26. Grant #2
For the first time in what felt like longer than eight months, everything was in the same place.
There are things that happen slowly and you barely notice until they've completely changed the landscape.
Jessika starts leaving the porch light on.
I notice this on a Tuesday when I come to help patch a section of fence line that's been giving them trouble, and the light is on even though it's just after seven in the morning. It was on the night before, too, I realize. It's been on consistently for the past week.
She doesn't mention it.
I don't mention it either.
The ranch in October has a particular quality, the horses coming out of their summer energy into something more settled, the pastures gold and brown, the mornings coming in silver and cold.
Presley Mills spends an hour outside most afternoons when the weather's decent, moving slowly with his cane, checking on things.
He doesn't say much to me. We have the particular dynamic of two people who are aware of their history and have agreed without discussion to put it down for a while.
He knows I'm helping.
He accepts this with the dignity of a man who has spent a long time being proud and has learned, recently, the cost of it.
Nova finds me in the barn on a Thursday afternoon.
She's done this increasingly over the past weeks, materializing with the casual specificity of a teenager who wants something and is trying to seem like she happened to be there. I let her think I don't notice. It's more comfortable for both of us.
She helps me with the water troughs. Then she hands me a tool I need before I ask for it, which means she's been watching and paying attention.
"You're good at this," she says.
"Keeping water in a trough?"
"Being here." She says it with the slightly sideways delivery she uses for the things she means directly. “Like, you just do things. Without being asked. You just see what needs doing and you do it."
"It's easier than talking," I say.
"Mom does that too." She's quiet for a second. "Not so much lately. Lately she talks more."
I don't respond to that.
"She laughed last night," Nova says. "At dinner. Like actually laughed. I haven't heard that since before the divorce."
Something moves in my chest that I don't examine.
"She's got a lot to worry about," I say.
"She always has a lot to worry about. That doesn't usually make her laugh.
" Nova picks up a bristle brush and starts on the nearest horse's back, Salem, the old gray mare, who accepts grooming from anyone with the patience of the truly unflappable.
"You make her different," she adds. Like she's noting the weather.
"Nova—"
"I'm not complaining." She's focused on Salem. "I'm just saying."
I work on the fence post I've been resetting for the past ten minutes.
"Do you have friends at school?" I ask.
"Not really." No bitterness in it. Just fact. "We moved midterm. It's hard."
"Yeah."
"Did you have friends?" She glances over. "When you were in school?"
“A few.”
She thinks about this.
"I'm looking," she says quietly.
"I know." I look at her. "You'll find them. They're out there."
She makes a small, noncommittal sound that means she doesn't quite believe me but wants to. This I recognize. This specific register of adolescent hope that's been burned enough times to be cautious.
When Jessika comes to tell us dinner is ready, she cooks now, has been cooking since week two, claimed it was cheaper than ordering out and that she wanted to cook and nobody argued because the food is extraordinary, I follow her inside and we sit at the table, all four of us, Presley and Nova and Jessika and me, and it occurs to me somewhere around the second course that this is the most regular thing I've done in years.
Sitting down to a meal with a family.
Being the extra chair at the table that nobody owns but that everyone expects to be there.
Presley asks me about the fence. We talk about it for ten minutes.
Nova tells a story about something that happened in her English class that's actually funny, she’s a natural storyteller, turns out, dry and precise, and Jessika laughs and when she laughs, the tiredness in her face goes somewhere else entirely, and she looks beautiful.
I look at my plate.
"Grant," Presley says.
I look up.
"The creek gate on the south pasture," he says. "It needs work before winter. I appreciate it if you could help me look at it this week."
Presley Mills is asking me for help.
This is not a small thing. I know it. He knows it. We both acknowledge it silently in the way that Presley Mills has always dealt with difficult things, by not saying them directly and trusting that the not-saying is a kind of speech.
"I'll look at it tomorrow morning," I say.
He nods. Goes back to his food.
Nova is watching this exchange with her dark, analytical eyes and I can see her noting something. Filing it. The way she files everything.
After dinner, Jessika walks me to my truck.
The night is clear and cold and the stars are very bright over the ridge.
Her breath makes small clouds in the air.
She's wearing a ranch jacket over her sweater and her dark curls are loose around her face and she's been close to me all evening in the way that people are close when they've stopped being afraid of the closeness.
"You and my father," she says.
"We're getting there," I say.
"He never—" She stops. "He blamed you for a long time. For Morgan. For the trial. For—a lot of things."
"I know."
"He was wrong."
I'm quiet.
"Grant." She turns toward me slightly. "He was wrong.
I was wrong." Her voice has a quality I'm not used to hearing from her, careful and direct at once, like she's navigating something with a precision she's been practicing.
"I've wanted to say that for, I’ve been building up to saying it for a long time.
I testified against you and I was wrong.
I had incomplete information and I—" She stops.
"There's no way to fix what that cost you. I know that. But I needed you to know that I know it was wrong.”
“We had this discussion already.”
“I know, I just needed to say it again, mostly for myself.”
I stand very still.
The night is warm and the stars are bright and Jessika is looking at me with those dark eyes that have never once been dishonest, not even when I wished they were.
"It took me too long to be angry at the right things," I say finally. "I was angry at you when I should have been angry at the situation. At the person who set the situation up." I pause. "You told the truth as you understood it. I would have done the same thing."
"You don't have to forgive me."
"I forgave you a long time ago," I say. "I was just too stubborn to let you know."
Something changes in her face. Not relief exactly. Something more like a quiet weight setting down.
We stand there for a moment.
"Stay," she says. "Not tonight. I mean—" She pauses, recalibrates. "I mean in general. Don't disappear after this is over. Whatever happens with Holcomb and Collins and all of it. After it's done."
I look at her.
"I don't know yet what I'll look like after it's done," I say honestly.
"I know." She holds my eyes. "Stay anyway. Figure it out here."
I drive home with all the windows down in the cold air.
I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling and make the same case to myself I've made before: that I am someone who ruins things, that people who attach to me tend to get caught in the blast radius, that she has enough to carry without adding me to the weight.
I make the case well.
I'm not sure I believe it anymore.