Chapter 16 #2
The barn is quiet around us. Outside, the T&O group is gathered somewhere near the dining hall. He can hear Sawyer's voice carrying across the property. Bingo is barking somewhere past the tree line.
"I didn't know how bad it got," I say. "I told myself I did. I didn't. I'm sorry."
"And now?"
"I'm going back," I say. "I should have gone a long time ago." I look at him straight on. "I can't fix what I didn't do. I know that. All I've got is going now and closing it right. I need you to let that be enough."
He looks at me for a long time. Long enough that I don't know what he's going to say.
Then he nods. Short and tight.
He walks out without another word. I listen to his boots on the ground, the truck door, the engine. I watch through the barn door until he clears the gate.
Then I sit down on a hay bale and stay there.
Outside, somebody laughs near the dining hall. A truck door closes somewhere in the lot. The afternoon keeps going like nothing happened in here.
I've been telling myself the story of a ranch that was already gone and a father who was already lost, pretending that made leaving mean something different than what it was. It didn't. He was fourteen years old. I took the only way out and left him standing in the yard with all of it.
I sit there until I can breathe right. Then I go back to work.
***
I find Logan splitting wood beside the arena in the late afternoon, the axe moving at the pace of a man who's been splitting wood all his life. I drop down onto a nearby log. He keeps working and doesn't ask me anything, which is exactly what I need.
That's the thing about Logan. He doesn't fill gaps. He listens to all of it and then he tells you the truth.
"I have to go back home," I say. "There's debt on my family's estate that needs to be closed. I've been putting it off for too long, and it's past time. I have to go back in person and deal with it properly."
He sets the axe down, looks down at me and waits.
So I tell him all of it. The whole thing, from leaving at seventeen to Garrett carrying the payments alone for three years.
Logan listens to all of it without filling a single gap. When I'm done, he looks at the axe for a moment and then looks back over at me.
"I know something about leaving before you're ready," he says. "And what it costs the person who's still standing there when you go. That doesn't go away. But it's not the thing that determines what happens next. What you do when you go back is."
"I can go back and pay off the debt," I say. "That part I can do. I don't know if it fixes anything with my brother. But he's been carrying my half of this for three years on a ranch hand's wages, and I can't keep letting him do that."
He picks the axe back up and turns back to the round in front of him. "Then go pay it off," he says. "Give your brother his life back. And come back."
He swings, the wood splits, and he sets the next round in place. That's the end of the conversation as far as Logan is concerned.
I sit there another minute with my elbows on my knees. Logan didn't dress it up. He just named the thing and handed it back. I push up off the log and carry those words with me the rest of the afternoon.
***
The T&O group drifts to their cabins after dinner one by one, the good kind of tired on their faces, the kind that comes from a week of work that asked something real from them.
The fire pit settles into crew territory, the chairs get rearranged, and the beer comes out.
It gets easy the way it only gets easy with people who've put in time together.
Sutton's between Kade and Rhea with a root beer he's treating with the full seriousness of a ranch hand's beer.
One boot up on the edge of the fire ring.
He's watched Kade do it approximately eight hundred times.
Bingo is nose-down along the far edge of the fire pit, convinced somebody dropped something worth finding.
"Bingo," Sutton says, pointing at the ground beside his chair. "Come sit."
Bingo doesn't come sit. Bingo locates a crumpled paper napkin near the chair Cal vacated and picks it up and trots a full lap around the fire pit with it.
"He's not listening," Sutton tells Kade, very seriously.
"He's listening," Kade says. "He just disagrees with you."
Sutton turns this over for a moment. "That's what Mom says about me."
Rhea laughs into her beer. Sawyer tips her head against Logan's shoulder with her eyes mostly closed. I've got the guitar across my lap, but I'm not playing it. I just need something in my hands to keep the rest of me from showing it.
Cass is across the fire from me. She's been watching me, eyes steady on my face. She hasn't asked.
Bingo makes another lap with the napkin.
"Bingo." Sutton points at the ground. "Drop it."
Bingo sits down with the napkin still in his mouth and stares at Sutton.
Eventually, Kade pushes up out of his chair and puts one hand on top of Sutton's head like a fence post on his way past.
"Hey," Sutton says. "Hey, that's my head."
Kade keeps walking. Sutton scrambles up after him, still holding his root beer. Rhea pulls her boots back on and stands. Logan reaches down for Sawyer's hand, and she takes it and goes with him without a word, which tells me it's later than I thought.
Sutton goes last, Bingo at his heels, still carrying the napkin like a trophy.
Then it's just the two of us and the fire burning down to coals and whatever has been sitting between us since this whole long day started.
I set the guitar down in the grass.
"I have to go back," I say. "To deal with the estate. With Garrett. With all of it."
She looks at me across the fire. "Garrett came back."
"Yeah."
"You okay?"
"Getting there."
She nods and waits. So I tell her. All of it, plain and in order.
She lets me go all the way to the end without filling a single gap.
When I'm done, the fire is mostly coals between us.
"You already know what you need to do," she says.
"Yeah."
"Will you come back?"
I look at her across what's left of the fire. "Yeah," I say. "I'm coming back."
“Good."
I think about Logan saying go pay it off, give your brother his life back, come back. I think about Garrett's truck going out through the gate this afternoon. I think about nine years of fire pits and cold mornings in the barn and what it took to build something that finally felt like mine.
I have to leave. We both know it.
Leaving somewhere that became home is one thing. Leaving her is something else entirely.