2. Priest
TWO
PRIEST
The cemetery sat on a rise east of town where the pines thinned out and the view opened up across the valley.
Forsaken spread below it in miniature, Main Street, the rooftops, the highway cutting through.
The mountains beyond. The sky doing what Montana sky always did, stretching until you stopped trying to find the edge of it.
I set the peonies between the headstones and crouched down to pull a few weeds from the base of the granite. Eleanor and William Hale. Married forty-seven years. Buried six months apart because my grandmother had looked at a world without my grandfather in it and decided she’d seen enough.
They’d taken me in when I was four. My mother had left me with a neighbor for two weeks, and the neighbors had finally called someone, and that someone had called my grandparents.
They’d driven eleven hours from Montana to collect a boy they’d only met twice.
My grandfather carried me to the truck. My grandmother buckled me in and handed me a sandwich she’d gotten from a gas station and I ate it without saying a word because I’d learned, even at four, that talking meant asking for things and asking for things meant being disappointed.
But they’d never disappointed me, not once. I learned eventually that my mother had done me a favor.
My grandfather taught me to fix an engine, read a map, and shake a man’s hand like I meant it.
My grandmother taught me to cook, to listen, and that showing up was the thing that mattered most. You showed up for the people you loved.
Every day. Even when it was hard, even when you were tired, even when the person you were showing up for didn’t know how to ask for help. You showed up anyway.
I’d been showing up here every two weeks ever since. Fresh flowers on their graves. A few minutes of quiet. The only conversation I still had with the two people who’d made me someone worth being.
The peonies looked good against the granite.
Macy had picked the right stems, the ones with tight buds that would open slowly over the next few days.
She always picked the right ones. I’d watched her do it enough times to know it wasn’t luck.
She had an eye for it, like some people had an ear for music, a feel for which stems would hold and which would drop their petals in two days.
And it was there that the thoughts started to land. Macy.
I’d been thinking about her since I last saw her.
Since I went back for my sunglasses. She’d been off.
Sharp with me in a way she’d never been, and when I’d come back, the shop was dark in the middle of the afternoon.
Her hands were white-knuckled around her phone and she’d looked at me like I was a problem she didn’t have the bandwidth to solve.
That wasn’t Macy. In all the months of walking through her door, she’d never once been anything less than warm.
Professional, sure. Boundaried in a way I’d noticed early and respected completely.
She gave you exactly enough of herself to make you feel welcome and kept the rest behind a line you couldn’t see until you bumped into it.
But the warmth was real. The way she remembered names, asked about people’s families, fussed over arrangements until they were exactly right. That wasn’t performance. That was her.
Except behind that drawn shade, when I’d asked her if everything was ok, it had been performance. And the performance had been fear.
I walked back to my bike and sat on it without starting the engine.
It was starting to cool, early enough in the season that hadn’t quite committed to summer yet.
Below me, Forsaken was going about its business.
A truck on Main Street. The lights on at Rosie’s.
The feed store with people going about their business.
And somewhere down there, a flower shop with a bell over the door and a woman behind the counter who hummed when she thought nobody was listening.
Who kept a single framed photograph on the wall behind the register, a mountain landscape, no people in it, and who changed the subject with a smile so practiced you’d swear it was genuine every time someone asked where she was from.
I noticed things like this in the way that I’d always noticed things.
In the Rangers, it had kept men alive. In the club, it kept operations clean.
With Macy, it had become a problem, because the more I noticed, the more I wanted to know, and the more I wanted to know, the harder it became to pretend that buying flowers every two weeks was just about the cemetery.
It wasn’t about the cemetery anymore. It hadn’t been for months.
I’d asked about the ranunculus because she’d said once, while she was trimming stems with her hip against the counter and her focus on the work, that if she ever had a garden of her own she’d fill it with them.
“They look like someone crumpled tissue paper into a flower,” she’d said, and then laughed at herself for saying it.
I’d carried that laugh out of the shop and onto my bike and halfway to the compound before I realized I was still hearing it and didn’t want to stop.
That was the thing about falling for someone in small pieces.
You didn’t feel yourself going. Each visit, each conversation, each detail was light enough to carry.
Her quick, sure hands wrapping stems. The tilt of her head when she was deciding between two arrangements, weighing them like they were arguments.
The two words, “see you” when I left, enough warmth behind them to keep me until the next visit and enough distance to remind me that warmth was all she was offering.
I could’ve named what I felt if I’d let myself. I hadn’t let myself. Because naming it meant doing something about it, and doing something about it meant crossing a line she’d drawn, and she drew lines for reasons I didn’t understand and respected anyway.
But yesterday she’d drawn the shade in the middle of the afternoon and her voice had cracked when she told me to leave and her eyes had held a fear that makes a man’s hands want to form fists.
I started the engine. I already knew I needed to do something.
The shop was open when I pulled up to the curb on Main Street. Sign turned, shade up, the window display rearranged since yesterday. Buckets of fresh stems flanking the door. Normal. Everything looked normal.
I went in. The bell rang. She was behind the counter with a cup of coffee, arranging greens into a vase with the focus of someone who needed their hands busy.
She looked up when I walked in and the smile she gave me was the right shape in every way except the timing.
Half a second too late. The delay between seeing me and deciding to be glad about it.
“Twice in two days,” she said. “I’m going to think you’ve got a whole second cemetery you haven’t told me about.”
I almost smiled. “Needed something for the lodge. Angel’s been on a thing about the common room looking like a barracks.”
It was a lie. Angel hadn’t said a word about the common room. But I needed to stand in this shop and see her face and decide whether yesterday was a bad afternoon or trouble that followed you home.
“What are you thinking?” she asked. Professional now. In her element. “For the common room, I mean. Are we talking a centerpiece or a few smaller arrangements?”
“Whatever you’d recommend.”
She came around the counter and moved toward the cooler, scanning the buckets with her usual precision, assessing color and shape and what went together.
Her hands were steadier now. Her hair was down, dark and past her shoulders.
She was wearing a green apron over her clothes and there was a smear of pollen on the inside of her wrist, bright yellow against her skin.
She was trying to look fine. She probably looked fine to anyone who wasn’t me.
She definitely wasn’t fine.
It was there in the architecture of the performance.
The smile that arrived on cue. The conversation that flowed without catching.
How she positioned herself near the workbench instead of the counter, which put the back hallway and the stairs to her apartment within three steps.
She’d done this yesterday too, gravitated toward the exit without seeming to realize it.
A pattern that looked like habit and felt like escape planning.
“The sunflowers are fresh,” she said, pulling stems from a bucket. “They’d hold up well in a space like that. Big enough to not get lost on a table.”
“Sounds good.”
She carried them to the counter and started working. Trimming, arranging, her movements quick and practiced. I leaned against the cooler and let the quiet settle between us, comfortable, the silence two people share when they’ve occupied the same space long enough that conversation is optional.
“You doing okay?” I asked. Kept it light. Gave her room.
“Fine. Why?”
“Yesterday. You seemed off.”
“Headache.” She didn’t look up from the arrangement. “I get them sometimes. Barometric pressure, allergies. Montana’s got a dozen things that’ll mess with your sinuses.”
She delivered it perfectly. Casual, mildly self-deprecating, with just enough detail to sound like the truth. If I hadn’t seen her in the dark shop with the shade drawn and terror behind her eyes, I’d have believed every word.
“Fair enough,” I said.
She glanced up. Met my eyes for a second, and in that second I saw the relief. She’d expected me to push. I hadn’t. She was grateful, and underneath the gratitude was exhaustion so deep it made my chest ache.