CHAPTER 4
Dally
°°°
Saturday mornings belonged to Dally. That was a rule Emery had never had to write down anywhere, the way some things just became true through repetition until they hardened into fact — every Saturday since the funeral, rain or shine, whether Emery was married or separated or whatever the word was for what she currently was, she showed up at nine with coffee for herself and a hot chocolate for Dally, even now that Dally was sixteen and told her, every single week, that hot chocolate was for little kids, and drank it anyway.
"It's for little kids," Dally said, taking the cup.
"You've said that every Saturday for three years."
"And every Saturday you don't listen."
"I'm historically bad at listening to you.
Ask your uncle." The words were out before Emery had fully weighed them, easy and automatic in a way that surprised her — she hadn't meant to invoke him, hadn't planned to, and felt the small aftershock of it in her own chest even as Dally didn't so much as blink.
Dally had been eleven when her mother died, and thirteen when Emery married into the family officially, though by then Emery had already been coming to these Saturday mornings for two years, already the one who signed permission slips when Rhys's mother's hands shook too badly to hold a pen steady, already more constant in this particular corner of Dally's life than half the actual blood relatives who cycled through on holidays and forgot birthdays.
Nobody had ever sat Emery down and assigned her the role.
It had simply become true, the way water finds the lowest ground, and when the marriage ended nobody — not Emery, not Dally, not even Rhys, as far as she knew — had ever seriously discussed whether the Saturdays should end with it.
They sat on the back steps of the house Dally shared with her grandmother — Rhys's mother, seventy-one and increasingly unsteady on the stairs, which was its own quiet worry Emery carried without saying much about it — and split a sleeve of the shortbread cookies Dally pretended to be too old for and ate four of anyway.
The morning was warm already, the kind of early-summer heat that promised worse by afternoon, and somewhere down the block a dog was barking at nothing in the enthusiastic, committed way of a dog with better things it could be doing.
"How's the shop," Dally said, not really a question, more a formality, the opening move in a conversation she was clearly building toward something else.
"Good. Busy. I might be opening a second location."
That got a real reaction — Dally's eyebrows going up, the cookie stopping halfway to her mouth. "Wait, really? Where?"
"Cypress Street. If the financing goes through." Emery heard herself say it and felt the small twist of complication underneath the sentence, the fact that if the financing goes through was currently sitting entirely in the hands of a man neither of them had said the name of yet this morning.
"That's huge. That's — Emery, that's actually huge.
" Dally's excitement was unguarded in the way sixteen-year-olds could still afford to be unguarded about things that weren't about themselves, and it landed somewhere soft in Emery's chest, a reminder of exactly why she'd never once considered letting the separation touch this relationship.
"Can I work there? This summer? I'll sweep floors. I'll do whatever."
"We'll talk about it." Which meant yes, and they both knew it meant yes, and Dally grinned around her cookie like she'd already won.
The sound of a motorcycle pulling into the driveway cut through the moment before either of them could say anything else — a specific sound, an engine Emery's body recognized before her mind caught up to placing it, and she felt her spine straighten on the step without deciding to straighten it.
"Uncle Rhys," Dally said, unnecessary, already twisting around to look.
He came around the side of the house on foot, having parked the bike at the curb, and stopped for half a second when he saw the two of them together on the steps — a small hitch in his stride, there and gone, that told Emery he hadn't planned on this any more than she had.
He'd come to see his mother, probably, or to drop something off, some ordinary reason that had nothing to do with either of them and had collided with this anyway.
"Hey, kid." He ruffled Dally's hair on his way past, which earned him an aggrieved noise and a swat at his hand. "Em."
"Rhys." She said it evenly, the way she'd practiced saying his name in rooms that weren't supposed to mean anything.
"I'm just dropping off Ma's prescription. Didn't mean to — " He gestured vaguely at the two of them, the cookies, the whole domestic tableau he'd walked into. "I can come back."
"You don't have to come back," Dally said, before Emery could decide what she wanted to say about it. "Sit down. We're talking about Emery's new shop."
Something crossed his face — surprise, maybe, or the ache of a man realizing he'd missed a piece of news that used to come to him first, automatically, the way news does inside a marriage. "New shop?"
"Cypress Street," Dally said, delighted to be the one telling him. "If the financing goes through."
The words landed in the yard with more weight than Dally could have known to intend, and Emery watched Rhys absorb them, watched something flicker behind his eyes that she recognized — guilt, maybe, or the sharp reminder of exactly what stood between Emery and that financing, sitting right there on the porch step in the shape of his own signature.
He didn't sit down. He stood at the bottom of the steps instead, one hand braced on the railing, looking at Emery in a way that made her feel simultaneously seen and exposed.
"That's great," he said, and meant it, she could tell he meant it, the same way she'd been able to tell nine years ago when he meant things and when he was managing her. "Really, Em. That's great."
