13. Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Thirteen
CALEB
The first thing I see when I pull into Sweetgum Hollow is Regan’s truck parked between Josie’s and Amy’s, dust-stripe down the door, parked the way a person parks when they’re in a hurry.
That tells me everything I need to know about the night ahead.
Maeve ambushed me Wednesday at the workshop. Bonfire Saturday. Jack wants you on fire duty. The new vet’s coming. She said it light, like she was handing me a list. Then she passed me a wrench I hadn’t asked for and was gone before I could refuse.
It wasn’t a refusal I was going to manage anyway.
The engine cuts. I sit a second longer than I need to.
The hollow’s already lit and going, hay bales arranged around the burn, Luke’s guitar slung on his shoulder, a clutch of kids running ragged at the edges. I find Regan in two seconds without trying.
She’s on a bale across the fire, next to Quinn and Maeve. Hair down. She doesn’t wear it down much. A soft top with a low neckline in a warm color the fire turns gold at the edges. Boots that aren’t her clinic boots.
She made an effort.
That’s not a thought I’m going to do anything with except notice and put away.
Ben clocks me first when I climb out. Lifts his beer from his post by the cooler, says nothing. Ben knows. He picks up a longneck, tosses it across the gap, and I catch it one-handed and keep walking toward the fire.
She looks up before I’m halfway there.
She catches me coming and doesn’t pretend she didn’t. The firelight is doing something to her face I’ll probably think about when I should be sleeping. I nod at her. Just a nod. The cheap version of hello. I can manage a nod.
She nods back. The corner of her mouth does the pre-laugh thing, the tiny twitch she’s never noticed about herself.
I noticed it.
I noticed it at sixteen and I’m noticing it across a fire at twenty-eight.
The bale opposite hers is empty. I take it. With the fire between us, that’s the only smart move I make all night, and it isn’t going to last.
“Caleb.” Luke drops onto the bale beside mine, grinning, two beers in. “Tell Regan about the time you tried to two-step.”
“No.”
He tells her anyway. Felled oak. Whole table of pies. Banned for a month. He’s having the time of his life.
Then, to get back at him, I tell a story about our misspent youth, summers in Wild Briar Creek where my older cousins would try to lead me astray. The laughter goes up. Quinn covers her mouth. Luke clutches his chest like I’ve put a round through it.
I shouldn’t look across the fire to see what Regan thinks of any of this, but of course I do.
She’s laughing with her hand on Quinn’s arm to keep herself upright.
Her whole face is open. I haven’t seen her whole face open in ten years, and the want in me is embarrassing and immediate, and I drink my beer just to have something to do with my mouth.
“Don’t believe a word Luke tells you,” Maeve says. “He’s the best storyteller in Wild Briar Creek and the worst with the casting.”
“That’s a slander,” Luke says.
“That’s a service to the historical record.”
A smile pulls at my mouth, and I don’t fight it. Family is the one room where I can let my face do what it wants.
“You want a true story about Luke?” I say.
The whole circle turns. Luke goes still in the way only people who already know what’s coming go still.
“Don’t,” Luke says.
“The walking stick.”
“Don’t.”
I look at Regan. She’s leaning forward now, beer paused halfway to her mouth, watching me. Whatever the noise of all this is supposed to be doing for me, it’s not as loud as her watching me.
So I tell it.
“Luke was twelve. I was nine. He told me there was a club. The boys at school had it and they wouldn’t let me in unless I proved I was worth it. Test was the walking stick in the window at Henley’s hardware. Said it was carved by a real cowboy. Said I had to walk in, pick it up, walk out with it.”
Luke groans into his beer.
“I did it. I walked in, I picked it up, I walked out. Made it about five steps down the sidewalk before old man Henley came out with his rifle and asked me what in God’s name I thought I was doing.”
The circle is gone. Ben wheezes again. Josie is laughing into Ethan’s shoulder.
“He marched me home with the stick over my shoulder. Luke met us at the porch and pretended he’d never seen me before in his life.
I got three weeks of dishes and a lecture from Uncle John I can still recite.
There was no club. The boys at school didn’t have a club.
The walking stick was carved in Atlanta. ”
Across the fire, Regan’s laughing so hard she has her forehead against Quinn’s shoulder.
I watch her laugh. The line at the base of her throat. The soft top moving across her shoulders. Her face when she isn’t running interference on it.
The fire pops and I drink my beer.
A weight hits my legs. Mason, all elbow and grape-soda smell, launching himself into my lap like gravity hasn’t been invented in his life.
“Caleb. Can I have your marshmallow stick. Mine breaked.”
“Broke,” Quinn says, from across the fire, not even looking.
“Broke.” Mason couldn’t care less.
