Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Hadley
Five-thirty in the morning and I'm on my porch in my robe with a cup of coffee gone half-cold in my hand, watching a man in a white cowboy hat walk to the kennel.
I've never been the one watching before.
For two months he's been the one watching me.
I've felt it—the way you feel a man's eyes on you when you're rolling out biscuit dough and you haven't said hello yet—and I've spent two months pretending I didn't notice.
Pretending it was nothing. Pretending I was a widow who didn't have any business noticing a man at all.
This morning I'm out here in my robe with my hair still in last night's braid and the chain around my neck warm from being against my skin all night, and I'm watching him.
He doesn't see me.
He's at the kennel gate with Diesel pushing his nose against the chain link, and Rogue is scratching that big shepherd's ear with two fingers the way he always does.
The sun isn't all the way up yet so the light is still that flat purple kind that makes a man's outline look bigger than it is.
He's wearing the white hat. He's always wearing that damn white hat.
He could walk out of that cabin in a thunderstorm at four in the morning and that hat would already be on his head.
He opens the gate. Diesel comes out. They head off across the eastern pasture together, the man and the dog, the way they do every morning at this hour.
I sit on my porch swing and I watch them until they're out of sight.
I drink my cold coffee, and think about what he said yesterday on his porch steps.
You and Nash are safe on this property. That I can promise you.
I think about the way he said it like he was reading the law, about how I should be more scared than I am, because a man doesn't promise that kind of thing unless there's a reason it needs promisin', and Rogue isn't a man who wastes words.
I think about how I'm not scared.
I don't know what that says about me, and I don't know what it says about him.
What I do know is that the chain around my neck has my dead husband’s ring on it and I haven't touched it since I came outside.
That's the longest stretch I've gone in twenty-two months without putting my fingers around it.
I go back inside to start Nash's breakfast.
* * *
Marlena knocks on my screen door around ten-thirty.
Cal's on her hip in the wrap thing, asleep against her chest the way he is most times I see them, and she's got a canvas bag over her shoulder with what looks like a sleeve of fresh peaches sticking out the top.
"Got peaches," she calls through the screen. "Phantom's cousin out in Llano dropped off a bushel yesterday, and Phantom's already eaten about a third of it standin' over the kitchen sink like a heathen. Y'all want some?"
I open the screen door for her. "Get in here, woman."
She comes in, sets the canvas bag on my kitchen table, and lifts the edge so I can see the peaches.
Six pounds, easy. Yellow-pink, soft, smelling like the whole month of June crammed into a grocery bag.
I make us lemonade from scratch because she mentioned the third week I knew her, and we carry the glasses out to the porch.
The swing creaks under us when we sit down. Cal doesn't stir. He's the easiest baby I've ever been around.
The cicadas are warming up in the cedar.
A hawk is circling lazily out past the bunkhouse.
Marlena says, "Phantom and I are drivin' down to College Station in two weeks."
"For what?"
"Presley's graduation."
I turn to look at her. "From A&M, right?"
"Four years. Animal science. The girl's about to come home and tell us all how to run this ranch better than her father’s been runnin' it for over thirty years.
" She smiles down into her glass. "She's already talkin' about helpin' Rogue with the operations side.
He's been runnin' those books alone for too long, and she's got the head for it.
The girl's got more sense than her sisters combined, and don't you dare tell Grace or Dakota I said that. "
"Her sisters?"
"Grace and Dakota. Grace and Dakota are Phantom's first wife's girls. Presley is mine and Phantom's, though that's a longer story than I've got time to tell on this porch. Point is, all three of those girls are mine to claim, and I claim 'em."
She says it with such matter-of-fact warmth that I have to look out at the yard for a second before I can answer.
I had two pregnancies that didn't take before Nash. I have one sister in Tulsa who hasn't spoken to me since the funeral.
My mother died when I was eight. The only woman who has ever sat on a porch with me and called girls she didn't birth her own is the one beside me right now.
Marlena doesn't look at me while I gather myself.
She’s good at that.
After a minute she says, soft, "How you doin', sweetheart?"
I want to say fine. The word is already in my mouth. I've used it on every doctor, every funeral guest, every neighbor who brought a casserole the week after Garrett died.
But Marlena is the kind of woman who hears fine the way a deer hears a twig snap. I'd be wasting both our time.
"I don't know yet."
She nods, like that was the answer she wanted. "You're allowed to not know."
"I keep thinkin' about what he said yesterday."