"Thanks." She let the silence sit for a second, then decided to be the adult about it, because someone had to be, and Dally was watching them both with the sharp, undisguised attention of a teenager clocking every adult mistake in real time. "You want a cookie? There's plenty."
He hesitated. Then he sat, one step below them, close enough that Emery could smell engine grease and the same soap he'd always used, and took a cookie he clearly didn't need and ate it slowly, like a man buying himself time to figure out how to exist in this particular configuration of people.
For a few minutes it was almost easy. Dally carried most of the conversation, the way she always did when she sensed the adults around her needed cover — talking about a summer job at the diner, a friend's drama, a movie she wanted to see that neither of them had heard of — and Emery let herself relax by fractions, watching Rhys laugh at something Dally said, watching the way he still leaned his forearms on his knees when he was really listening to someone, and felt the old, dangerous ease of it settle over her like a blanket she'd meant to give away.
It was a good trick, she thought, watching Dally work the two of them without either of them fully noticing they were being worked — steering the conversation into safe water, filling silences before they could turn heavy, the specific competence of a kid who'd learned early that peace in a house sometimes had to be built by hand.
Emery recognized the skill because she'd built her own life out of the same material once.
She wondered, not for the first time, whether that recognition was a compliment or a warning.
Then Dally, mid-sentence about the movie, said, offhand, the way teenagers said the most important things in their lives, "Oh, also, there was this weird car outside school on Thursday."
Emery didn't think anything of it. Dally kept talking, moving on to something about the parking lot, but Rhys had gone very still beside her, the ease dropping out of his shoulders like a switch had been thrown.
"What car," he said. Too fast. Too flat.
Dally blinked at him, surprised by the shift. "I don't know. A gray sedan. It was parked across from the front entrance for like an hour after last bell. Cara thought it was somebody's dad picking up their kid, but nobody ever got in it."
"Did you get a plate?"
"Uncle Rhys, it's a car."
"Did you get a plate, Dally."
The sharpness in his voice cut clean through the yard's easy afternoon warmth, and Emery watched Dally's face do the thing teenagers' faces did when an adult suddenly stopped being fun and started being serious — a flicker of alarm, quickly covered with practiced nonchalance.
"No. I didn't think — it's probably nothing."
"Probably." Rhys was already standing, brushing cookie crumbs off his jeans with hands that weren't quite steady, and Emery felt the same cold thread she'd felt twice now in the last week, watching him fold something away behind his face before she could get a good look at it.
"Rhys." She stood too. "What's going on?"
"Nothing. I need to — " He checked his phone, though it hadn't made a sound, and Emery understood in that moment that the checking wasn't about the phone at all, it was about giving his hands and eyes somewhere to go that wasn't her face. "I need to go handle something. Dally, you good here?"
"I'm always good here." Dally's voice had gone careful too now, matching some frequency she'd clearly learned to read in this family long before Emery had come into it. "It's fine. Go."
He looked at Emery for one more second — something apologetic in it, something that wanted to say more and wasn't going to, not here, not now — and then he was moving, back around the side of the house toward the bike, and a moment later the engine caught and roared and faded down the block, leaving the yard feeling smaller and quieter than it had five minutes ago.
Dally exhaled, long and slow, and picked up another cookie.
"He does that," she said, matter-of-fact, in the tone of someone who'd had a long time to get used to a thing without ever quite deciding whether she liked it. "Gets a look and just — leaves. He used to do it when you guys were still together too. I remember."
Emery sat back down slowly, the porch step suddenly cold under her even in the June heat.
"I remember too," she said.
"Do you think it's about that car?" Dally's bluntness had an edge to it now, something more pointed than idle curiosity.
"Or is it just — I don't know. Is it always like this?
Because if it's always like this, that's kind of messed up, right?
Both of you doing the thing where you don't say the thing. "
Emery didn't have an answer for that. Not one she was ready to say out loud to a sixteen-year-old on a porch step, not when she didn't have the answer for herself yet, and the silence stretched long enough that Dally finally shrugged, unsatisfied but unwilling to push further, and reached for the last cookie.
"I just think," Dally said, quieter now, "that if you guys are gonna figure this out, somebody should actually say things. That's all."
Emery looked at her — sixteen years old, blunt as a hammer, entirely too perceptive for anyone's comfort — and felt something crack a little further open in her chest, some door she'd also nailed shut a long time ago.
"Yeah," she said. "You're probably right."
She didn't finish her coffee. She sat on the steps a while longer, half-listening to Dally talk about something else now, some safer subject, and thought about a gray sedan parked outside a high school for an hour with nobody getting in or out of it, and about the strange stillness that had come over Rhys's shoulders when he heard about it, and understood, with a certainty that settled cold and unwelcome in her stomach, that whatever he wasn't telling her was bigger than a signature on a piece of paper.