Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Hadley
Five-fifteen in the morning and I've been awake for the better part of three hours, and I’m angry.
Not sad. Not scared. One hundred percent, completely fueled by rage sort of angry.
I've kicked the sheet off twice. I've punched the pillow into the right shape and then punched it again because the right shape was wrong.
I've replayed yesterday's porch visit in my head six different ways and in every one of them I'm louder than I was at the time.
The first three times, I tell Todd to get off my porch the second he says the word honey.
By the fourth, I'm telling him the second he climbs the steps.
By the fifth, I never let him through the gate at all.
In the sixth I'm in the kitchen and I've got the cast iron skillet in my hand.
That's the one I keep coming back to.
I sit up in bed in the dark and I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and I let myself be angry for a long minute.
I'd rather be angry than anything else I could be right now.
Sad means he won. Scared means he won.
Angry is the only thing that feels like it’s still mine.
He came to my porch and stood too damn close to me on it.
He called me honey five times in ten minutes—on my porch—and I stood with my back against my own rail like a cornered animal because I was raised too polite to tell a man to get the hell off my property when he hadn’t become dangerous yet.
And the worst part, the part that has me grinding my teeth at five in the morning, is that I said thank you for stopping by.
Like he'd brought me a casserole.
Like he'd come by to drop off mail.
Like a Texas woman ending a conversation without raising her voice—and Todd heard it and he kept on talking anyway, and that means I gave him the polite version when I should've given him the other one.
I give up on sleep at nearly five-thirty and pad to the kitchen barefoot.
Nash is asleep down the hall. I can hear him breathing through his door, which I leave cracked open every night so I can listen for him in the dark.
The cabin is cool from the night air and the linoleum is cold under my feet.
I put the kettle on the stove because if I make coffee I'm going to drink the whole pot before sunup and shake all the way through breakfast service.
While the water heats I stand at the sink and look out the window across the dark yard.
Rogue's front room light is on.
It was on at midnight when I gave up on the porch and went to bed.
It was on at two when I got up to use the bathroom and looked out my own kitchen window.
The man hasn't slept either.
Around six o'clock, I take my tea out to the porch.
I stop at the screen door.
The framed wedding photograph of Todd and my dead husband is no longer on the porch rail.
I left it exactly where Todd put it yesterday afternoon.
I couldn't bring myself to touch it. Couldn't throw it out either, because somehow that felt like throwing out Garrett too, and I haven't figured out how to do that part yet.
I had been planning to deal with it today.
Wake up, drink my tea, and finally figure out what to do with the thing.
Somebody dealt with it for me.
I push the screen door open and step onto the porch.
The rail is empty. No frame. No flowers—those went in my trash bin yesterday before Todd's dust was off the gravel.
Just bare wood and morning light starting on the eastern edge of the sky.
I exhale, sharply.
I think about a man who would take a thing he knows you don't want without making you ask.
A man who'd do the work for you without telling you he was going to.
Who'd walk across his own yard in the dark to your porch and take an object that was hurting you, then put himself to bed without saying a word about it.
That's not the same kind of man Todd is.
I sit down on the porch swing with my tea and I let the angry part of me settle one degree.
Just one.
I'm still angry. I'm going to be angry for a while, but I'm not angry at the man across the yard.
* * *
Nash comes out around six-thirty in his dinosaur pajamas with Stitch under his arm and his hair sticking up in three directions.
He climbs onto the porch swing beside me without a word and notices the empty rail in about half a second.
"Where'd the picture go, Mama?"
"I don't know, baby."
"Was it pretty?"
"No. It wasn't pretty."
He thinks about that for a second. "Then I'm glad it's gone."
I kiss the top of his head and tell him to go get dressed because I’ve got to get over to make the brothers their breakfast.
He hops down off the swing and pads inside.
A minute later I hear him singing some made-up song about a dog who can drive a tractor.
I’m still angry, but I need to do something with my rage.
Once Nash is dressed, we head over to the bunkhouse kitchen. It’s the cleanest it’s been in a while.
I move through it like second-hand nature.
Biscuits in the oven. Bacon in the cast iron. Sausage gravy on a low burner. Eggs cracked into a bowl, ready to scramble when the first boots hit the porch.
I tie my apron tight enough that it pulls against my waist and I push my sleeves up to my elbows, and I work, because anger is easier to manage if you give it somewhere to go.