"Rogue?"
"He told me Nash and I are safe on this property."
Marlena rocks the swing slow with her bare foot on the porch boards. "You are."
"That's not what I'm askin'."
"I know it isn't."
I look at her.
She looks back at me with those quiet brown eyes that have seen more than she ever tells anybody.
She says, "Phantom told me about Rogue the second week I was here. Bits and pieces. Enough I knew not to ask the rest of it. He's a good man, Hadley. Under all that quiet, he's a good man. He just—he doesn't know how to be loud about it."
My right hand goes to the chain at my neck before I know it's moving.
The metal is warm.
Marlena sees my hand move. She doesn't say anything about it.
"He's been good to Nash," I tell her. "Rogue."
"He's been good to you, too."
I don't answer that one and she doesn't push.
We sit with it for a long minute.
Cal stirs against her chest, makes a small wet noise in his sleep, settles.
The hawk is gone from the sky. Somewhere out past the bunkhouse a dog yips once and another one answers back.
Marlena says, "You don't have to decide anything today. Don't have to decide anything this week. But that man—whatever you're workin' out, he worked out two months ago. He's been waiting for you to catch up, sweetheart. That's all I'm gonna say."
She pats my knee, hands me her empty lemonade glass and stands up slowly with Cal still asleep against her.
"I'll be back next week. Phantom likes those gingersnaps you made. I'm hoping you'll make 'em again if I bring you the molasses."
"I'll make them, don’t you worry."
"I was praying you would."
She gives me a look like a friend would when she’s trying to encourage you to step out of your comfort zone, and then she steps off my porch and crosses the gravel back toward the main house.
I sit on the swing for a long time after she's gone, my hand staying on the chain.
I head to the bunkhouse at eleven-thirty to start lunch.
Thunder's already there.
He's pulling cans of sweet tea out of the cooler and he's got his cut hung on the hook by the door, whistling some country song I half-recognize but can't quite place. "Cross."
"Thunder."
"What're we feedin' the troops?"
"Chicken salad on homemade rolls. Tomatoes from your mama's garden, the ones she dropped off yesterday. Pickles from the jar I put up. Sweet tea."
"Lord have mercy."
"Don't take the Lord's name in vain in my kitchen."
"That was praise, Cross. That was a prayer."
I roll my eyes, he laughs and steals a tomato off my cutting board, and I smack his hand with the wooden spoon I keep on the counter just for this purpose.
"Ow!"
"Don't touch a damn thing."
"You assaulted me."
"I disciplined you. There's a difference."
He pops the tomato in his mouth anyway and grins around it, and I shake my head and go back to mixing the chicken salad.
Thunder leans against my kitchen island and watches me work for a second. "Raine's gonna lose her mind when I tell her you made chicken salad."
"She likes it?"
"Last time you put it on the menu, she ate three sandwiches and demanded the recipe. She's pretty sure she's gonna be a chef when she grows up."
"What happened to the veterinarian plan?"
"That was last month. Last week she wanted to be a barrel racer like Dakota. This week she wants to be a chef. By August she'll want to be the president."
"Of the club or the country?"
"With Raine, you don't ask. You just say, yes, ma'am."
I laugh out loud.
Thunder grins.
"Where is she today?"
"With my mama in town. School let out yesterday and Mama wanted her for the afternoon to teach her how to bake pies. Raine's pretty sure she's about to revolutionize the peach pie industry."
"I got peaches."
"You serious?"
"Marlena brought me a bag this morning from Phantom's cousin out in Llano. If your mama wants 'em, I'll send a basket back with you."
"She'll cry."
"Tell her not to."
"I'll tell her. She'll cry anyway. Mama Lou cries at gestures."
I laugh again, and I realize I’m laughing with a man my dead husband would have liked, about peaches and a nine-year-old girl who's gonna revolutionize the pie industry, and for one second I'm not a widow.
I'm a woman with a kitchen, a son, and a friend.
Thunder catches the look on my face. He doesn't say anything about it. He just hauls a fresh bag of ice over to the tea pitcher for me and refills it without being asked.
The brothers come in at noon.
Spur first, smelling like horse and sunscreen.
Banshee right behind him.
Blaze hasn’t made it back from San Antonio yet.
Blight slinks in last with the rest of the men, and the prospects in a clump behind them.
Rogue comes in with his hat already off, which is unusual for him at lunch.
He nods at Thunder when he comes through the door and Thunder nods back.