Chapter 17
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Spur
I walk across the gravel from the burn pit toward the back porch of the main house with the smoke from the fire still in my hair, and the question I've been carrying sitting in my chest like a stone.
Phantom is on the porch where Dakota said he'd be.
Coffee in one hand. Bible open on the rail. He's looking out at the property the way he looks at it most evenings—like a man assessing something he built.
He doesn't look at me when I climb the porch steps.
He speaks low. "Have a seat, son."
Phantom closes the Bible, sets it on the rail, and picks up his coffee.
"I figure I know why you came over here, Spur."
I get straight to the damn point. "I want to ask for your daughter's hand."
He looks at me for a long second. His face doesn't move. Phantom's face never moves when something matters most. He lets the question sit.
Then he says, "Tell me why."
I take a breath. I've been working on this answer for a while and now that the moment is here, the words come easier than I thought they would.
"Because she's the only thing in this world I want to come home to. I’ve loved her since she was a teenager and I’ve been waiting her whole adult life for the moment she wanted me back.
I want to put a ring on her hand and stand up in front of this club and call her my ol’ lady.
I want to spend the rest of my life giving her what she chose me for. "
Phantom listens without interrupting.
When I finish, he sets his coffee down, folds his hands together, and looks at me.
"What kind of life are you giving her, Spur?"
"The one she wants. She wants to ride the circuit, she gets the circuit. She wants the ranch, she gets the ranch. She wants babies someday when she's done riding, she gets babies. She wants me, she gets all of me. I don't have anything in this world I'm not putting on the table for her."
"You ready to be a father, Spur?"
"When she wants me to be."
"Even if that's tomorrow?"
"Even if that's tomorrow."
"And if she's still riding the circuit when she's pregnant?"
"Then I'm in the truck driving her to the next qualifier. Same as I was last week."
Phantom nods slowly. His hand finds his coffee and turns the mug a quarter turn on the rail. He looks out at the property again. "Love has an interesting way of turning up. There's no one way to do it. You build the marriage that fits the woman. Dakota's a Lyle. The marriage has to fit a Lyle."
"Yes, Prez."
He's quiet for a long time. The cicadas are working themselves up to full pitch in the oaks. The light goes from gold to pink across his face.
Then he takes a look around and drops his tone a bit. "What about Jolene, Spur?"
He doesn’t want anyone to hear. Not that I can blame him.
The question lands heavier than I expect. I haven't heard him say her name in a year. He's not asking me what I think happened to her, because I know.
He's asking me something else.
"What about her, Prez?"
"You're going to marry my daughter, and you're going to carry it. For the rest of your life. You know that."
"Yes, I do, Prez. It’s not my business to tell her, even if I do think she has a right to know she’ll never see her mother again. That fucks with her, Prez. I hate seeing it on her face. She hides it well, but I fucking see it."
Phantom takes a breath, the heaviness weighing on him.
"You were there after it happened. Within ten minutes, you were one of the people that helped dispose of her body.
Dakota doesn't know. Grace doesn't know.
Shiver doesn't know. My little girl, the one you're putting a ring on tomorrow, is going to ask you about her mother someday, and you’re going to have to look her in the face and tell her you don't know where her mother went. "
I want to sigh, but know that’ll be a dumb mistake. "I know, Phantom. If I was going to crack, I would’ve done it by now. I don’t want to keep any secrets, but I will."
"Some men can't carry that, Spur. Some men come apart at year three. Year five. Year ten. They hold the secret too long and one night they're a bottle deep on a porch and they tell their wife, and the wife loses everything in one sentence."
"Prez."
"I'm not saying you would. I'm saying I have to ask."
"I know you do."
He's looking at me steadily. The Bible is closed. The coffee is on the rail. The man asking me the question is the man who has been carrying it himself for the last year.
I take a breath. "Phantom. I know what happened, and I don’t need a recap of it.
I’ve looked at your daughter every day since that night and not said a word.
I can keep doing that for the next fifty years.
Until I'm in the ground beside the woman I'm asking to marry me.
The day Dakota asks me where her mother went, I tell her the same thing you told her—she left and she didn't come back.
That's the answer. That stays the answer. "
He closes his eyes for a second before opening them. "You take care of her, Spur."
"Until I'm in the ground."
"And the secret stays between the men who already know it."
I don’t say anything else. I give him a nod.
He's quiet for a long time after that.
