11. Sullivan
Sullivan
Nine in the morning, and the porch boards are still wet from the thaw. The sun comes through the pines in long wet stripes, the light you only get in April after a hard winter finally quits.
I sit with my back against the post and the phone heavy in my hand, but I don’t dial.
Inside, Tess is making tea. I hear the cupboard opening, the kettle hissing, the small private hum she does when she thinks no one is listening. I am. Always. I’ve memorized that hum the way I used to memorize terrain.
Old habits, new use.
I press Henry’s name before I can talk myself out of it.
He answers on the second ring. “Sullivan. You all right?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
I close my eyes. A knot the size of a fist is sitting in my throat. I swallow around it. “Yeah, Henry. I’m sure.”
“By the way, Ennis turned up. Closer to home than we all thought.”
“So we’re one step closer.”
“We’re good.”
Henry Sutton is a man who, when you call him, makes space and lets you fill it. I used to feel uneasy about it. This morning, I’m grateful.
I clear my throat. “I’d like to take the spot. In the vet program.”
A long pause before he finally says, “How soon?”
“A month or so. Got a few jobs to finish.”
“Ah, the cabin.”
I frown at the valley. “How do you know about the cabin?”
“You told me you were staying through the thaw. I called Tank to let him know, and he said”—Henry pauses for effect, the bastard—“and I quote, ‘Sullivan doesn't stay anywhere through anything that isn’t work. Something’s changed.’”
I rub my hand over my face. “Tank is a nosy son of a bitch.”
“Yeah, well, you can take the man out of the military, but you can’t take the military out of the man. Tank gathers intelligence.”
The kettle clicks off behind me. I hear Tess open the cupboard for the mugs—two now, instead of one. A small sound that’s doing strange things to my chest.
“There’s a—” I stop, looking out at the valley.
Henry doesn’t fill the silence, so I do.
“There’s a woman. She inherited the cabin below mine. She’s—”
My gaze swings to the cabin window, where Tess is standing at the counter, wearing my flannel and not much else. Her legs are bare, her hair tangled from sleep and from me. She’s pouring water into two mugs. She lifts one to her face and breathes the steam. My chest does the thing it does now.
Mine. The word lands clean, like an axe finding the grain.
“She’s the one,” I say.
It’s the first time I've said it out loud. The valley doesn’t fall in. The porch boards don’t split. My voice just lays the truth down plain between Henry and me, and Henry, bless him, doesn’t make me say it twice.
“I’d like to bring her with me.”
“Of course.”
“Yeah?”
“Sullivan, we have guest cabins at Havenridge. Daniel has guest cabins at Stoneridge. Take your pick. You’re welcome. Tess is welcome.”
“How do you know her name?”
“Tank.”
I huff out something that isn’t quite a laugh.
A pause. “Come home, Sullivan. And bring your woman.”
My woman. Nothing has ever sounded so right.
“The wives will fold her into the family,” Henry adds. “You know how they are. There’ll be baking, soap-making. Goats.”
“Christ.”
“Yeah.” A small, real laugh from Henry. “Get the cabin done. Get your woman packed. Get yourself in a truck. Call me when you cross the state line.”
“Will do.”
“And Sullivan?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m proud of you, brother.”
The fist in my throat comes back. I look hard at the tree line so I don’t say anything stupid. “Henry, don’t.”
“Take it. For once.”
I don’t argue.
I end the call and sit on the porch step with the phone in my lap and let the words do what they want.
I’m proud of you, brother.
A year ago, I would have rejected Henry’s words and thrown the phone in the snow.
A month ago, I would’ve flinched. This morning, my hands are steady.
This morning, I let them be true. That’s Tess, mostly.
I came up here as a favor to Henry and to disappear.
I think, instead, I’m starting to come back.
Tess opens the door behind me.
She doesn’t say anything. She sits down beside me on the porch step with a mug of tea for each of us because, apparently, I’m a man who drinks tea now.
She tucks herself under my arm as if she fits there, which she does.
Her hair smells like my soap. Her bare foot finds mine on the cold board and stays there.
She's small enough that the flannel comes down to her thighs. The cuff is rolled three times on the wrist of the hand holding the mug. I want to pick her up and put her on my lap. But I don’t. Not yet.
“How’d it go?” she asks after a while.
“He told us to come home.”
She makes a small sound against my shoulder. “Good.”
We drink our tea. A hawk calls its mate as it flies overhead. I don’t react, not like before. Now I have my woman under my arm, and the hawk is just a hawk.
“Tess?”
“Mm?”
“Are you okay? With leaving?”
The pause is long. I let her have it. The thing I've learned about Tess Carter is that her best answers come when nobody's hurrying her.
She holds her mug in both hands. “It was Aunt Rosa’s cabin.”
“I know. That’s why I asked.”
She breathes out slowly. “Aunt Rosa wrote in her letter that this place was a comfort to her when she had no one. That she hoped it would be the same for me.”
She turns her head against my arm so I can feel her voice in my ribs. “It did, Sullivan. From the moment I parked the truck. It was the first thing in my life that asked me to be the person I am, instead of the smaller version my family wanted.”
I tighten my arm. I can't help it. She fits closer.
“I fixed things,” she says. “Knocked on doors. Made friends. Then a tree dropped on it in a storm and put me on a man's couch, and that turned out to be the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“Tess.”
“Let me finish.”
She threads her fingers through mine. Her hand is small. Mine swallows it. The plain fact of her hand in my hand still does something to the back of my neck I'm not used to. I'm not sure I'll ever be used to it. I'm not sure I want to be.
