14. Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fourteen
REGAN
Friday night and I’m putting on jeans I haven’t worn since I left Virginia.
I know it’s a bad sign. I take them off, put on a different pair, look in the mirror, put the first ones back on. I’m twenty-seven years old and I’m doing the jean rotation for a man who has spoken to me a grand total of forty minutes since I moved to his town.
This is reconnaissance, I tell my reflection. This is a new resident doing what locals do.
You’re a liar.
I leave anyway.
The Rusty Spur is louder than I expected and exactly as sticky-floored.
Friday night and the whole town has wedged itself in: beer, somebody’s perfume going at full power, a hum of voices over a sound system that’s been pushed two notches past comfortable.
The wooden bar top has been polished to a shine by twenty years of forearms. Mick the bartender’s working two taps at once and making it look like one job.
And there’s a small stage along the back wall, strung with lights, the band already plugged in and tuning.
Amy spots me from a table near the front and waves both arms.
“You came.” She slides me a beer without asking, the bottle cold and sweating onto the wood. “Luke owes me five bucks. He said you’d chicken out.”
“You took a bet on me?”
“I take bets on everybody. It’s how I afford this lifestyle.” She tips her head toward the stage. “You’re in for a night. Luke’s been buzzing since Wednesday.”
On stage, Luke’s at the front with his guitar beside Ethan, laughing at something Ben said behind the bass.
Noah’s tuning the fiddle, hair falling in his eyes and Maeve’s standing at the mic, tapping her foot, waiting for them to get themselves organized.
At the back, behind the kit, sits Caleb.
Buzz cut, black T-shirt, ink running down both arms in patterns I can’t read from here.
He’s spinning a stick between his fingers like he doesn’t know he’s doing it.
He doesn’t look at me.
Luke says something into the mic about it being good to be home, the crowd whoops, and the band drops into a song everybody but me clearly knows. Ethan sings. Noah and Maeve come in on harmony. Ben’s bass runs underneath, holding the floor in place.
And Caleb.
Caleb, who in normal life moves through a room the way you move through a building you don’t trust, plays drums like a man swinging a hammer.
Clean. Controlled. Hard. His arms are doing two different jobs, and not one of them looks uncertain.
The ink on his forearms flexes when he hits the snare.
Dark lines, script on the inside of one wrist, something I can’t make out at the back of his shoulder.
I haven’t blinked.
I make myself blink.
Three songs in, something happens to him. His shoulders drop. His head tips back. There’s a smile that flickers and is gone again so fast I’d swear I imagined it if Amy hadn’t elbowed me.
“That’s his happy face,” she says, not looking away from Luke. “Rare bird. Mark it down.”
For maybe three minutes, he looks like nobody’s weight is on him. The weight he hauls everywhere he goes, set down on the floor next to the kick drum. Just him and the music, and his hands knowing exactly where to be.
That’s the man you knew.
That was a lifetime ago.
I drink my beer and peel the label off it because my hands need a job and I don’t have a kit to play.
The band closes with what Luke calls, into the mic, “the loud one,” and the crowd loses its mind. Caleb does a fill that rattles the bottles on the shelf behind Mick and stops on a dime. The applause is deafening when the band finish. They wave and laugh and start unplugging.
I tell myself I’m going to finish my beer, hug Amy goodnight, and drive home in a straight line. Like a sensible adult. Like a woman who knows her exits.
He comes off the stage.
He doesn’t head for Luke or Ben or Noah, or any of the people who came here to see him. He heads for the bar. The bar that I happen to be sitting at, because I moved there from the table about ten minutes ago without examining why.
He stops two stools down. Close enough for a conversation. Not close enough to look like one.
“Mick,” he says. Mick slides him a water.
He doesn’t sit. He stands at the bar with his elbow on the wood, drinking water, looking at nothing in particular. The T-shirt is soaked through between his shoulder blades. I can smell him from here. Sweat and smoke and something underneath, like soap that’s done time in a military-issue locker.
I should leave.
“Good set,” I say.
“Thanks.”
“Loud.”
“Yeah.” The corner of his mouth moves. The same half-smile he did on stage.
“How’s Bear?”
“Same as when you saw him yesterday.”
“Right. Sorry. I’ve got it on a tape loop.” I peel another strip off the label.
“It’s a fair question.”
A silence. Not bad. Not the stable-yard silence. Something else.
“You played well,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.
He glances at me sideways. “You said good set already.”
“I’m saying the drums specifically.”
“You a drums fan, Marsh?”
He hasn’t said my name once in six weeks. He says it now like it’s a word he’s been not-saying on purpose. Marsh, not Regan. Halfway. A toe in the water.
“I’m a fan of competence.”
“Cold.”
“Honest.”
He doesn’t laugh. The corner of his mouth moves, and he covers it with a swallow of water.
“Long day, Marsh?”
“Calving’s running late this year. Mrs. Petersen’s heifer decided tonight was the night.”
“Before this or after?”
“Before, when I should have been eating dinner.”
His mouth does that thing again. “Get the calf?”
“Got the calf.”
“Good.”
I shred more of the label because my hands have decided this is the activity for the evening. I’m not even drinking the beer at this point. I’m dismantling its packaging.
“Still doing that,” he says.
“What?” I say, looking up at him.
“Picking at things.” He’s not looking at me. He’s looking at the bar top, at the small pile of paper shreds I’ve made there. “You did it with the corner of your notebook. The little spiral one. All the way through senior year.”
Something inside me goes still.
I’d forgotten about the notebook. I had truly forgotten.
Pink cover, ring-bound, the spirals bent and bitten where my thumb had worked at them every afternoon in fourth period.
I haven’t thought about that notebook in a decade, and I would have sworn on a stack that nobody else on earth ever noticed it.
He noticed it.
He noticed it then.
He’s noticing now.
“Caleb,” I say, and I don’t know what comes after it because there are six things I want to say, and none of them are safe.
He moves before I can find one. Pushes off the bar. “I should help Luke load out.”
“Right.”
“Drive safe, Marsh.”
He’s gone before I can say his name again.
The shreds of a beer label sit on the bar top in front of me like evidence at a scene.
Amy materializes at my elbow with two empty glasses. “What was that?”
“Nothing.”
“That was the longest I’ve ever seen Caleb Callahan speak to a woman.”
“Amy.”
“I’m only noting.”
I throw money on the bar. I hug her too hard. I leave.
The air outside the Spur is cool in a way it wasn’t last week. September has been coming on quiet. The parking lot smells like dust and engines and somebody’s barbecue from down the road. I get in my truck and start the engine. I don’t look back at the door of the bar to see if he’s come out.
I don’t look.
And then I do.
He’s not there. He’s inside, loading out his cousin’s amp, like he said he was going to.
Picking at things.
He remembered the notebook and probably a hundred other things I haven’t given him credit for, and somewhere between the bonfire and the bar I’ve stopped being able to tell myself this is old chemistry.
Old chemistry is sweet. Old chemistry is a song on the radio.
This is something different. This is a man who sat behind me in fourth period and clocked the way I bit my nails through senior year and is, apparently, clocking me still.
I drive too fast through the dark.
My heart is doing the wrong thing in my chest. Not panic. Not even close to panic.
Want, dressed up as panic.
This isn’t a memory. This is happening. Tonight. Now.
The lot behind the clinic is empty when I pull in. I sit with the engine off for a long time.