13. The Ice Storm
The Ice Storm
ANGEL
Back At The Barn
W e make it back in nine minutes.
By the time we come through the tree line, the temperature has dropped enough that I can feel it through my jacket in a way I couldn’t on the overlook.
The rain starts three minutes after that.
Not the steady December rain the property has had all week, but something harder, with a sound I recognize.
Sleet.
I know that sound. I grew up in the mountains of eastern Tennessee, where winter weather arrives with more commitment than it does in Nashville, and that percussive tick against every hard surface is not rain.
“Get inside,” I say.
Cash is already moving toward the barn door.
I follow. Inside, Emmett and the program horses are alert, as animals get when the pressure drops, heads up, ears forward, the attention of creatures who feel the weather in their bodies before it arrives. Clover has moved to the back of her stall.
I check the stall latches. I check the water. I do the things I do when the weather is coming.
Cash stands in the barn door looking out at the sleet hitting the gravel drive.
“Your truck,” he says.
“It's fine in the barn lot. It’s not going anywhere.”
“You are.”
I come to stand beside him.
The county road is visible from here. I can see it in the failing light, the surface already going from wet to something else. The sleet is pounding down as it does in Middle Tennessee when the temperature hits thirty-two and falls: it is not staying sleet. It is becoming ice.
“You’re not driving back to Nashville on that,” he says. It is not a question.
I look at the road.
He is not wrong.
I call Ivy.
"I'm seeing it on the weather app," Ivy says, before I can say anything. "Winter storm advisory. Roads will be bad until morning. Stay at the barn. We are in Nashville, or I would offer up the house."
"Okay."
A pause. The kind of Ivy pause that contains more information than the words around it.
"Is Cash still there?"
"Yes. He's here."
Another pause.
"There's a pull-out in the office," she says. Blankets in the supply closet. The space heater is in the tack room. I'm sorry I can't get out there."
"Don't try. Stay put."
"Angel." A beat. "I know you're fine."
She hangs up without saying anything else, which is Ivy's way of saying quite a lot.
I find the lantern.
* * *
Cash finds the space heater before I do.
I come back from the supply closet with the blankets to find it already running in the office, him standing in the doorway with his jacket still on, looking at the pull-out couch. This man has registered a situation and is deciding how to be sensible about it.
"Ivy's office," I say. "She uses it for late monitoring nights."
"I see that."
I set the blankets down and open the pull-out. The mattress is thin but adequate. The frame locks into place with a sound that seems very loud in the quiet barn.
We both look at it.
"I'll take the tack room floor," Cash says.
"It's going to be twenty-eight degrees by two AM."
"I've slept in worse."
"Cash."
He looks at me.
"It's a mattress," I say. "We're both adults. The program has a strict no-fraternization policy, which we are not violating by sharing a pull-out couch during a weather emergency."
Something moves through his face. Not quite amusement. Something different.
"Okay," he says.
We don't discuss it further. He turns the lantern low, and we lie down in the dark with the sleet on the roof, announcing itself, insisting, filling every silence with sound.
The mattress is narrow. This is simply true, and we have both acknowledged it, as two people who have decided to be practical and are now lying six inches apart in the dark, being practical.
His jacket is still on. Mine is still on.
Neither of us has said anything for a while.
The horses settle below us. Emmett makes the sound he makes when he has decided everything is fine, and he is going to sleep now, a long, slow exhale that I have come to find unreasonably comforting.
I am very aware of the warmth coming off him. Not dramatically. Just the undeniable fact of another person nearby, their heat in the cold air, with the blanket holding it between us.
I am also aware that I am aware of it, which is its own problem.
"What was the worst storm you were ever in?" Cash says.
His voice is low. The tack room voice. The one he uses when he has forgotten to manage things.
My mind goes back to that day.
"I was nineteen. Driving back from Knoxville in a car that had no business being on winter roads. Black ice on 40. I went sideways."
"How bad?"
"Ditch. Not hurt, just stuck. Two hours until a highway patrol car came by." I look at the ceiling. "I sang the whole time. Everything I knew. It was the only thing that kept me from panicking."
At some point, I cannot say exactly when, the six inches between us has become four. The mattress is narrow, and the cold is real, and neither of us has moved deliberately, but we have both stopped being careful about the geometry.
I am aware of his shoulder near mine. The length of him beside me. The stillness of a man who is also, I think, aware.
"You?" I say.
"Amarillo in January. Wind, not ice. The kind that moves cattle.
" He pauses. "I got separated from Jake in a whiteout once.
He was twelve. Dad was out on the south range.
