Chapter 13
THIRTEEN
SAGE
By noon, half of Rimrock has paid five dollars a throw to launch Knox into a dunk tank, and Ashley is running the line like she invented joy.
Crews worked frantically all morning hauling scorched debris out of the records office two streets over, and Nell’s has been running coffee to soot-streaked volunteers, but the fairgrounds sit clean on the far side of the town square, close enough that the clocktower’s still visible above the pie tent, far enough that nobody has to smell smoke while they eat funnel cake.
Rimrock decided, apparently by unanimous and unspoken vote, that the fundraiser goes on.
July’s showing off anyway. The Rockies stand up hard and shimmering grey to the west, snow still clinging to the highest folds even with the valley floor baking gold, and the sky behind them is the kind of relentless, cloudless blue that doesn’t look real in photographs, the kind you only believe once you’ve stood underneath it and felt your shoulders start to burn.
Lupine and Indian paintbrush crowd the ditches all the way from the highway, and the fairground fence is lined with posters of the youth hockey and football rosters, kids grinning gap-toothed under helmets two sizes too big, last season’s team photo blown up poster-size by the entry gate like Rimrock’s proudest export.
“Step right up, step right up.” Ashley’s got a clipboard in one hand and a megaphone she absolutely does not need in a town this size, her sundress covered in little embroidered pinecones like she coordinated her outfit with the mountains.
“All proceeds to Rimrock Youth Hockey and Football. Knock the county’s favorite rancher into the drink. ”
Knox, soaked to the collar and glaring at the crowd from inside the tank like a man reconsidering every choice that led him here, catches my eye and mouths help me. I toast him with my lemonade instead.
Half the crowd wandering the food trucks isn’t even local.
Glacier National Park traffic runs straight through Rimrock all summer, RVs the size of small buildings crawling Main Street at fifteen miles an hour, tourists in visors and brand-new hiking boots stopping to photograph a dunk tank they have no context for, no idea they’re looking at the county’s two most dangerous families raising money for youth sports like there isn’t a dead informant and a burned records office between them.
One of them, a guy my age in a faded University of Montana shirt that says he’s either an alum or bought it at a gas station this morning, is currently standing a little too close to the raffle table, smiling at me like he’s found the best thing at the fair and hasn’t yet noticed it comes with security detail.
Maren’s beside me working the other end of the same table, making change out of a cash box and half listening, which is how she listens to everything.
“You didn’t strike me as a small-town girl,” he says, nodding at the ticket roll in my hand. “Let me guess. You’re just here for the summer too.”
“Something like that.”
“I’m Brandon. We’re driving up to Glacier this afternoon, but my buddy said this place had the best pie in Montana, so.
” He leans onto his hand on the table, easy, oblivious, the exact posture of a man who has no idea there’s a husband thirty feet away already tracking the distance between his hand and my shoulder. “You local?”
“Married in.”
“Lucky guy.”
“He’d agree with you.” I tear him two raffle tickets and take his ten dollars, and if I were feeling generous, I’d tell him to enjoy the drive and mean it.
I am feeling several things right now. Generous isn’t one of them, because I can feel Dawson’s attention land on us from thirty feet away like weather moving in off the Front, fast and aimed and entirely uninterested in subtlety.
Maren beats him to it.
“Brandon, is it?” She sets the cash box down and rounds the table with the effortless, terrifying warmth of a woman who has spent thirty years talking men out of things they don’t know they’re about to regret, close enough that she’d caught every word of it from three feet away.
“You’re going to want to see the pie table.
Nell does a huckleberry that will genuinely change your understanding of dessert. Right this way.”
“I was just talking to—”
“I heard every word of that.” Maren’s smile doesn’t move, and neither does the hand she’s already using to steer him by the shoulder. “Pie table. Now.”
She only gets him a step away before Dawson arrives, hands in his pockets, wearing the kind of calm that has never once meant calm on this man.
“Everything all right over here?” he says, to me, not to Brandon, which is somehow worse for Brandon than if he’d said it the other way around.
“Everything’s fine.” I hand him a raffle stub he didn’t ask for, mostly to give his hands something to do that isn’t whatever they’re currently deciding not to do. “This is Brandon. He’s on his way to Glacier.”
