Chapter 18 #2
Logan is at the side of the truck waiting.
He puts his hand out, and I shake it. He holds it longer than a handshake needs, the grip of someone who knows what it is to drive away from something and carry it down every road after.
He came to Whispering Creek with a troubled horse and nowhere else to be.
He built a life here that looks like what it is: a home.
Right now I need it to mean something it didn't used to mean.
"You good?" he says.
"I will be."
He looks at me for a second.
"Close it out," he says. "And come home."
He gives me a nod and steps back.
Darla comes out of the dining hall, crosses the lot with a paper bag and holds it out without a word. When I look inside, it's enough food for the drive and then some.
"Darla, this is enough for three days."
"Good," she says. "It means you'll think of me all the way there."
"I'll be back before I finish half of it."
She gives me a look over her glasses. "From your mouth to God's ears." She pats my arm, firm and certain, holds it there a second. "You've got people here, Levi. You remember that on the drive."
I tell her I will. I mean it.
Mandy comes out of the dining hall with the thermos and hands it to me. She wraps both hands around mine when she passes it over.
"Drive safe," she says. "Stop when you need to. Coffee or otherwise."
"Yes, ma'am."
She smiles and lets go.
Then Sutton appears from around the side of the dining hall at full speed with Bingo half a length behind him. He plants himself directly in front of the truck with the authority of someone who has decided he has a say in how this goes.
"You're coming back Friday," he announces.
"Soon, bud," I tell him.
He considers this. Looks at me with Logan's eyes.
"How soon?"
"A few days."
"That's not Friday."
"No," I say. "It's not, bud."
He thinks about this. "Okay," he says finally. "But Bingo's going to wait by the gate."
"Tell Bingo I said not to make a big deal of it."
Sutton looks at Bingo. Bingo's tongue is out.
"He says he's going to make a big deal of it."
I laugh and hold my hand up. Sutton slaps it hard enough that he's clearly been practicing.
I open the truck door. Bingo makes a full, committed run at the opening.
I catch him by the collar before he gets a foot on the running board and deposit him on the ground.
He looks at me like I've done something deeply unreasonable.
I get in and shut the door.
***
I pull out of the lot and watch the ranch in the mirror before the gate takes it.
The barn doors. The dining hall porch. The pasture fence with the horses still grazing beyond. A few people still standing where I left them. Kade already headed back to the barn. Darla on the dining hall steps with her arms crossed. Sutton trying to hold Bingo back from the gate.
Cass isn't there.
She said what she needed to say on her porch this morning. She meant every word of it, and she didn't need to stand in the lot and watch me drive out to prove it. That's who she is. I knew it before I looked, and I looked anyway.
Then the tree line closes in, and it's gone.
I've been here before. Not this road, not this ranch, but this exact moment.
Another road. Another morning, fourteen years ago.
A truck, two bags, a guitar. I was seventeen, and I drove down the ranch road outside Sadler.
I told myself I wasn't going to look back.
I looked back anyway. In the mirror, the same as now.
Garrett was fourteen years old, standing in the gravel drive with his hands at his sides, watching me go.
He didn't run after the truck. He didn't yell.
He stood there and watched. I kept driving.
That image has followed me through every job, every town, every place I put my feet down and called home for a while.
I told myself I was doing my dad a favor.
Told myself one less mouth to feed was one less problem for a ranch already bleeding out.
I had enough reasons lined up to fill all the way to the state line.
I used every one of them. None of them was the truth.
The truth is, I was seventeen and scared. The easiest thing was to go.
Garrett didn't have that option. He stayed because he had to. He grew up fast and hard in the space I left behind. He ran what was left of that ranch while our father sat in the front room and drank.
I kept driving.
I put my eyes back on the road and let the distance open up in front of me.
Last night she was in my bed. Her shoulder warm against mine in the dark, her hair across the pillow, the ranch going quiet outside the window.
I woke up before her and lay there and listened to the early birds starting up in the tree line.
I didn't move because I didn't want to. I've woken up in a lot of places.
I've never once had that feeling before, that weight of a morning where everything you want is already in the room with you.
I think about her hand on my chest after the kiss.
That one extra second before she lifted it away.
She didn't say be careful or come back soon or any of the things people say to fill a goodbye.
She just let me go. That's Cass. She doesn't hold on to things she can't control.
She makes sure you know where she stands.
Then she trusts you to do what you said you'd do.
I'm going to do what I said I'd do.
I drive and let myself think about what I'm coming back to instead of what I'm leaving behind. That's new too.
I don't know what I'm going back to.
But I know exactly what I'm coming back for.