Jake was fine. He went to the barn like he was supposed to.
I was the one standing in a field trying to figure out which direction the house was. "
"How long?"
"Forty-five minutes. Longest forty-five minutes of my life until the rodeo circuit."
The sleet shifts outside. I can hear the temperature in it, how the sound changes as freezing rain replaces sleet, harder and more deliberate, coating everything it touches.
His hand is close to mine on the blanket. Not touching. Just close, as if two people have stopped maintaining the distance and haven’t decided yet what to do about it.
The overlook. The cold decided before either of us had to.
The cold is not making this decision.
I am warm. We both are; the shared heat of the narrow mattress is comforting. And I am lying in the dark thinking about the inch between his hand and mine with a focus that has nothing professional about it.
"The rodeo circuit," I say, because talking is safer than not talking. “Do you want to talk about it?"
"Bull riding ends one of two ways," he says. "You retire, or you get retired. I got retired."
"How bad?"
"Three vertebrae. Six months in a hospital bed in Amarillo with my dad driving in three times a week because that's what Jim Wilder does, he shows up.
" He pauses. "My mother died two years before the injury.
Twenty-three. Dad handled it by not talking about it.
Jake handled it by becoming more like Dad. I handled it by leaving."
A beat.
"Which is a pattern, I know."
I don’t say anything.
After a moment, his hand moves.
Not a reach. Just a shift, the way hands shift when the rest of the body has finally decided something, and the back of his hand is against the back of mine, barely, the lightest possible contact, and neither of us acknowledges it.
Neither of us moves away.
The warmth of it travels up my arm.
"And now?" I say softly.
"Now Emmett walks the length of his paddock to press his nose into my chest, and I write verses at four AM."
A pause. "Better."
We lie in that with the sleet on the roof, the horses below, the small warmth where our hands are barely touching. The barn holds us like it holds everything: without ceremony, without asking anything, simply present.
There is something about the word yet.
The word that is not no.
I don't move my hand.
Neither does he.
Outside, the storm continues.
I think about a man in a hospital bed in Amarillo with a guitar and nothing else, finding his way back to the real thing. And the almost-kiss at the overlook two hours ago, the cold deciding before I had to.
* * *
I don’t know when I fell asleep.
I know that at some point, the sleet stopped and the silence of a landscape under ice settled over the property. Cash’s voice went quiet mid-sentence about something, Jake’s opinions about fence posts, I think.
When I wake in the gray pre-dawn, he is asleep beside me with one arm along the edge of the mattress and his jacket still on. His face in the early light looks like the one I have only ever seen in the barn, when he has forgotten anyone might be watching.
Unguarded.
I lie very still for a moment.
Then I get up slowly and go down to check the horses.
* * *
Sycamore Ridge — Morning
The county road has half an inch of ice on it.
By eight AM, the temperature is climbing back, and the sun is on the road, and by nine-thirty, it will be drivable. Middle Tennessee ice storms are not long events. They arrive fast, melt fast, and leave the world looking scrubbed and specific, every surface shining.
I do the morning feed while Cash makes coffee on the small two-burner in the supply room. He has been learning the geography of this barn for eight weeks. Of course, he found the two-burner.
He brings me a cup at Emmett’s stall.
We drink our coffee standing side by side in the barn door, looking at the ice-covered property in the morning light. Every blade of grass, every fence post, every branch of the pecan tree at the property line is encased in a thin skin of clear ice that the sun is already working on.
It is, despite everything, very beautiful. The ice makes everything unfamiliar. The fence posts are glass. The pecan tree is a different tree entirely.
“Jana’s going to call me this morning,” Cash says.
“About the profile piece.”
“Yeah.” He drinks his coffee. “I’m going to tell her yes.”
I shoot him a questioning gaze.
“I know what I’m doing,” he says. “The program stays off the record. I’ll hold that line.”
I wonder what Bren Cole might find, anyway. A thorough journalist, twenty minutes from Nashville, with property records and a website, and a gray horse who would walk directly up to a notebook.
“Okay,” I say.
He looks at me. He is waiting to see if there is more.
There is not. I said okay, and I meant it. If he says he will hold the line, he will hold the line.
That is what eight weeks of watching a man in a paddock teaches you. Not what he says about himself. What he does when no one is checking.
He has been doing the right thing for eight weeks, even though no one was checking.
I hand him back the empty cup.
“Road should be clear by ten,” I say.
“I’ll walk you out when it is.”
I look at the ice on the pecan tree, the sun catching it.
“You don’t have to do that.”
“I know,” he says.
We stand in the barn door for a while longer.
The ice melts.
The morning comes in.