“Is he?” Dawson’s eyes move over Brandon once, slow, taking inventory, the same look I’ve watched him give men right before their insurance bonds mysteriously evaporate. “Long drive. You’ll want to get back on the road soon.”
“Yeah, for sure, man, I was just—” Brandon’s already backing up, his lizard brain a step ahead of the rest of him, the part that makes deer freeze and then bolt. “Enjoy the fundraiser.”
He goes. Maren goes with him, presumably all the way to the pie table and possibly all the way back to his RV, and Dawson watches him disappear into the crowd with the stillness of a man doing complicated math.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say.
“Do what?”
“The eyes. The long drive, you’ll want to get back on the road. You practically walked him to his car.”
“I said two sentences to a tourist about pie logistics.”
“You said two sentences that ended a conversation I was having.”
“You were tearing raffle tickets.”
“I was flirting a little, Dawson. It’s a fundraiser. It’s allowed.”
His eyes flick once, quick, and I watch him decide whether to lie about it and then decide not to bother. “I don’t like it.”
“Noted.” I don’t try to hide how much that satisfies the petty, starving thing in me that has been waiting a long time to watch this man be jealous in broad daylight where everyone can see it. “For the record, that’s a new development. You didn’t used to mind who I talked to.”
“I minded plenty. I just didn’t have the right to say so.”
“And now you do?”
“Now you’re wearing my name at a hockey fundraiser my sister organized the food truck schedule for.” His voice drops, pitched for me only, rougher than four seconds ago. “I’m allowed to want the men who flirt with my wife to remember there’s a husband standing thirty feet away.”
“Careful. That’s almost romantic.”
“God forbid.”
“Also,” I say, stepping into the space he just made smaller, “you don’t get to run off my raffle customers and call it hospitality. Brandon bought two tickets. That’s twenty percent of what you’ve raised standing here being smug about it.”
“He can buy tickets from Maren.”
Taking his arm isn’t a decision. I only notice it half a second after I’ve already done it, my hand curling into the crook of his elbow like it’s been doing this for years instead of five days, easy, unnegotiated, nothing about it timed or weighed against a clause.
He doesn’t look down at it. He just resettles his stance to make room for me against his side, the adjustment so small and so immediate that I know he’s done it without thinking about it either.
Across the fairground, Ashley’s megaphone catches on a laugh mid-sentence, and when I glance over she’s watching us with a smile that hasn’t lost a single watt.
Only her eyes have gone somewhere else entirely, cold and spiteful for exactly as long as it takes her to notice me noticing, and then it’s gone, buried back under the pinecones and the clipboard like it never happened at all.
I tuck it away with everything else I’ve been collecting on Ashley Rourke Pruitt lately.
Finn is cheating at the ring toss.
I don’t have proof, exactly, but I have four consecutive wins and a level of smugness that no honest man achieves purely through hand-eye coordination, and when I say as much he clutches his chest like I’ve mortally wounded him in front of God and the Rimrock Youth Hockey Association.
“Slander,” he says. “I am a gifted athlete.”
“You’re standing four inches closer to the bottles than everyone else.”
“That’s called strategic positioning.”
“That’s called cheating at a children’s fundraiser.”
“Tate,” Finn calls, without looking away from me, “back me up.”
Tate, sitting on an overturned bucket with a scorebook that has nothing to do with ring toss and everything to do with the football pool he’s running out of his back pocket, doesn’t even glance up. “He’s four inches closer to the bottles.”
“Traitor.”
“Accurate.”
Cricket has appointed herself official mascot of the entire event and is currently accepting ear scratches from a line of children that stretches nearly to the funnel cake truck, tail going like a metronome, taking her celebrity status with the gravity of a dog who has decided this is simply her due.
Somewhere behind the hockey booth, a commotion rises that sounds exactly like a raffle table losing a structural argument with a mule, and thirty seconds later Rae comes jogging past with a lead rope and an expression of profound, weary resignation.
“Felony’s loose,” she says, to nobody, already gone.
“Again?” I call after her.
“He ate the gift basket,” she shouts back, not stopping. “The whole basket. Ribbon and all.”
Dawson’s laugh, rough and real and startled out of him, is worth more to me right now than the entire raffle pot.