Chapter 6 #2
I list them. Brothers in passing—Thunder near the kitchen this morning, Bullseye at the meat locker, Longhorn fixing something on the south fence. Marlena bringing me water at the practice pen at two. Presley walking past the round pen this morning on her way to her car.
Then Buckley.
Spur stops on Buckley.
"Buckley what?"
"He hit on me at the practice pen this afternoon. I shut him down."
His jaw locks. I watch it happen. Watch the next thing he's going to do from behind his eyes, and watch him put it back.
"That's a separate problem. You're going to your father with this. Now."
His hand goes to the small of my back.
It’s the first time.
The first real touch since the handshake at the fire pit two weeks ago.
I feel it through my shirt the whole walk to the main house.
* * *
Pops reads the note at the kitchen table.
Marlena is at the counter with Cal on her hip. He's gnawing on a teething ring while he watches Pops with the serious face he always makes around his daddy.
She doesn't say anything. Instead, she watches my father read.
Pops sets the paper down and puts both his hands flat on the table.
He doesn't speak for almost a minute.
When he does it's quiet, the way he gets quiet right before something stops being a question.
"When did you find it?"
"Twenty minutes ago."
"In the tack room?"
"In my saddle bag."
He looks at Spur. "Church. Ten minutes."
Spur nods.
Pops looks at me. The eyes I have been calling mine my whole life. Sharp. Reading me. Looking for the fracture under the surface and finding it.
"You okay, baby girl?"
"I'm pissed, Pops."
"Good. Stay pissed. Don't be scared. The men in this club are about to make this somebody else's problem."
He stands and kisses the top of my head on his way out the door.
I sit at the table.
Marlena slides Cal into his high chair, gives him another piece of toast sliced into pieces, and pours me a coffee from the pot on the counter.
She fills the tumbler I brought in with me, sees what's etched on the side and doesn’t comment.
She slides the tumbler across the table to me. "You okay, Kota?"
"I will be."
"He'll handle it."
I almost say I know, or thank you.
I almost say a lot of things to this woman in the kitchen that used to be my mother's. With my baby brother on her hip—the half-brother I have spent nearly half a year learning to love.
I drink the coffee.
For the first time in almost a year, I sit at this table and I don't get up and walk out.
Marlena turns back to the sink.
She doesn't push, doesn't fill the silence.
* * *
I'm on the front porch with Cal asleep in a swing when church lets out.
He's asleep on me and he's heavier than he has any business being for a baby who weighs twenty-two pounds.
Marlena left him with me because she had to run something out to one of the brothers and I said I'd watch him without thinking about whether I wanted to.
I'm sitting on the porch with my brother on my chest and his fist closed around the hem of my tank top, and my mind is running a marathon.
I'm thinking about the note, Buckley, and about Spur's face when he read it.
The door of the clubhouse opens.
Spur comes out first. Pops behind him. Then Banshee, then Shadow, then a flow of brothers.
Half of them don't look at me as they pass the porch.
Half of them do—small nods, small set jaws.
The ones who look at me are the ones telling me without words that I'm a Lyle on this ranch and the men in that room just took my problem as their own.
Pops comes up the porch. "You're with Spur until I say otherwise. Twenty-four seven. He sleeps where you sleep. He eats where you eat. He's not your boyfriend, baby girl. He's your shadow. Are we clear?"
"Yes, Pops."
He looks at Spur. "Don't disappoint me."
"I won’t, Prez."
That's the whole thing. Pops takes Cal off my lap, kisses my forehead again, and walks inside.
Spur is on the porch with me. Hands in his cut pockets. Hat down.
"Dinner?" I say.
"You eat. I'll be at the rail."
"Spur."
"Yeah."
"Sit at the table with me."
He looks at me a second too long. "Sure. Okay."
Marlena sets a sixth plate without comment.
Pops is at the head, Marlena to his right, Cal in his high chair, me on the long side, Spur is next to me, Presley across.
Presley's eyes go to Spur. Then to me. Then to her plate.
She doesn't say anything about it.
She just kicks me lightly under the table, which is twenty-one-year-old sister code for I see you and I have questions later, and I fight smiling.
We eat. Pops talks about a new colt. Marlena tells a story about Cal and a Tupperware lid.
Spur eats half his plate and watches the windows. Nobody mentions the note.
Nobody looks at me funny.
After dinner I walk to Grace's. Spur stays ten feet behind me the entire way.
Grace is on the porch with chamomile tea and her feet up on the railing.
Waylon is asleep in the bassinet beside her.
Shadow's still at the clubhouse, working through whatever Pops handed off to him after church.
Spur stops at the bottom of the porch steps. Doesn't come up. "Inside or out?"
"Out."
"I'll be at the truck."
He walks across the yard to where his Ford is parked next to Shadow's and sits on the tailgate.
Doesn't look at us. Doesn't look away.
I sit down next to my sister.
Grace passes me a mug. "It's hot."
"I know."
I drink it anyway and burn my mouth.
She hands me an ice cube without saying anything.
I hold it against my tongue and stare out at the yard. "I'm scared, Grace."
"I know."
"Don't tell Pops."
"I would never dream of it."
She drinks her tea. "Is it the note?"
"It's the note. It's Spur. It's Buckley. It's everything."
"Mom?"
I stop.
