Chapter Thirty-Seven
TWO NIGHTS AFTER I brought Amy home, I was sitting at the end of the clubhouse bar with a beer I wasn’t drinking, being the thing I’m best at, which is furniture.
That’s a skill nobody credits. I’ve spent my life being the man people forget is in the room, big as I am, you’d think it’d be the opposite, but I go still and I fade into the wall, and folks say things in front of me they’d never say if they remembered I was there.
It’s useful in the life. It’s less useful when what you end up witnessing is a family coming apart three feet away and no clean way to stand up and leave without making it worse.
I hadn’t slept right since I carried her out of that place.
Every time I shut my eyes I was back in that doorway with a man’s hand around her throat and the cold coming up in me clean and total and the thing I keep in a garden doing what it does.
I don’t remember deciding. You don’t remember a fall.
I remember her hand at her throat, and then it was over, and Cal on the floor, and my own hands not shaking.
That’s the part that sits on me. Not that I did it.
I’d do it again this morning, twice, and sleep fine.
It’s that it cost me nothing in the moment.
That she’d had to watch me be it. And that I’d had to stand in that bloody yard after and wait to find out whether she’d ever let me put those hands on her again.
The club was still raw. Two days out from nearly losing Amy and everybody was moving soft and staying close, the way a club does after it gets a scare, and Brenda was working the room the way she does after a scare, which is feeding everyone and touching everyone and fussing herself half to death because if her hands are full of other people’s needs she doesn’t have to sit still with her own.
She’d been at it two days. She was running on fumes and grief and relief all stirred together, and anybody with eyes could see she was one kind word from going to pieces.
And Horse was at the other end of the bar watching her do it with his heart in his face, the way he always does, like a man looking at a fire through a window he’s decided he’s not allowed to open.
Then Brenda stopped. Set down her rag. And she went to him.
I saw it happen and I knew what it was before she got there, because it was the same walk I’d watched Amy make across my cabin, the same terrible brave thing: a person reaching, out loud, in the open.
Brenda came around that bar and she put her hand on Horse’s forearm and she said, low, not meant for the room, “Horse. I ’bout lost that girl.
I can’t do the scared part by myself tonight.
Come sit with me a while. That’s all I’m askin’. ”
And Horse, big, good, loyal Horse, who’d put his own body between that woman and a threat in a parking garage not a month back, went stiff as a fence post, the way he does anytime she gets too close to the truth of it.
He didn’t take her hand. He looked at it on his arm like it was a thing he didn’t know what to do with.
And then he said something back to her, low, just for the two of them, too quiet for the room to catch.
But I was close enough at the end of that bar, and still enough, that I caught it.
“Don’t go makin’ more of it than it is, Brenda. We’re all shook. You’ll feel better in the mornin’.”
More of it than it is.
I don’t think he even heard himself. That’s the thing about Horse: he doesn’t say the cruel thing on purpose, he panics and reaches for the nearest wall and shoves it up between them, and the wall he grabbed this time was telling a woman who’d just reached for him with her scared heart that she was making too much of it.
I have watched men get shot and flinch less than Brenda flinched.
She took her hand back off his arm slow and pressed it flat to her own chest, and I watched twenty years go across her face, and she said, “Course. You’re right.
We’re all shook,” in a voice with nothing left in it, and she turned and walked fast toward the back, and she was crying before she cleared the door.
Amy was up off the couch and after her before the door swung shut. She shot one look at me on her way past, stay, watch him, I’ve got her, and was gone.
Which left Horse at the bar. And Fiona, a few feet down it with a stack of plates in her hands, close enough to have caught every word of it, her face gone white and still.
And me, in the corner, furniture.
* * *
Fiona set the plates down very carefully. That’s how I knew it was coming. The careful ones are the ones you watch: the slammers blow off their steam, but a woman who sets a stack of plates down soft as a whisper before she turns around is a woman who’s about to take the roof off.
“You absolute coward,” she said.
Horse didn’t turn around. “Baby girl — ”
“Don’t.” Her voice had gone hard. “Since I was a girl, Dad. Fifteen years I’ve watched you love that woman and never once say it.
She raised me. When Mama died and you fell down inside yourself and couldn’t climb back out, it was Brenda who fed me and braided my hair and sat up with me through the nightmares.
All those years. It was Brenda at every school thing you were too deep in your grief to come to, it was Brenda, and you have never once, not one single time, let that woman know she was anything to you but help around the place. ”
“That ain’t — ” Horse’s voice was rough. “You don’t know what’s between grown people.”
“I know she just reached for you.” Fiona took a step toward him.
“Two nights after this club almost put Amy in the ground. She was scared and she was tired and she reached for you, out loud, and you told her she was makin’ more of it than it is.
” Her voice cracked for the first time. “You told her she was makin’ too much of it.