“I would like, very much, for it to do that job for someone else.”
I look at her. She looks at me.
“I don’t want to sell it,” she says. “I don’t want to lock it up and let it rot.
I want to fix the rest of it and rent it to someone who needs it the way I needed it.
Someone running, maybe. Someone hiding. Someone with no one.
” She looks up at me. Her eyes are wet but steady.
“I want them to find what I found here. Is that okay?”
“That’s more than okay.”
“You’ll help me?”
“Yeah. Reggie’s got names at the lumberyard. We’ll vet them. We’ll make sure the next person who walks up that drive in a melt finds a porch step that holds.”
She smiles. “And a man on the ridge?”
I look at the ridge. The trees. “There won’t be a man on the ridge anymore, Tess.”
She's quiet.
“But the cabin will be there,” I say. “For someone who needs it.”
“Mm.” She tips her head back against my arm. “We’ll have done that part.”
She rests her head against my arm again. The tea cools. The hawk goes over a second time because hawks are show-offs.
I stay where I am, on the porch in the April sun, with my woman warm under my arm and a phone in my lap that just rearranged my whole life, and I let myself feel it. All of it. The strange, unfamiliar weight of being chosen and choosing back.
It doesn't hurt the way I thought it would.
“Sullivan.”
“Mm?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Asking. About the cabin. Most people in my life haven’t asked, but you do.”
“I’ll keep asking.”
Tess tips her head back and smiles at me. At the man on the ridge with a new system that now includes her. I’ve never been athe object of anyone’s joy in this way. I’d chop my way through a winter mountain forest barefoot to keep her looking at me like that.
I lean down and kiss the tea off her lips. She makes a small, surprised sound that goes through me like a struck bell.
“All right.” I stand and pull her up with me. “Boots.”
“Where are we going?”
“Town. I promised Mae I’d go to the café. The woman scares me. I need you to protect me.”
“You? Scared of Mae? She’s tiny.”
“Mae is five foot nothing and pure malice. Up, Carter. Boots.”
She laughs—that laugh I’d hike a mountain in a storm to hear—and goes inside to find her socks.
I stay on the porch a second longer. Look at the valley.
Then I follow her in, because that’s the direction my life goes now.
Within ninety seconds of walking through the door of The Switchback Café, Mae Whitlock has me by the elbow and is steering me toward the back booth like a woman docking a small boat.
“Sit. Both of you. Sit, sit, sit.” She drops menus on the table. “June, get over here.”
June is at the counter and does not need to be told twice. She slides into the booth across from us with her coffee and her bacon sandwich and the small smile of a woman who’s been waiting all morning to be entertained.
“All right,” Mae says, hands on her hips. “You’re going to sit in that booth, and you’re going to drink the coffee I’m about to bring you, and you’re going to allow me to enjoy this. Do you understand me?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Good. Cinnamon rolls?”
I nod. “Four.”
Tess looks at me sideways. “Sullivan Mercer.”
“What?”
“Four?”
“Yeah.”
Tess grins. So do June and Mae. And I realize, with a detached horror, that I’m also grinning.
“Well, look at that,” June says to Mae.
Mae sighs. “I’m looking.”
“He’s a person.”
“He’s a person, June.”
“Tess Carter, you’ve civilized the man on the ridge,” June says.
Tess shakes her head, her eyes dancing. “I had nothing to do with it.”
“You had everything to do with it,” I correct, reaching for her hand under the table.
“All right,” May says. “Coffee. Four rolls. Sullivan, you eat all four?”
“Three for me. One for her.”
“Generous. New look on you.”
“Mae.”
“All right, all right. Sit. Talk.” She bustles off.
June leans both elbows on the table. “Okay. Real talk for two seconds.” She looks between Tess and me like a woman who’s already done the math. “You’re leaving, aren’t you?”
I nod. “In a month or so.”
“Where?”
“Montana.”
“Permanent?”
“Yeah.”
June nods, then looks at Tess. “And you?”
“Going with him.”
June nods again. “Yeah, I figured. All right. You, miss”—she points at Tess—“let me know when you’re loading the truck. I’ll bring the boys down to help. We’ll get a chain on the box and a tarp on the roof, and between Mason and Eli, we’ll have you on the road in a morning.”
June turns to me. “Mercer.”
“June.”
“Don’t be a stranger. The man on the ridge is always welcome at this café. Bring her back to visit. Bring me a Christmas card. Don’t be a sad bastard about it.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The coffee comes with the cinnamon rolls. Tess nudges my boot under the table, Morse code that says hi. I nudge her boot in return and realize I’m sitting in the back booth of a café in a town I visited to disappear, holding hands under the table with the woman I love.
I’ve been a man on a mission and a man with a schedule and a man counting sounds in an empty cabin.
Now, I’m a man on a date.
“Tess.”
“Yeah?”
“This is a date.”
She looks at me over her glasses, frosting on the corner of her mouth. “Yes, darling,” she says seriously. “It is.”
“Can’t remember the last time I went on a date.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“Yeah?”
“You bought four cinnamon rolls.”
“I’m an overachiever.”
“Yes, you are.” She nudges my boot again. “Eat your rolls.”
I do as I’m told.
I haven’t let myself imagine a tomorrow that wasn't a count of hours I could survive. Now, I’m looking at a future that stretches weeks and months and years.
A guest cabin in Montana with two pairs of boots inside the door.
A barbecue at Havenridge in the summer that I’ll walk into with a woman who apologizes to hammers.
A phone call to Wire that I haven’t had the courage to make but am starting to think I might.
My future tastes like cinnamon rolls and Tess.