Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The beautiful aroma of pot roast drifted to them as they stepped onto the porch.
Jason knew the house better than his own kitchen.
He’d rebuilt half the barn behind it and hauled the couch through that front door with Tate on the other end of it, and he’d never once climbed those porch steps with a woman beside him.
Cece had her coat buttoned to the throat and a pie in each hand that she’d bought at Sweet Everything and told him not to mention that she didn’t bake them herself.
“They’ll know it’s from the bakery,” he said.
“Then they’ll know I have good taste. But you still can’t bring it up.”
The door opened before he could knock. Rylee had a dish towel over one shoulder and flour on her cheek. She looked at the pies, and then at Cece, took one of the pies and put her free arm around Cece’s neck and pulled her inside. Jason came in behind them and shut the door on the chilly air.
Tate was at the stove with his back to the room. He turned around slow, wiped his hands on his jeans, and held one out.
“Cecelia.”
“Tate.”
They shook. It went on a beat too long, both of them measuring, and then Rylee said, “Nobody’s signing a treaty. Sit down,” and they sat.
The table was too small for all the food on it. Pot roast, potatoes, green beans, rolls in a basket under a towel. Rylee started asking questions before the bread had gone around the table.
Where had Cece grown up? Did she cook? Did she ride? What did her father do? Rylee asked that last question no differently than the others, and Cece answered it the same way. Tate looked at his plate, then looked up again.
“Cece runs her father’s public relations,” Jason said.
“I know what she does.” Tate passed the beans. “I did my reading in the summer.”
“Tate,” Rylee said.
“I’m passing vegetables so everyone can have some.”
Cece took them. “He’s allowed to have done his reading.”
That got a look out of Tate that Jason hadn’t expected, sideways and quick, the look he gave a horse that did the smart thing before he’d asked for it.
He said nothing. He ate his roast. By the second helping he stopped being careful, and by the rolls he was telling her about the year the creek came up to the barn door.
Apparently Jason had carried three goats across the yard one under each arm and one in his teeth.
“Not in my teeth.”
“Close enough.”
“It was a kid. It hardly weighed anything.”
“You had it by the scruff. I have a picture.”
“He doesn’t have a picture,” Jason told Cece.
“I do have a picture,” Tate said, and got up to find it.
Rylee shook her head. “Sit down, you don’t have a picture.”
He sat down and shrugged. “Wish I did have one, though.”
Cece laughed. Not the polite one. The real one. Rylee heard it too and looked at Jason over the rim of her glass and raised it half an inch.
Then the pig came in.
Nobody had shut the mudroom door. She came through it at a trot with her ears up, made straight for the dish towel Rylee had dropped over the back of a chair, took it in her mouth, and trotted back out.
The four of them looked at the empty chair.
“That’s one of the good towels,” Rylee said.
“It was,” Tate said.
Cece had both hands over her mouth. Tate was already out of his seat.
“Just let her have it. It’s only a towel,” said Rylee.
Jason sat where he was and looked at Cece laughing into her hands, and he didn’t want to be anywhere else.
The lodge road was dark and the heater in the truck wasn’t quite up to doing the full job of keeping them warm. Cece sat with her hands in her coat pockets and her head against the window. She was quiet, which he’d learned meant she was working through a thought and not that anything was wrong.
He let her think.
Past the turn where the trees closed in, she said, “I forgot what that feels like.”
“What.”
“A family at a table.” She didn’t lift her head off the glass. “Arguing about a picture nobody has. Somebody’s pig coming into the house.” A breath. “It’s been my father and me across a hotel table for eight years. I didn’t know I’d forgotten what it feels like to be with a family.”
Jason reached across the cab and took her hand out of her pocket and held it keeping his eyes on the road. There were things a man couldn’t look at and drive through at the same time.
She turned her hand over in his and held on.
The shine of it hadn’t worn off yet when Tate came looking for him with a face Jason hadn’t seen since the summer.
