29. Hunt
— ? —
Hunt
I cleared it with dispatch first.
That was the part nobody would’ve believed about the old me: that the grand gesture started with a phone call to the county emergency coordinator to make sure I wasn’t tying up a working frequency, that I filed it like a drill, that I asked permission.
But I’d learned. Anything worth doing, you do it right, and you do it where it belongs.
The rest of the plan I’d been building for a week.
Half of Primrose was in on it. All of Primrose, if I’m honest, because a secret in this town is just a piece of news that hasn’t finished traveling.
June had the timeline. Maeve had been assigned to film and had been practicing holding her phone horizontally for days.
Doc Hale had loaned me a truck. The grange ladies had handled the ditch grass, whatever that meant.
The only person in three counties who didn’t know what was coming was the one it was for.
I hadn’t slept. I’d lain in our bed most of the night listening to Nora breathe, one hand on the curve of her where the baby turned over and over, running the words until they stopped sounding like words.
Before the sky went gray I slipped out and drove to the fence line to set the whole thing up while she slept.
The man I used to be would’ve organized this with a checklist and a chain of command; the man I was now still did exactly that, only in service of the only thing that had ever mattered.
I was more scared than I’d been on the mountain with the bear.
On the mountain I’d had nothing left to lose.
This morning I had all of it, and I was about to put a radio in my wife’s hand and ask her to decide, in front of the whole county, whether I got to keep it.
On a quiet Saturday morning, I keyed the county emergency frequency.
Every scanner in two counties carried it.
Every kitchen radio in Primrose, every fire station, every dispatch center, and, I’d been promised, the little handheld unit Nora kept clipped to her belt even on her days off, because she was the only emergency vet for thirty miles and she never really stopped being on call.
“All units, all stations,” the dispatcher read, in her most official voice, because she’d volunteered for this the second June asked. “Priority call. Requesting Dr. Lenora Smith. Respond to the fence line on Route 12. Nature of emergency: permanent.”
Then we waited.
I stood at the fence rail in the golden early light with my feed-store cap crushed in both hands and my heart going like I’d run the whole way, and I watched the dust cloud come up Route 12 at a speed that would’ve gotten anyone else a ticket.
She arrived at seventy in work boots, ready for blood.
That was my wife. A dispatch says emergency and she comes at a dead run with her kit on the seat and her sleeves already shoved up, because somewhere out there an animal might be dying and Nora Smith doesn’t make it wait.
She hit the brakes. She was out of the truck before the dust settled, scanning for the disaster.
There wasn’t one.
A fence rail strung with the first of the golden light.
A box of gas-station donuts sitting on the top rail, powdered sugar and all.
The entire town of Primrose parked along the ditch grass, pretending with tremendous effort to be invisible and failing completely.
June, filming, horizontally, already weeping.
Waffles, wearing a bandana, standing on the hood of Doc Hale’s truck like a hood ornament carved by a vengeful god.
And there was me.
Nora went very still.
“Hunt,” she said. “What is this.”
I picked up the radio one more time, so the whole county could hear it.
“Seven years ago,” I said, and my voice only shook a little, “I told a woman on a fence that she was the best partner I’d ever had.
Then I spent a year and a half forgetting it.
The rest of my life won’t be long enough to make up for that, but I’d like to spend it trying.
” I had to stop and breathe. Somewhere in the ditch grass, somebody was already crying.
“So this is a formal request. Requesting permanent reassignment. All calls, all weather, all the rest of it. Back to back. Always.”
I set the radio down.
Then, off the frequency, just for her, I opened the box.
There weren’t donuts underneath. There was a ring.
Her ring. The one she’d handed back to me in a parking lot the day I got out of the hospital, and found in my pocket months later in a borrowed room in a flood, and handed back to me a second time. I’d stopped counting how many times I’d have to be given it before I got to keep it.
“You gave this back to me once,” I said. “I never accepted the return. We never actually stopped being married, Nora, but marry me again anyway. New vows. Real ones. Out loud, in front of everyone, so there’s a whole county full of witnesses if I ever get it wrong again.”
She was crying. She was laughing. She crossed the distance between us and grabbed the front of my shirt, and she said it into the radio I hadn’t quite managed to shut off, so the whole county heard that too.
“Yes. Obviously, yes, you enormous idiot.”
The ditch grass erupted.
Waffles screamed from the hood of the truck. June was sobbing openly now. Somebody set off an air horn that had no business being there. And I slid the ring back onto the finger it’d lived on for three years, and it fit like it’d never left, because it never should’ve.
I kissed my wife on a fence line at golden hour, with a county full of witnesses.
And halfway through the kiss, I felt our daughter kick, hard, square against the curve of Nora between us, perfect timing, already her mother’s sense of the dramatic, and I had to stop, because I was crying too hard to keep going.
“She approves,” Nora said, wet and laughing against my mouth.
“She has excellent instincts.”
“She takes after the goat.”
For one second, before the town remembered it was allowed to move, there was only the three of us: Nora and the ring and the kid kicking between us. She pressed her forehead to mine.
“You planned all this,” she said, wondering, like she still couldn’t square it with the man who’d once forwarded his apologies to her through an assistant. “You shut down a county frequency.”
“I cleared it with dispatch. I’m not an animal.”
She laughed, wet and helpless, and I felt it everywhere.
“How long have you been planning this?”
“Since the night you let me back through your front door,” I said. “Maybe since the mountain. Maybe since a fence line seven years ago. Take your pick. They’re all true.”
The town descended after that. There were donuts, which turned out to be real, because June thinks of everything.
There was my mother, who had driven down and was pretending she hadn’t been in on it and fooling absolutely no one.
There was Waffles, accepting congratulations like a decorated general.
And there was the question of the wedding, which the whole town had apparently decided was its business now.
“Here,” Nora said, when I asked her where.
“At the farm. In the orchard, with everyone I’ve built a life with standing in the grass.
After the baby comes.” She poked me in the chest, right over the ink.
“And you’re going to write your own vows and read them out loud with no notes, because I spent three years wondering what you were thinking, and I’m done wondering. ”
“You’re going to watch me sweat through a suit.”
“I know.” She was fighting a smile and losing.
“June as matron of honor?”
“June would murder us both if it were anyone else.”
I ticked the next name off the list. “Waffles as ring bearer?”
Nora looked over at the goat, who was now attempting to eat the bandana off his own neck.
“He’s earned it,” she said.