Epilogue 2
Mason
Five years later
I’m on the porch. Coffee in my hand, boots on the rail, the mountains steady and green and unchanged.
Everything else has changed.
The ranch looks different now. Not because I changed it.
Because she did. Not the buildings or the fences or the land.
Those are the same. But there are flower boxes on the porch railing that she planted the first spring.
There’s a wind chime by the kitchen window that she hung because she said the house needed more music.
There’s a chicken coop near the barn that she insisted on because she wanted fresh eggs and she wanted a three-year-old boy to learn where food comes from.
The three-year-old boy is currently racing out of the house and toward the barn at a speed that suggests he has inherited both his mother’s enthusiasm and his father’s disregard for caution.
“Come on, Daddy! I want to ride my horse!”
Jackson Lane. Three years old. Dark hair, his mother’s eyes, my jaw.
He runs the way Paige sings: at full volume, with complete commitment, holding nothing back.
He’s been on a horse since he could sit up.
He named his pony “Riot Two” after the bronco his mother watched me ride the day she brought my jacket back, a story he’s heard approximately four hundred times because Paige tells it at every opportunity and I let her because watching her tell it is my favorite thing in the world.
“One minute, buddy. Let me finish my coffee.”
“But DADDY.”
“One minute.”
He runs to the barn. He’s wearing boots.
Small boots, children’s boots, the ones Paige bought in Bozeman with the same deliberateness she applies to everything she cares about.
She researched children’s riding boots for two weeks.
She made a spreadsheet. She called Claire for spreadsheet advice.
Claire sent her a template with formatting suggestions.
My wife and her best friend exchanged spreadsheet templates about toddler footwear and I sat on this porch and thought: this is my life and I would not trade a second of it.
From inside the house, I hear her.
She’s singing.
She’s always singing. In the kitchen, in the shower, on the porch, in the barn.
She sings while she cooks and while she grades music assignments and while she picks tomatoes from the garden she put in the second summer.
She sings to Jackson at bedtime, songs she writes for him, songs about horses and mountains and a boy whose daddy rides broncos.
She sings at the school, where she’s been the music teacher for four years now, where her students love her so much that three of them cried at last year’s recital when she told them she was proud of them.
She’s louder now than she was when I met her. Louder and brighter and more herself every day. She sings in the kitchen at 7 AM and the whole house hears it and nobody, not once, has asked her to be quieter.
I put my coffee down. I stand up. I walk inside.
She’s at the counter, making breakfast, her guitar leaning against the chair where it always leans. She’s in one of my T-shirts and leggings and her hair is down and she’s singing a song I don’t recognize. Something new. Something she’s working on.
She stopped singing in Nashville bars. She didn’t stop singing.
She just found a different stage. The school.
The ranch. The kitchen. Our son’s bedroom at night.
She plays at The Burning Tree sometimes, open mic nights, and the whole town comes because Paige Lane’s voice is the kind of thing you cross a mountain for.
She puts her guitar down. She turns around. She’s smiling. The quiet one. The real one. Mine.
And then she stands and I see it properly. The curve of her belly under my T-shirt. Five months along. Our second. A girl, the ultrasound said last week. Paige cried. I cried. Jackson asked if the baby could ride Riot Two and we said probably not right away.
“Morning, cowboy,” she says.
“Morning, sweetheart.”
I cross the kitchen. I put my hands on her belly. I feel the kick against my palm. Right there, under the cotton, a tiny foot against my hand.
“She’s active today,” Paige says.
“She’s her mother’s daughter.”
“God help us all.”
I kiss her. She tastes like coffee and the jam she had with breakfast. She kisses me back and her hands are on my chest and the kitchen is warm and the guitar is leaning against the chair and our son is in the barn talking to his pony and our daughter is kicking against my palm.
“DADDY! MY HORSE IS WAITING!”
Paige laughs. The full laugh. The laugh I heard for the first time on a raft trip when she didn’t know I was watching. The laugh that lit up her whole face from the inside.
“Go,” she says. “Your son needs you.”
I go. I stop at the door. I look back.
She’s picking up the guitar. She’s settling into the chair by the window, the same chair she sat in the first night she played for me, the night before the wolf, the night her voice rearranged every piece of furniture in my life. She starts playing. Singing. Something soft and warm and full.
I stand in the doorway and I listen and I think about a flat tire on a mountain road.
About a woman standing on a gravel shoulder holding a tire iron like a foreign instrument.
About a handshake that ran through my hand and into my chest and never stopped.
About a jacket I didn’t wash. About a fence and a bronco and a wolf and a shot and a kiss and a music room and a porch and a boy named Jackson and a girl who isn’t here yet but who is already kicking.
I stopped to change a tire. That’s all. A flat tire on a mountain road. I’ve stopped for a hundred strangers. I didn’t think twice.
I think about it every day. Every morning on this porch with this coffee and these mountains and this woman singing in my kitchen. I think about what would have happened if I’d been five minutes later. If I’d taken a different road. If I’d driven past.
I didn’t drive past. The mountain wouldn’t let me.
“DADDY!”
“Coming, buddy.”
I walk to the barn. The mountains are behind me. My wife is singing. My son is on his horse. My daughter is kicking.
I’m not a man who needs much. I never was. A ranch. Good horses. Quiet mornings. That used to be enough.
Now I have everything.
~~~