Chapter 6 #2
He hands me a beer without being asked, and we sit there together on the steps as the light goes gold and then gray, not talking much, and there's a comfort in that particular silence I don't think I ever properly appreciated before this whole mess started — the fact that whatever happens with Ruth, whatever happens with the Reverend, I've got a porch step and a beer and a brother willing to sit next to me on the worst nights without demanding I explain myself first.
"You did good," Diesel says eventually, standing, clapping me once on the shoulder on his way inside. "Whatever happens next. You did good today."
I sit out there a while longer after he's gone in, watching the last light fade off the tree line, turning the whole conversation over in my head — the Reverend's dead wife, the drawer with the wedding ring Ruth had mentioned without knowing I'd end up hearing about it twice in one week, the particular way his voice had cracked when he talked about being terrified of losing the only piece of her he had left.
I understand that fear better than I want to admit.
I've spent thirty years afraid of losing things I never even got to have in the first place — a mother, a stable house, a name that meant something before it got turned into a joke.
The Reverend's fear and mine aren't so different, when you get right down to it.
His just wears a collar. Mine wears a leather cut and a rap sheet.
Ruth, it turns out, doesn't wait around to find out whether my visit worked.
She makes her own move entirely without knowing about mine, which I only learn about after the fact, and which somehow makes the whole thing better, not worse — two people fighting the same fight from opposite directions, neither one waiting for the other to save them.
She calls me Thursday evening, voice steady in a way it hasn't been all week.
"I re-submitted the application," she says. "Mailed a fresh copy myself. And I told my father I'm an adult, and I'll make my own choices, with love, but without his permission."
"How'd he take that?"
"Badly. Then less badly. Then he went very quiet, which is somehow worse than shouting, and locked himself in his office."
"Ruthie." I sit down heavy on the edge of my bed, something in my chest loosening for the first time in days. "I need to tell you something. I went to see him. Yesterday."
Silence on the line, long enough that I think it's dropped.
"You went to my father," she says slowly.
"I did."
"Without telling me."
"I didn't want you to talk me out of it. Or worse, come with me and get caught in whatever happened next."
Another silence, and then, quietly, she says, "That's either the bravest thing anyone's ever done for me, or the single most reckless."
"Can't it be both?"
"It can absolutely be both." I hear something in her voice shift, warm now, close to laughing. "You walked into my father's church. Hat in hand. Sober."
"I even shaved."
"Gabriel Mercer, that's practically a marriage proposal by your standards."
"Careful, preacher's daughter. Keep talking like that and I'll start getting ideas."
She laughs — the real one, the one I've been chasing since the first day I found her standing in the clubhouse gravel with a clipboard held like a shield — and something settles in me, solid and certain, that whatever happens next, we did this part together, even standing three miles apart, without either one of us knowing what the other was doing.
"What did you even say to him?" she asks. "He's been strange all evening. Quiet strange, not angry strange."
"I told him the truth. About the homes. About wanting him to let you fly instead of keeping you caged."
"You used the word love."
"I did."
"To my father. Before you'd said it to me."
I hadn't thought about it that way, and hearing it framed like that lands somewhere unexpectedly tender. "I figured I'd better say it to somebody who might throw me out a window first. Considered it a dry run."
"That is the least romantic explanation I have ever heard in my life."
"I'll work on my delivery."
"Please do."
There's a pause on the line, comfortable, the kind we've gotten good at over these past weeks, and then she says, quieter, "Gabriel. Did you mean it? The word."
"Ruthie." My voice comes out rougher than I intend. "I've never meant anything more in my life."
Another silence, this one warmer, and I can hear her breathing change on the other end, can practically picture her sitting on the edge of her bed with the phone pressed too tight against her ear, the way I'm sitting on mine.
"I love you too," she says, finally, simply, like it's the easiest true thing she's ever said. "I think I have for weeks. I just didn't have the courage to say it before my father tore up a piece of paper and made me angrier than I've ever been in my whole life."
"Remind me to send him a thank-you card."
"Don't you dare."
"A small one. Tasteful. 'Thanks for making my girlfriend furious enough to finally say it.'"
"I will hang up on you."
"You won't. You love me too much now. You just said so."
"That was a mistake."
"It was the opposite of a mistake, and you know it."
She laughs, and I laugh, and for a few minutes neither of us says anything important at all, just trades easy nonsense back and forth across three miles of darkened town, and it's the best conversation I think I've ever had in my life, precisely because nothing about it is dramatic or fraught, just two people who love each other, talking about nothing, the way people who've got all the time in the world talk about nothing.
Two acts of courage, separate and unknowing, finally converging.
I fall asleep that night for the first time in a week without the old, familiar weight sitting on my chest, and I dream, for once, of something other than silverware and empty duffel bags.
I dream of church bells, and gold light, and a woman with paint on her fingers who looked at the worst thing anyone ever called me and decided, all on her own, to call it something else.
I wake Friday morning to a text from Diesel — heard you talked to God's middle manager and lived, respect — and another from Hawk, just three words: told you so.
I don't bother correcting either of them.
Some victories are better left to the rumor mill; it does a more thorough job than I ever could.