5. Chapter Five
Chapter Five
CALEB
The snare sounds wrong.
Not wrong in a way anyone in the crowd would clock. Wrong in the wrists. The hit’s a fraction late, the rebound too tight, and I know it’s because my hands haven’t unclenched properly since yesterday afternoon when a blonde woman stood up in my family’s stable yard and the ground shifted under me.
Luke starts the intro to “Whiskey and the Creek.” Three, four, and I come in on the offbeat.
The kick drum is fine. The hi-hat is fine.
Everything is fine except the part of my brain that’s supposed to be counting bars is instead replaying the way her face went white when she saw me.
The way her mouth opened and closed around my name.
Focus.
But focus is a clean word for a thing I don’t have tonight.
My hands know the kit. My head’s still in the stable yard, on the second she stood up and turned around and the whole morning tilted. The flannel. The knot of blonde hair. The way my body went off like a struck match before my brain caught up to her name.
One look at her and ten years of work came undone.
I drag the tempo back. Snare, kick, hat. The job. The pocket. Anything but her.
The Rusty Spur is packed for a Thursday.
Locals at the bar, a few tourists at the back tables, the usual crowd of women in boots and denim who show up whenever the Wild Briar Boys play.
Two exits. One behind the stage, propped open for the heat, and one at the front past the pool table.
I count them without meaning to. Old habit.
Doesn’t go away just because you’re stateside.
Luke’s in his element, grinning at the front row, working the mic stand like he was born behind it.
Noah’s got his fiddle tucked under his chin, eyes half-closed, somewhere else entirely.
Ben holds down the bass line the way Ben holds down everything.
Steady. Reliable. The foundation nobody notices until it’s gone.
We play “Slow Burn Ridge” and I’m okay. We play “Fence Line” and I’m okay. Then Luke calls “Long Way Home” and the opening riff hits, and I’m back in a parking lot ten years ago, watching a girl in a green dress walk toward me with her whole future in her smile.
I miss a fill.
Not badly. I recover. But Luke half-turns from the mic and raises an eyebrow, and I see Noah glance back. I tighten my grip on the sticks and play through it, but the damage is done. They noticed.
We finish the set. Ethan does the sign-off, thanks the crowd, and unplugs his guitar.
The noise in the bar swells up to fill the gap where the music was.
Glasses clinking. Somebody laughing too loud at the pool table.
The ceiling fan above the stage is ticking on every third rotation because the blade is warped and nobody’s fixed it.
I fix things. That’s what I do. Engines, fences, broken steps, warped fan blades. Things that can be diagnosed and repaired with the right tools and enough patience. Clean problems.
People are not clean problems.
Luke drops into the chair next to mine and sets a beer in front of me. “You good? You were hitting that snare like it owed you money.”
“I’m fine.”
“You missed the fill on ‘Creek.’”
“I said I’m fine.”
Luke looks at me, then the beer. He picks up his own and drinks, and I can see the decision pass across his face, where he calculates whether pushing is worth the reaction he’ll get. It isn’t. He knows it, so he changes the subject.
“Amy says she’s got pecan pie at the diner if anyone wants to swing by after.”
“Pass.”
“Noah?”
Noah’s packing his fiddle case. “Mason’s with Quinn, but she’s got lesson prep to do. I should get back.”
Luke shakes his head. “This band has zero social life.”
“You have enough for all of us,” Noah says, not looking up from the latches.
That pulls a laugh out of me. Small. Barely there. But Luke catches it and points at me with his bottle. “See? He’s alive. Ladies and gentlemen, Caleb Callahan has a pulse.”
The beer goes down in three swallows. “I’m heading out.”
Ben’s already at the bar, settling the tab with Mick. He catches my eye as I pass. Doesn’t say anything. Just falls into step beside me as I push through the door and into the parking lot.
The night air is thick. August in Tennessee where even at ten o’clock the humidity sits on your skin. Cicadas scream from every direction. The neon sign above the Spur throws red and blue across the gravel. My truck is parked at the far end of the lot, next to Ben’s.
We walk. Ben doesn’t talk. He’s good at that. He knows the difference between silence that needs filling and silence that needs leaving alone, and most of the time he picks right.