The stick goes to him. “Don’t put it in your eye.”
“I won’t put it in my eye.”
I frown at him.
“You put one in your eye last time.”
“That was a different time,” he says, with enormous dignity, and settles back against my chest like he’s claimed the bale and me along with it. He doesn’t get down. I don’t move him. The beer goes to my far hand so I’m not holding it anywhere near his face.
Across the fire, Regan’s watching this happen.
She isn’t making a thing of it. She’s just looking, the way a person looks at something they’re trying to read, and the wall I built in the parking lot of a recruiting office in 2014 develops a hairline crack right under my sternum.
I don’t move him.
He smells like soda and he trusts me for no reason a sane person could explain, and across the fire she’s still watching, and I don’t move him.
Mason gets bored eventually and goes hunting for a fresh marshmallow. My hands are empty. That’s worse than full.
The cooler it is.
She’s already there.
Crouched at the tailgate, digging past the ice for a cider. The fire’s twenty feet back. The dark’s come down for real now. Ben’s wandered off. The whole hollow is laughing at something Luke is saying and we are not in any of that.
I want to step back.
I don’t.
I want to step closer.
I don’t do that either.
She stands. She cracks the cider against the edge of the tailgate.
She tips the bottle to her mouth and drinks, and the line of her throat in the firelight is going to be a problem I’m going to have to lie down with later, and I have to look at the ice for two full seconds before I can look at her face again.
“How’s Bear?”
“Better. Eating again.”
“The new dose holding?”
“Yeah.”
She drinks again. She doesn’t go back to the fire. I get a beer out of the ice and don’t open it.
“Luke says you all play,” she says. “The band.”
“Sometimes.”
“What do you play?”
“Drums.”
She waits. She used to wait like that. She used to wait whole minutes for me to finish saying a thing because she knew I was going to.
There isn’t more coming. But she keeps looking at me, and the firelight is doing what it’s doing to her mouth, and I hear myself say, “Ben’s on bass.
Noah plays fiddle. Maeve harmonizes. Luke runs his mouth and holds a guitar while he does it, Ethan’s the front man. ”
“That tracks.” A small laugh. She tips the cider toward the fire, toward the noise of all of them. “I’d like to hear it sometime.”
“Rusty Spur. Fridays.”
It’s not an invitation. The Spur’s a public bar with a sticky floor and Mick behind the taps. Anyone in this county walks through that door.
Except it comes out of my mouth and it doesn’t sound like the feed store.
She knows it. I watch her decide not to make anything of it.
“Maybe I will,” she says.
“Suit yourself.”
She doesn’t move.
I don’t move.
The cooler is between us, and the dark is around us, and there’s about three feet of night air sitting between her body and mine and it might as well be nothing. If I lifted my hand I could touch her. I am, with both hands and a clear head, thinking about lifting my hand.
My fist closes around the cold of the unopened beer until the bones complain.
She tilts her face up at me. She’s not tall, and the angle of it from down there is the exact angle that wrecked me in the front seat of my first truck at seventeen.
The firelight catches her hair and her mouth and the small flat triangle of skin at her collarbone, and I’m a thirty-second decision away from putting my hand on the back of her neck and finding out if she still smells like the same thing she used to smell like.
“It’s good to see you, Caleb,” she says, quiet.
It is not the smartest thing she could have said. It is, possibly, the most honest.
It goes through me like a round through paper.
“Yeah,” I manage. It is all I trust myself to give her.
I push off the cooler before she can answer. I don’t walk back to my bale. I take a different one, on the dark side of the fire, where the burn is between us again and I can pretend I came over here for the angle on the music.
Ben catches my eye on the way past. He doesn’t say anything. He’s the only one of my cousins who could and won’t. I tip my beer at him. He shakes his head, slow, and looks at the fire.
I sit. I drink. I do not look across the burn at Regan Marsh.
I last about ninety seconds.
She’s looking up before my eyes finish landing on her. She found me first. She doesn’t smile. She just looks at me across the fire and lets me look back, and I don’t know what she sees in my face and I’m not in any position to ask.
I have the photo. I have ten years of being right about her. I have a life clean and quiet and needing nobody. It works. It’s been working.
It’s not working tonight.
What’s in front of me right now isn’t the photo. The photo was a dark parking lot ten years ago. What’s in front of me right now is firelight on the side of a throat and a soft top the fire turns gold and a woman who told me at twenty-eight, after I’ve given her nothing, that it was good to see me.
I keep looking.
She keeps letting me.
Mason runs past with a marshmallow that is fully on fire, and Noah grabbing for him. Somebody laughs. The guitar starts up again on the far side of the burn.
I do not look away.
Fuck.