The ice cube melts a little against my tongue. Waylon shifts in the bassinet and settles.
The crickets across the yard start up the way they always start up this time of year, the sound that to me will always mean home.
"Not tonight, Grace."
"Okay."
We sit. She doesn't push. She has never pushed.
She is the one person in my life who has known how to wait me out since I was six years old and she figured out that her little sister was the kind of person you had to wait out.
Kind of like how Spur and I wait out the horses.
Eventually she says, "Pres made you a tumbler."
"How do you know?"
"She showed me three weeks ago. Asked if you'd think it was stupid."
"What'd you tell her?"
"I told her you'd say it was stupid and you'd use it every day."
I laugh. Small. Real. The first laugh of my day.
Grace looks at me. "You let her in this morning."
"A little."
"Good."
We sit some more. The tea in my hand goes from too hot to drinkable to cold.
Spur is on the tailgate of his Ford across the yard. He hasn't moved in forty minutes.
Grace, eventually, "You're not doing this alone, Kota."
"I know."
"Do you?"
I don't answer.
I think about the note in my pocket.
I think about Pops's face in the kitchen and Spur's face in the round pen and the way every brother who walked off the church porch tonight clocked me on his way past.
I don't answer, but I lean my head against Grace's shoulder.
She doesn't say anything. She just rests her cheek on the top of my head and breathes.
After a bit, Spur and I head back. The path takes us past the bunkhouse.
Buckley is on the porch.
Buckley and a prospect I don't know by name—older than him, mid-twenties, maybe. Sharp-faced. Both with beers. Both watching us walk up the path.
Spur stops at the foot of the porch steps.
He doesn't speak. He looks at Buckley.
Just looks at him.
I have never seen Spur make a man go through stages of regret in real time.
It happens so fast.
Buckley's beer pauses halfway to his mouth, and his face does a slow drain from cocky to confused to scared, and I don't know what passed between them earlier that I missed, but Spur is collecting on it now without saying a word.
The other prospect looks between them. "What?"
"Nothing," Buckley says. Soft.
Spur looks at Buckley a second longer, then he turns to me and tips his head toward the path to my cabin.
We walk.
When we're past the bunkhouse I ask, "What was that?"
"Nothing."
"Spur."
"He's not going to talk to you again."
I don't push. I just feel something settle in my chest that I'm not ready to name yet, which is the feeling that this man saw a problem before I named it, walked over to that problem, and shut it down with his face.
We get to my cabin and I unlock the door. "You want the couch or the floor?"
"Couch."
"Bed sheets are in the dryer. I'll grab them."
"I don't need sheets, Dakota."
"You're sleeping on something I sit on, Spur. You're getting sheets. I want you to be comfortable."
I get him the damn sheets, and he doesn’t argue with me about it.
He makes the couch up himself, without complaint.
I lean in the doorway between my bedroom and the living room and watch him do it, and he doesn't look up at me but he knows I'm there.
I leave the doors between the rooms open.
Both of them. Deliberately.
He doesn't say anything about it.
* * *
I lie in my bed in the dark and look at the ceiling.
The ceiling is the same pine boards it's been since Pops had the cabin built—no insulation cost, no painting, just the bare wood that smells of cedar in the summer when the heat draws it out.
I've been staring at this ceiling for longer than I care to admit.
For fuck’s sake, any time I have a lot going on in my life I lay down and just stare. I don’t know why. If it’s the architecture or craftsmanship that draws me in.
But it calms me down.
Tonight I'm staring at it with a man on my couch.
I can hear him breathing.
Not asleep. He's pretending. The slow, steady in-out of a man who has decided you should think he's asleep.
I think about my mother.
I think about Marlena pouring me coffee into a tumbler my half-sister made.
I think about Buckley on the bunkhouse porch and Spur shutting him down with a look.
I think about the freaky ass note.
I think about Spur's face when he read it.
Mom would have hated all of this, or maybe she would’ve loved it.
I roll onto my side and look at the doorway.
I can see the outline of him on my couch in the dark.
Boots off. Cut on. One arm behind his head.
He's looking at the ceiling too.
I almost get up, but I don't.
I don’t know what comes over me.
I just feel like my mother left, but this man won't.
I close my eyes and I don't sleep.
* * *
It's just before dawn when I get up.
I'm thirsty. I want water. I tell myself that's all I want.
I cross the bedroom in my tank top and sleep shorts.
Don't bother with a robe. He's seen me in less from twenty feet across a fire pit.
Spur is awake on the couch.
Eyes open. Tracking me in the gray light coming through the window.
I stop in the doorway of the kitchen.
I look at him.
He looks back.
"Spur."
"Yeah."
"Thanks."
"For what?"
"Buckley. Pops. The note. Sleeping on the couch. All of it."
He's quiet for a long second.
The kind of quiet where I think he might not answer, or might answer something I'm not ready for, and either way I'm going to remember this morning for the rest of my life.
"Dakota."
"Yeah."
"I'd burn this ranch to the fucking ground before I let somebody put a hand on you."
He says it flat. Not a confession. Not a promise.
Just a fact, the way a man states something he's already decided.
I hold his eyes a moment longer than I should.
I don't smile. I don't even speak. I just walk back to my bedroom, and leave the door open behind me.
I don't sleep, but I rest.
Which is something I haven't done in eleven months either.