Of being scared she almost lost Amy. You couldn’t even give her that. ”
Horse turned around then. And his face had come apart, an old man’s face full of an old man’s life of not-doing-the-thing, and he said, “What do you want from me, baby girl,” in a voice that had given up before the sentence started.
“I want you to be brave one time before I have a baby that grows up watching you be a coward its complete life.”
The room stopped.
Horse went absolutely still. Even I stopped breathing, back in my corner, because it landed on all of us at once, the way of it, the thing she hadn’t told anybody.
“...What,” Horse said.
“I’m pregnant.” Fiona’s chin came up, and the fury cracked all the way open and there were tears under it now, running down that cold, set face.
“Almost four months. Bolt knows. Nobody else knows. I’ve been carrying it around this nightmare of a month keeping it to myself because there’s never a good time in this life, somebody’s always in danger, and I wasn’t going to tell you like this, I wanted it to be nice — ” She wiped her face hard with the back of her wrist, furious at her own tears.
“But I am not going to bring a child into this family and let it grow up the way I grew up. Watching you. Watching you love somebody with your full heart and be too scared to say it out loud. Watching Brenda get old waiting on a word from you that never comes.” Her voice dropped, and this was the one that did it, this was the killing one.
“You’re going to be a grandfather. And that baby is going to love Brenda, because everybody who comes into this family loves Brenda, she’s the warmest thing any of us ever had.
And I need to know, before it gets here, whether it’s going to watch its grandfather finally be a man, or whether I’ve got to explain to my kid someday why Grandpa let the best woman any of us ever knew grow old thinking she was never worth more than a good time. ”
Horse didn’t say anything.
That was the thing that struck me, watching from the wall.
He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t bluster.
He sat on that barstool and he took every word of it like a man standing in the open taking rounds, and when Fiona finally ran out of them, he just — sat there.
His big hands open on his knees. His face gone somewhere far off and terrible.
A man looking straight at all those years of his own cowardice because his daughter had reached down his throat and dragged it up where he had to look at it.
“Congratulations,” he said finally. Barely a voice at all. “On the — the baby. That’s real good. Bolt’s a good man.”
“That’s all you’ve got.”
“No.” He shook his head, slow, and I saw his eyes were wet. “No, it ain’t all I got. It’s just all I got right now, baby girl. You dropped a lot on an old man.” He rubbed a hand down his face. “Give me — I gotta sit with this. All of it. Let me sit with it.”
“Don’t sit with it too long,” Fiona said.
“That’s the thing I’m telling you. That’s the entire lesson of your own life, if you’d ever once look at it.
You sit with things until they’re gone.” And she picked her plates back up, because she’s Horse’s daughter and Brenda’s girl both and that means you don’t leave a mess even when you’re detonating, and she carried them into the kitchen and left him there.
* * *
For a while neither of us said anything. Horse didn’t know I was there, or he’d forgotten, the way people do.
Then he found me in the corner, and he didn’t startle, he just looked at me tired, a man who’d been seen at the worst moment of his year and didn’t have it in him to care.
“How much of that’d you catch,” he said.
“All of it.”
He nodded. Looked back at his drink. I got up off my stool and I came down the bar and I did the thing I don’t do, which is offer a man something he didn’t ask for, and I only did it because I’d been exactly where he was sitting and I’d only just climbed out and the climb was still fresh enough to bleed.
I set my full beer down in front of him next to his empty one. Didn’t say anything about it. Just left it there.
“I spent about a year,” I said, “telling myself that keeping away from somebody was how I loved her. That it was the noble thing. The safe thing, for her.” I put my hand on his shoulder, once, the way these men do, brief and heavy.
“It wasn’t noble, Horse. It was just fear wearing a nicer coat.
And the only thing it ever protected was me, from having to risk the one thing worth risking anything for.
Damn near cost me her for good.” I took my hand back.
“Fiona’s right. You don’t get forever to sit with it.
None of us do. We just found that out the hard way with Amy. ”
Horse looked at the beer I’d set down. Looked at it a long time.
“How’d you know,” he said. “How’d you finally know it was time to quit bein’ a coward about it.”
“I didn’t.” I picked up my cut off the back of the stool.
“A nineteen-year-old girl walked down a dark path in the middle of the night and did it for me. Reached for me when I didn’t have the guts to reach first.” I shrugged into the cut.
“Not everybody gets that, Horse. Somebody braver than you doing the brave part first. Brenda already did hers tonight. She walked across a room and reached for you in front of God and everybody, and you told her she was makin’ too much of it.
” I looked at him. “You might not get offered it twice.”
And I left him there at the bar with two beers and fifteen years and a grandchild coming, and I went to find my girl, because I could, because I’d been lucky enough and she’d been brave enough that I got to.
Behind me, when I looked back once from the door, Horse hadn’t touched either beer.
He was just sitting there with his face in his hands.
It was the most hopeful thing I’d seen him do since I’d known him.