I'd stopped knowing I was doing it. A hay bale in a barn in Texas at six in the morning, silk top on a fence post—that was apparently where it had been waiting.
I was still crying when Dutch found me.
He came in from the side door quietly, the way he moved across any part of this property—no announcement, not making a thing of the quiet. He must have seen the shirt on the fence post. He looked at me on the hay bale. Then he pulled a hay bale over, six feet to my left, and sat down on it.
He didn't say anything.
He just waited, forearms on his knees, watching the barn wall.
I don't know how long it took me to stop. Long enough for Sarge to appear at the barn door, assess the situation, and lie down across the threshold like a hairy draft stopper.
"My ex broke up with me a year ago," I said eventually, because apparently this was happening. "He told me my career was boring. Said I was boring with it."
I'd said a version of that to Olivia. I'd said it to myself in the shower and on the subway and over a glass of wine at a dinner where nobody had asked.
I had not, apparently, said this version: both sentences lined up in that order, out loud.
Hearing them that way was a different thing than having them live in my chest.
Dutch was quiet for a moment.
"Darlin'," he said. "I haven't been bored once since you got out of that van."
I laughed. It came out wrong first, the way laughs do when they arrive mid-cry, wetter than you'd planned, and then it came out right, and I wiped my face with the back of my hand and let the laugh be what it was.
Dutch let it settle. Then: "You're trying to manage a thing that doesn't need managing.
" He looked at me sidelong. "The chaos isn't a problem to solve.
It's a wedding. You're already doing the job.
You're just trying to manage a wedding that only needs to be photographed.
" A pause. "Put the camera down for a minute. Then pick it up and let it happen."
It was the most specific thing anyone had said to me about my work in a long time. He'd actually been watching.
"Nobody in my life has ever thought my work was interesting until you," I said. One sentence. I wasn't going to make it a speech.
Dutch didn't say anything back. He reached across the space between us and put his hand against the side of my face.
I went very still. My pulse did not.
His palm was warm and rough at the base of his thumb, the specific roughness of actual work, and nothing about it was put on.
He was just there, present the way he was always present, and the blush had nowhere to run because I had nothing left to hold it back with.
There was heat lower than that too — the kind I'd been pretending wasn't there since the rehearsal dinner — and it had nothing to do with the Texas morning.
My hand moved to the hollow of my throat before I'd made any decision to move it.
He saw it. Of course he saw it.
He held his palm against my face for a count of three, long enough that I understood what it meant and short enough that he wasn't pushing it, and then he dropped his hand.
"We've got a wedding to get back to," he said.
He stood up and held his hand out.
I took it.