Banshee comes in first, sees my face and opens his mouth.
I look at him.
He closes it, sits down at the table and pours himself coffee in silence.
Spur comes in behind him smelling like a mixture of manure and sweat, takes one look at the silence and at Banshee's face, and decides today's not the day to test the waters.
He sits, reaches for the biscuit basket and doesn't say a word.
Blight slinks in last, like always.
I bring out the platter. The brothers serve themselves. The kitchen is quiet in a way the kitchen is rarely quiet, and it's quiet because I’m not being my normal, bubbly self. I don't apologize for it.
Rogue comes in with his white hat on.
He reads the room, notices my face and oddly doesn't say good morning.
He just walks to his seat at the table, hangs the hat on the back of the chair, and sits.
I bring him his plate last.
When I set it down in front of him, I bend just enough that I can speak under the sound of the brothers' forks. "Thank you."
He looks up at me. "For what, Hadley?"
"You know what for."
He holds my eyes for a long second. Pale blue-green, sun-flushed at the cheekbones, a man who hasn't slept in a day and I’m the only one who knows it.
He nods. Just once.
He doesn't say anything. He doesn't make me carry the gratitude, or pretend the thing didn't happen.
He just says, low, "Anytime."
I go back to the kitchen and I keep working.
* * *
Marlena drops by at ten with Cal on her hip and a covered ceramic dish in her free hand.
"I made peach cobbler this mornin'. Had more peaches than Cal and Phantom could eat between 'em.
Phantom told me about yesterday," she says, holding the dish out.
"Figured you might want some after—well. After."
She doesn't say after Todd, but I know what she’s trying to say.
I take the dish. I make us ice coffee instead of lemonade because it’s too early for anything tart.
We sit on the porch. She doesn't ask about Todd. Phantom already told her so she knows whatever she needs to.
I keep my shit together, even though I’m still pissed at Todd. Marlena drove over to check on me, and she doesn't deserve to mop up my mood for it.
I don't unload on Marlena. She has enough to deal with. Being the President’s ol’ lady has to come with its fair share of trials and tribulations.
The anger stays banked behind my ribs while we talk about Cal teething, Presley calling last night from College Station, about Phantom being out on a run, and the fact that the new prospect—the one whose name I can never remember.
I tell her that, and she laughs—apparently shot his own foot at a target range and lived to tell about it.
Before she leaves, she shifts Cal on her hip and looks at me square.
"Hadley?"
"Yeah?"
"I'm not going to say a lot about yesterday because you didn't ask me to. But I want you to hear one thing from me."
"All right."
"Rogue would burn this ranch down before he'd let something happen to you or that boy. You hear me? He'd burn it down to the cattle skull on the gate and walk into the fire smiling."
She doesn't pause for a reaction. She just steps off my porch, heads to her SUV, and drives the gravel back to the main house.
I sit there with the cobbler dish cooling between my hands and I let what she said sink in.
* * *
Mama Lou's old blue Ford pulls up to my cabin just after eleven with a peach pie on the passenger seat and a nine-year-old girl in the back.
Do I have a sign on me that says ‘bring all the peach desserts’?
I've heard about Mama Lou. I haven't met her until now.
She's about sixty, wide-hipped, gray hair in a braid down her back, wearing a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled.
She climbs out of the truck and pulls the pie tin off the dash and hands it to me before she's even said hello.
Then she hugs me with the pie still in my hands the way Texas grandmothers hug, hard and all consuming. "You must be Hadley."
"Yes, ma'am."
"Thunder told me you sent peaches home with him yesterday. The man's mama doesn't forget a kindness. Figured I'd return the favor and meet you while I'm at it."
She holds me at arm's length and looks me over for a half second like she's reading a recipe card. "You're prettier than my son said you were. Don't tell him I said that."
I laugh. The first laugh I've had since yesterday afternoon.
"Mama!" Raine hollers from the back seat. "Can I get out?"
"You can get out, baby, but don't go runnin' off without sayin' hi to Miss Hadley."
Raine spills out of the truck like somebody opened a paddock gate.
Long brown braids, scuffed boots, a t-shirt with a horse on it that's already too small for her.
She comes up the porch steps two at a time and stops in front of me and sticks out her hand like a grown woman. "I'm Raine."
"I know. Nash has told me about you."
"Where is he?"