Chapter Six
Dutch
THE brUNCH CROWD HAD thinned to family by the time my phone buzzed.
Nora: How was the wedding?
“My sister.” I texted back and pocketed the phone. “Told her she’d have to wait and meet you herself.”
“You told her about me?” Jules looked at me, hazel eyes steady.
“Friday night,” I said.
“That was the night we met,” she said.
“I’m aware of that,” I said.
Jules turned back to the table, where Stoney was attempting to convince Bobbie-Jean that the bridal bouquet didn’t need to be pressed and mounted this afternoon. From the look of it, Bobbie-Jean was already winning.
That was fine. I wasn't in any hurry.
Across the terrace, Caprice had her phone pointed at Butterbean, who’d abandoned the cake remnants for a chair cushion and was unimpressed by the pitch.
Faye Ralls worked her way around the table on her own schedule—a hug for each person, nothing rushed, nothing skipped. She pulled Jules in when she got to her, and Jules didn't step back.
"We'll see you back here, I expect," Faye said.
"I think so," Jules said. No qualifier on it.
Faye gave her one more look, warm and satisfied, and moved on.
Bobbie-Jean caught Jules near the mimosa table with the forward momentum she applied to everything—total commitment, no question of whether the other party was ready.
"Quick thing," Bobbie-Jean said, in the tone of a woman who'd gotten married yesterday and had a list nine hundred items long and was working through it.
"My college friend's husband is a senior editor at Cosmopolitan.
I'm going to send him your wedding photos—the animals, all of it. Just giving you a heads up."
Jules blinked. "At a Texas ranch wedding."
"That's exactly right." Bobbie-Jean said this with the full conviction of a woman for whom this was obviously correct. "He loves that zany lifestyle content. You'd be perfect for it." She squeezed Jules's arm and was already moving.
Jules turned and found me with the expression of a woman waiting for the world to finish doing whatever it was doing.
"Bobbie-Jean knows everybody," I said.
"Apparently she does." Jules looked in the direction Bobbie-Jean had gone. "A senior editor at Cosmopolitan. For photos of Princess FiFi demolishing a wedding cake."
"It's a strong image."
"It really is." She thought about it. "That might actually be good for me."
"I'd bet on that editor doing exactly what Bobbie-Jean told him to do."
Jules looked at me. "That's fair," she said.
By eleven-thirty most of the guests were gone. The catering crew was breaking the far tent apart, stacking chairs with the efficient silence of people who had a long drive back to Dallas. Jules had her camera bag consolidated and her rolling case already at the porch door. The van was at two.
I'd watched her work this way all weekend.
She moved through a property the way she moved through a photograph—knew where the edges were before she committed to the center.
The camera bag squared up before the van was even confirmed on the schedule.
The rolling case braced against the door so it wouldn't tip on the gravel.
Everything in its place, even when the place was a Texas porch and the weekend had included a Great Dane, a gerbil, and a macaw with a full agenda.
Most people come apart when a thing keeps going sideways.
Jules had gotten sharper. I'd found that interesting all weekend and I still did.
She was checking her phone when I came up beside her. Still working. Even now.
"Walk with me," I said.
Her eyes went to the camera bag, then to me.
She left the bag by the door and came.
The back pasture was ten minutes on the path that ran past MeeMaw's old homestead and through the live oaks.
The bluebonnets were deep on either side of the track—a good year, better than last. Jules walked beside me without filling the quiet, which I'd come to understand was the highest compliment she gave a place.
The path bent south through the live oaks before it opened up along the fence line.
A good spring—grass coming in deep at the edges, the kind of stand that takes a wet March to build.
Jules had her camera across her body on its strap.
She wasn't reaching for it. Just walking, taking the land in.
I let the path do its work. It was quiet the way it gets out here when the wind drops off—no catering crew, no music, no macaw with commentary.
Just the live oaks and the bluebonnets and whatever she was thinking about, which she didn't say and I didn't ask.
Pancake was at the fence when we got there. Moonshine hung back in the shade the way she always did, waiting to see how the situation developed before committing.
I leaned on the top rail. Jules leaned on the rail beside me and looked out at the pasture. She'd brought her camera. She didn't reach for it.