“She’s the new vet,” I say.
He doesn’t break stride. “I heard.”
“Regan.”
“Yeah.” Ben leans against his truck. Crosses his arms. The bass case is slung over his back, and he shifts it. “Ethan mentioned it at dinner. Said she was good. Professional.”
I don’t say anything to that.
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because people keep asking.”
Ben watches me. He’s the only person alive who knows the full story. He was twenty that summer. He drove me to the recruiting office and didn’t try to talk me out of it. I’ve never figured out whether that was because he understood or because he knew I was past listening. Probably both.
“You want to talk about it?” he says.
“No.”
He nods. Pushes off the truck. “Alright.”
That’s it. That’s Ben. No lecture, no advice, no careful probing. He asked. I answered. The door stays open, but he doesn’t walk through it.
“She doesn’t get to mess this up,” I say. Harder than I meant.
Ben looks at me for a long second. “Nobody’s messing anything up. She’s a vet. You’re a mechanic. You don’t even have animals.”
I do, though. And that’s the part I don’t say out loud, because Bear has been off his food for two days and I’ve been pretending it’s the heat or a change in routine, and I know it’s not.
“Night, Ben.”
“Night.”
The Airstream is dark when I get back. Just the porch light, a single bulb I rigged to a battery, throwing a yellow circle onto the dirt.
The fire pit is cold. My laundry hangs from the line between the two pines, a row of T-shirts and jeans drying stiff in the night air.
The workshop beyond it is locked up, tools put away, engine parts on the bench where I left them this morning.
Bear lifts his head when I open the door.
His tail gives one pathetic thump against the floor.
He’s lying on the mat where I sleep, taking up most of it, which means he’s been there since I left.
His fur is warm when I lean down and press my hand against his ribs.
He lets me. Six months ago he’d have flinched at a hand coming toward him that fast. Now he just shifts to give me more room.
“Hey, bud.”
He puts his chin back down and watches me with those deep brown eyes that see too much. Bear doesn’t judge. Bear doesn’t ask questions. Bear just lies there and lets me exist, which is more than most people can manage.
The step of the Airstream is still warm from the day. I sit and leave the door open so he can come out if he wants. He doesn’t. He stays on the mat, nose between his paws.
His food bowl is by the door. I filled it before I left for the gig and it’s still full.
That’s two days now.
My phone comes out and the screen lights up. Muscle memory does the rest, the thumb that swipes to the photo before I can decide whether I want to see it.
There she is. Grainy. Dark. The parking lot outside the gym. Her arms around someone. His arms around her. A man who isn’t me, holding the girl I was going to marry.
Drew brought me the photo like a grenade with the pin already pulled.
I looked at it once, and the world rearranged itself.
All the fear I’d been carrying, all the quiet certainty that good things get taken, that people leave, that love is just another word for the thing that destroys you. Confirmed.
The fear didn’t start with her. It was in me long before prom night, before the green dress, before any of it. Planted young, in a house I don’t talk about, by the two people who were meant to raise me and mostly just taught me how to be left.
Regan only proved it right.
I didn’t get it wrong.
She was wrapped around someone else. In the parking lot. On prom night. While I was inside, planning a future with her.
I close the photo, lock the screen, and set the phone face-down on the step.
I’ll get to the workshop at six. There’s a transmission rebuild for old Hank Miller’s truck and a fence post that came loose on the south paddock. Work. Real work. Hands and tools and nothing that asks me to feel.
Bear hasn’t moved. His food bowl is still full.
Tomorrow I’ll deal with it. I’ll figure out a vet in the next town over, someone who does house calls, someone who isn’t her. There are options. There are always options.
Except this is Wild Briar Creek, and the next town is forty minutes away, and the closest large-animal vet who does small-animal work on the side just retired, and the woman who replaced him is five foot nothing with blonde hair and steady hands and a voice I can still hear saying my name like it stuck in her throat.
Bear shifts on the mat and makes a sound that’s halfway between a sigh and a groan.
“I know,” I tell him. “Me too.”
The night presses in. The cicadas don’t stop. The photo sits face-down on the step, and I can still see it, every pixel, like it’s burned into the back of my skull.
I’m not calling her.
Yet.