Chapter 27 Mara — Day 173 #2
“I'm not too thin.”
“You'll be thinner if you don't eat.” She kisses my cheek. It's the closest she's ever come to saying it out loud. I get it.
We eat. We drink. Someone toasts. Thayer toasts, actually, which none of us saw coming — three sentences, one small joke about how Bastien didn't know how to seat a horse when he showed up and now he sits one like he was born to it, one true sentence about how my father would've liked him.
Bastien has to look down at the table for a minute after that.
Renata toasts second. She stands in her soft green dress and boots.
“To Mara, my best friend, who I lost for three years because we're both stubborn as fence posts, and who came back to me.
And to Bastien, who's a good man, who I threatened three separate times in this yard, and who took it—so I know he's tough enough for her.”
Bastien tips his beer to her. “Noted.”
“And to the whole ranch,” Renata says. “Because the ranch stays.” She lifts her glass higher. “The ranch stays.”
The whole yard lifts back. “The ranch stays.”
I feel Bastien's hand find mine under the table. He doesn't say anything. He squeezes once, and holds.
Later, the sun has finally sat down and the string lights are on and the guitar's joined by a fiddle and there's dancing on the packed dirt in front of the porch. I take my boots off. Bastien, at some point, takes his jacket off and rolls his sleeves back so I can see the tan on his forearms.
Cassia herds the single women into the yard. “Bouquet time,” she calls, in her teacher voice. “Get out here, all of you. Don't make me name names.”
Renata drags her feet. “I'm not catching that thing.”
“You're unmarried. Get in the yard.”
“This is coercion.”
“It's tradition. Move.”
I stand on the second porch step with my back to them. I've got the little bunch of wildflowers Opal wound together in kitchen twine that morning. I don't look. I toss.
A ripple of shrieking and shoving behind me. When I turn, Renata is standing there holding the bouquet with the expression of someone who's just been handed a lit match.
“No,” she says.
“Yes,” Cassia says.
“No. Absolutely not. Take it back.”
“That's not how it works.”
“I'm going to throw it in the river.”
“That's not how it works either.”
Renata glares at me over the top of the flowers. “I'm going to be so furious with you about this.”
I try very hard not to laugh. “You look furious.”
“I'm faking. I'm actually furious.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I'll get you back for this.”
“Uh-huh.”
She stalks off toward the drinks table with the bouquet still in her hand.
I catch a movement out of the corner of my eye — Renata's cousin Mireya, in from El Paso for the wedding, small and dark-haired and light on her feet, tipping her chin toward the makeshift bar over by the barn.
A tall stranger stands there alone. A friend of Bastien's from somewhere back east, I think.
Good shoulders, slow smile, drink untouched, eyes moving over the crowd like he is looking for someone he has not found yet.
Mireya raises her brows at me and drifts toward the dance floor, leaving him to his search.
I make a note of that and let it be.
I lose an hour, maybe more, in dancing. Bastien isn't a good dancer.
He isn't embarrassed about it. He puts his hand on the small of my back and moves me slowly across the dirt and lets me lead when the music gets fast, and I love him more for it than I did that morning, which I didn't think was possible.
At some point I need air that isn't full of string lights and rosemary and fiddle. I get a glass of wine from the porch table and slip around the corner of the house to the west-facing side, where the porch runs long and quiet.
Renata's already there.
She's sitting on the top step with her boots off and her maid-of-honor dress rucked over her knees.
The bouquet is beside her on the boards.
Her wine is nearly gone. The reception is muffled around the corner.
Above us the sky is Marfa's deep blue after sundown, the first stars pinned to it like nailheads.
“Move over,” I say.
She moves over.
I sit. My hip against hers. Our arms touch.
“You're glowing,” she says. “It's obnoxious.”
“Sorry.”
“No, you're not.”
“No,” I agree. “I'm not.”
We sit for a while.
“You okay?” I say.
“Yeah.” She turns the wine glass in her hand. “I'm okay. Weddings just — you know.”
“I know.”
“He was a good man,” she says, quiet. She doesn't say the name.
She doesn't have to. “But he lied. About small things and big things and everything in between.
And I said I'd never — ” She stops. She takes a breath.
“I'm never, ever falling in love with a man who lies to me.
That's my whole vow. That's my one whole vow to myself. Are you listening, universe?”
“Universe is listening,” I say.
“Good.”
I take a sip of wine.
Across the yard, past the corner of the house where the string lights start again, I can see the makeshift bar. The tall stranger is still there. Mireya, at some point in the last hour, has drifted away toward the dance floor. The stranger has turned to look for her, or for something else.
He turns another quarter turn.
He's looking at Renata.
He can't see us clearly from where he's standing—we're deep in the porch shadow—but he must have caught the green of her dress, the shape of her sitting on my step, because his whole face has just done something I've seen exactly once before.
Nearly six months ago. At the gate. When a man in a dusty blue truck who didn't yet know he was going to stay looked up and saw me for the first time.
Bastien's face, that day. The same face.
The stranger blinks. His mouth opens a little. He closes it. He doesn't know he's doing it.
Renata hasn't noticed. She's looking at her wine.
I take another slow sip and I don't say anything.
“Are you smiling?” she says.
“No.”
“You're smiling. Into your wine. I saw.”
“I'm not.”
“You're a liar.”
“Wife of a reformed one. I picked it up.”
She snorts. She bumps my shoulder with hers.
“I love you,” she says. Grudging. “Even though you married a rich man and made me catch flowers.”
“I love you too,” I say.
Somewhere on the other side of the house a fiddle starts a slow tune. I hear Bastien's laugh, low and easy, in a knot of voices near the porch steps. Any minute now he'll come looking for me. I'll let him find me.
Renata sighs and leans her head on my shoulder.
“Never, ever,” she says again, quiet, like a spell. “Not one that lies.”
I look across the yard.
The tall stranger hasn't moved.
I smile into my wine.
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