She had the same quality in the field that she had behind a camera—fully present without announcing it.
I'd seen it on Saturday when the vows were happening and she'd put the camera down and just watched.
Now she was giving Pancake the same attention, and I thought she might not know she was doing it.
Some things a person does before they've decided to.
I filed it away next to the FiFi incident and the laugh in the barn and every other thing she'd done this weekend that was entirely herself.
"Hey, Pancake," I said.
Pancake regarded this with his usual level of interest: minimal, tolerant, politely skeptical. He'd heard most things before.
I watched him a minute.
I'd thought about how to say it on the walk over.
Not a speech, just the plain thing, nothing dressed up.
Pancake had been at this property longer than I had, which said something about patience.
He'd walked into this pasture and decided it suited him and never wasted a morning second-guessing the decision.
I wasn't Pancake, but I understood the logic.
Then I said what I'd come out here to say.
"I know New York isn't going anywhere." I kept my eyes on Pancake. Easier that way. "I'm not asking you to give it up."
Jules was still.
"I'll come to you when I can. You come back here when you can. We work around your studio and your clients and Mrs. Whatever-Her-Name-Is." I put my hand flat on the rail. "I've got the time. I'm willing to put in the work if you are."
Pancake cropped a mouthful of grass and chewed it with great deliberation.
I looked at her.
"You tell me what you need," I said. "We figure it out."
Jules was looking at the pasture. Then she looked at me.
"I don't have an answer yet," she said.
"Okay."
"I'm not saying no."
I nodded. Waited.
She took a breath. "I think I'm saying yes. Eventually." She held my eyes.
I put my hand over hers on the fence rail. She turned her hand over and I threaded my fingers through hers.
"That works for me," I said.
Pancake ambled forward and lowered his head to the grass near the post, taking his time the way he took his time about everything.
Jules watched him for a moment—that particular quiet she had when she was letting something be what it was—and then she lifted the camera with her free hand, easy and unhurried, and got three frames.
I didn't move my hand.
"He's very photogenic," she said, after the third frame.
"Don't tell him. He's already impossible about it."
She laughed, and I stood there in the morning with her hand in mine and a retired draft horse eating grass like none of this was any of his business, and thought: that'll do.
The walk back passed MeeMaw's old homestead.
MeeMaw was on the homestead porch in her rocking chair.
"Well," she said, "that was the best wedding I've been to since my own." She stood up. "I'm going to go sit by my pool with a margarita and a filthy book and let y'all figure out the rest yourselves."
The van pulled onto the gravel at two o'clock. Jules's gear was on the porch. One of the catering crew helped with the big case. I carried the camera bag. Jules let me.
She did a final check out of habit, then stood on the top step and looked at the drive, the live oaks, the ranch house in the afternoon light. I didn't rush her.
She turned.
There wasn't much left to say that the pasture hadn't covered. I stepped up on the top step beside her.
I kissed her—my hand at her jaw, her hands coming up to my chest, and for a moment I had her exactly where she'd been since Saturday night, close enough to feel her breathe.
Her hands stopped being careful about my shirt, and I let it run until one of us had some sense about the gravel and the catering crew standing twenty feet away.
She pulled back. Her face had the open, unmanaged look she'd been showing me since FiFi took out the wedding cake.
"I know where to find you," she said.
"You do," I said.
She got in the van. The door slid shut. Through the window she lifted a hand. I raised mine.
The van turned at the end of the drive. The live oaks closed around it.
Sarge was at the gate. He'd planted himself there when the gear went out and hadn't moved since, watching the road with the focused patience of a dog who took his responsibilities seriously.
He'd assigned himself to Jules the same afternoon she'd stepped off the van, and he was still at it. I crouched down beside him and put a hand between his ears. He didn't look at me. His eyes were on the road where the van had gone.
"She's coming back," I said. "Give it time."
Sarge stayed on the road. I took that for agreement.
The dust was settling back down on the gravel.
I walked back to the fence.
I leaned on the rail and watched the live oaks. Pancake was at my elbow doing what he does. The van had been gone forty-five minutes. New York was three hours and fourteen hundred miles north. And I was already counting the days until she came back.