He stands up. I stand up with him. "You got a ring, Spur?"
"I've got my grandmother's. In a box in my cabin."
"You've had it the whole time?"
"Since she died. I was twenty-eight. I had a feeling then I was going to give it to your daughter someday."
He gives me a nod and walks back in the house, the screen door closing behind him.
* * *
The next morning I wake up before her.
Dakota's on her side facing me, braid coming loose on the pillow, wrapped wrist resting on her stomach. The cabin is gray with the pre-dawn light through the window.
Today is the day.
I get out of the bed as quietly and carefully as possible, pull on jeans and a t-shirt, walk barefoot to the kitchen, and reach behind the spare coffee mugs in the cabinet over the sink.
The small cedar box is where I left it years ago.
I sit at the kitchen table and open it.
My grandmother's ring. Yellow gold band, worn smooth by fifty-seven years on her finger.
Texas turquoise the color of pale sky with a vein of brown running through it.
My grandfather put it on her hand outside a courthouse in San Saba in 1967.
It's smaller than I remembered. Dakota's hands are smaller than my grandmother's were.
I close the box and slip it into the pocket of my jeans
Dakota stirs in the bedroom. So I start making coffee.
She comes out a few minutes later in nothing but my t-shirt and sleep-soft eyes. "Morning, baby."
"Morning. Coffee?"
"Yeah."
I bring her a mug. She sits at the kitchen table and drinks it slowly. The morning light's coming up gold through the window, and her hair is catching it. I smile because she has no idea what I'm about to do to her in the next twelve hours.
"Walk with me, baby."
"Where?"
"Big barn."
She tilts her head. "Why?"
"I want to show you something."
She doesn't ask what. She gets dressed—jeans, boots, one of my flannels over my t-shirt.
I take her hand. We walk across the gravel toward the big barn at the back of the property.
The cicadas haven't started. The dogs at the kennel are quiet. The May morning is the kind of cool that'll burn off in an hour.
I take her up the ladder of the hayloft. She climbs after me. I haul her up the last rung and we stand in the loft with the morning light coming through the slats of the corrugated roof in long yellow bars.
She knows what this place is. "Spur."
"You know what this place is, baby."
"Yeah."
"He stood right here. He took a picture of me kissing the top of your head and he sent it to your phone."
"I know."
"I want this place back."
She looks at me. Her hair's loose from the climb. The light is across her shoulders and her throat.
"How?"
I cross the loft, put my hand on the back of her neck, pull her against me. "Like this."
I kiss her. Hard. The kiss I've been holding back.
She kisses me back, hands in my hair, body pressed against me, the loft warm and smelling like hay and sun-warmed wood and the woman I love.
"Tell me you're mine."
"I'm yours, Spur."
"Say it again."
"I'm yours."
I pull her flannel off her. The t-shirt under it. Lay her down in the hay on top of my flannel.
Her jeans next. Her panties. She's bare in the morning light, and I take a long second just to look at her.
"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen, baby."
"Spur."
"I'm not done. I have been watching you for years, and you've been the most beautiful thing I've ever seen in every one of them.
Tonight, I'm going to ask you something I have been waiting a long time to ask.
But first, I'm going to fuck you in this hayloft and take it back from the dead man who tried to take you from me. "
She pulls me down to her.
I kiss every part of her she'll let me.
The inside of her left wrist where my name is healing. Her collarbone. The spot under her jaw that makes her breath catch. Her breasts. Her stomach. The inside of her thighs.
She's wet for me before I put my mouth on her, and when I do, she fists her hand in my hair and her hips come up off the hay.
"Spur."
"Yeah, baby."
"I need you in me."
"Soon."
"No, now."
"Soon."
I take my time with her. The man who took the photo of us on the porch doesn't get a quick fuck in his hayloft.
He gets the woman he wanted dead on her back in the hay, coming on the mouth of the man whose name is on her wrist.
She comes loud. Loud enough I'm glad the barn's fifty yards from the main house and the brothers are sleeping in.
I take my jeans off and the cedar box ring stays in the small pocket on the floor of the loft beside us, and I push into her, and she takes me the way she's been taking me—fierce, hers, mine.
"Tell me, Dakota."
"Yours, Spur."
"Whose?"
"Yours. Always have been. Always will be."
"That's right, baby."
I fuck her in the hayloft of the big barn. Slow. Then hard. Then slow again.