Jason was in the round pen with the Baileys’ mare, working her on a long line, when Tate came around the barn and stopped at the rail. He didn’t say anything at first, which was Jason’s trick, not his. That alone put a cold spot in Jason’s gut.
He brought the mare down to a walk, then a halt, and let the line go slack. “Say it.”
“The rezoning meeting’s dead,” Tate said. “Council threw it out. The notices never went up. Half the town that should’ve been told never heard a word.”
Jason waited. That wasn’t the face. The town had been fighting Reginald Williams all year, and Tate delivered news of that fight without heat, win or lose. This was something else.
“There’s more,” Jason said.
“There’s more.” Tate took his hat off, which he only did for church and bad news.
“The council didn’t like the look of it, so they put Kyle Sinclair in a room and asked him how a public meeting goes missing its public.
Kyle’s seat was on the line, so Kyle talked.
” He turned the hat in his hands. “He says somebody came to him and asked him to keep the notices inside City Hall. Says she came back a second time to make sure it stayed done.”
“She.”
“Jason.” Tate said it low and steady, and that was the worst part. He wasn’t angry. Angry would’ve been easier. “He named Cecelia Williams.”
The mare stirred behind him, sensing a change in the pen that hadn’t been there a minute ago. Jason breathed until she settled. It was the only thing he knew how to do right then that he could do.
“Kyle’s covering for somebody,” he said. “Himself, most likely.”
“I thought that too. First thing I thought.” Tate hung the hat on the post as if buying himself a second.
“So before I walked over here, I went and asked at the clerk’s office myself.
She was there, Jason. Twice. Signed in at the front desk both times, because that’s the one book in that building nobody thought to keep quiet. ”
Jason looked at the mare. She looked back at him with the big simple honesty horses had, the thing he’d built his whole life around. Horses don’t lie. That was people.
“I want to be wrong,” Tate said. “You understand me? I sat across a table from her and passed her the rolls and liked her. Rylee likes her. I want Kyle to be a liar and I want the sign-in book to be somebody else’s handwriting.
But I’ve been to this rodeo before, little brother.
I spent a whole season learning what it costs to look away from a thing because looking at it hurts. ”
“Don’t.” It came out flat.
“I have to.” And then Tate did the thing Jason would remember longest. He didn’t shout, and he didn’t pace, and he didn’t tell Jason what to do.
He stood at the rail of the round pen and laid it out one post at a time.
“I’m not talking about her father. You knew who her father was from the start, and so did I, and I shook her hand at my own table anyway.
I’m talking about what she did. There were people all over town with a right to stand up in that meeting.
Faith. Brent’s cousins. The Gilleys. Rylee, who owns land on that border.
Somebody made sure they never knew the room existed.
That’s not being born with the wrong last name.
That’s a thing a person chose to do, on an ordinary afternoon, with her own two hands. ”
Every word landed.
“You’re the best judge of animals in this town,” Tate said.
“Better than me, better than anybody. So I’m not going to stand here and tell you what she is.
I told you what I know, and now I’m going to go home and hope to God there’s another side to it.
” He picked his hat back up. “You’re about to hang your name on a barn and ask this town to trust you with what they love.
You deserved to hear it from me first. That’s all this is. ”
He was halfway to his truck before Jason spoke.
“Tate.”
His brother stopped.
“Thank you for not asking me to stop seeing her.”
Tate looked at him for a long moment. “I already asked you my one question,” he said. “It’s still the only one I’ve got.” Then he got in the truck and drove home.
Jason stood in the round pen with the mare for a long time after the dust settled on the drive.
He had a hundred arguments for defending Cece.
He’d have spent every one of them on Kyle Sinclair, on the council, on anybody who asked.
He didn’t spend them, because he didn’t know yet whether they were true, and he’d never once in his life said a thing he didn’t mean.
The mare bumped his shoulder. He rubbed her neck without thinking about it.
He didn’t know what he believed. He knew where the answer was.
Jason coiled the long line, hung it on the gate, and went to get his keys.