Chapter 16 #2
“In June. Those printouts from the Dallas clinic. There was a note on top, in your handwriting.” She looked at the barn. “I sent it back with the rest. I never read it.”
He was quiet for a moment. Then he wiped his hands on the paper napkin, slowly, and folded it.
“It said, I should have come myself.”
Rae turned and looked at him.
“Five words,” he said. “I wrote it about ten times before I got it that short. I kept putting in reasons.” He looked down at the folded napkin. “Then I took them all out. There weren’t any.”
She was quiet. She sat on the tailgate with her hand under his and looked at her own name hanging off the gate in the sun.
“I’d have thrown it in the stove,” she said finally. “In June. If I’d read it.”
“You’d have been right to.”
“I’m glad you wrote it anyway.”
* * *
The vow renewal was that evening, at her gate.
It had been Cole’s idea to do it. It had been hers to do it here. They had argued about that too, at the yellow table in January, out loud, for most of an evening.
He wanted the church in Pardee, where everybody could see.
He said he wanted the whole county to know.
She said the whole county already knew, the whole county had been in the grandstand at the rodeo.
She said she did not want to stand up at the front of a church in a dress again, with half the people there not really her friends.
She wanted to stand at her own gate with her own name over it.
With the people who had carried her through.
He had thought about it for a whole day. Then he came back and said, “You’re right. Your gate.” Then he said, “But I get to pick the music.” She said fine. He picked George Strait. She had known he would.
They did it at seven, when the heat was going out of the day.
There were not many people. That was how she wanted it.
The hands came in clean shirts, with their hats in their hands.
Chuy and Beto and Dusty, and Clem, who had shaved and put on a bolo tie Rae had never seen before.
Manny came with Yolanda, who cried from the moment she got out of the truck.
Rudy came, taller than last year, and asked twice if he could ride Hondo afterward.
Carly came in a dress, which nobody had ever seen, and said if anybody said one word about it she would geld them.
Nobody said a word about it. Hope drove out from San Angelo with her husband and brought a pan of peach cobbler.
Renee came in her flight suit, because she was on call.
She said if her radio went off she was sorry, but she’d have to run.
Dub Pickett drove all the way down from Weatherford in his shoeing truck with the anvil still in the back.
He was seventy-five now. He stood at the gate with his hat in his hands and his big scarred farrier’s fingers shaking a little.
When Rae hugged him he said, “Your daddy would’ve liked this one,” in a voice so rough she almost could not hear it.
Travis came. He stood at the back, by the fence, with his hat pushed back and his hands in his pockets. When Rae caught his eye he smiled, the big easy smile, and lifted two fingers off his hat brim. She smiled back. She was glad he had come. She had not been sure he would.
Russ and Sharon stood at the front, on Cole’s side.
Sharon was in a blue dress and did not cry once.
She stood very straight with her chin up, and when she looked at Rae she looked proud.
Russ was in his good Sunday hat and his pressed shirt.
He stood with his hands behind his back and his jaw tight and looked at the ground a lot.
When Pastor Mike asked who stood with this couple, Russ said, “We do,” before anybody else could.
He said it loud, like the rodeo announcer. Then he looked surprised at himself.
* * *
Pastor Mike kept it short. He was a terrible dancer, but he knew how to keep a thing short. He said a few words about marriage and a few words about grace, and then he said they had written their own vows. He stepped back.
Rae stood at her gate with the sign over her head and the sun going down behind the barn. Cole stood facing her. He had on a white shirt and his good jeans and a new hat he had bought for this. He was holding both her hands. The good one and the bad one.
He went first. They had agreed on that. He had wanted to.
“A year ago today,” Cole said, “you called me for help, and I didn’t give it.
I said all right to somebody else. I’m going to know that my whole life.
I’m not going to pretend I don’t.” He looked at her.
His voice was steady. “So here’s what I promise.
I choose you. In every room. When you’re standing next to me and when you’re two hundred miles away.
When it’s easy and when it makes me look like a fool.
When my father’s watching, and when nobody is.
I’ll ask you. I won’t decide for you. I’ll call you back, every single time. And when you call me, I’ll pick up.”
He stopped. He swallowed.
“I love you, Rae Dawson,” he said. “I’m going to love you till I’m older than Clem.”
Somebody laughed, softly, in the little crowd. It was Clem.
Rae looked down at their hands. At his big rough thumb moving across the scar on the back of her right hand, back and forth.
She had written hers down. She had it in her pocket. She did not take it out.
“A year ago today,” she said, “I sat under a windmill and waited for you to come. You didn’t.
And I learned I could stand up and walk out on my own.
I learned I could live alone, and start colts one-handed, and hold up my own hand in front of the whole county.
” She looked up at him. “I don’t need you.
I want you to hear that. I don’t need you to save me. ”
“I know,” Cole said.
“I choose you anyway,” Rae said. “I chose you in December from a house I could have lived in forever. I’m choosing you again right now, at my own gate, under my own name.
I’m going to choose you tomorrow. I’m not going to get small.
I’m going to stay big, and loud, and I’m going to fight with you out loud.
And I’m going to call you in meetings about hawks.
” Her voice cracked. She let it. “I love you, Cole Ashby. I trust you. I didn’t think I’d ever get to say that again, and I’m saying it, and I mean it.
You’re my husband. You’re my partner. And I’m not going anywhere. ”
Cole’s face crumpled. He did not try to stop it. He stood at her gate in front of everybody they loved, and cried, and did not care who saw.
Pastor Mike said something about the power vested in him by the state of Texas, but no one heard it. Cole had already kissed her.
* * *
There was barbecue afterward, and Yolanda’s four pies, and Hope’s cobbler, and a cooler of Shiner.
Cole played George Strait off his truck speakers with the doors open.
They danced in the dirt in front of the barn as the sun went down.
Rae danced with Cole, and then with Clem, who two-stepped like a young man.
Then with Dub, who was stiff and slow and did not step on her once. Then with Russ.
He came over to her near the end, when “Amarillo by Morning” came on. He stood in front of her with his hat in his hands.
“I’m not much of a dancer,” he said.
“Neither’s Pastor Mike,” Rae said. “I survived.”
He danced with her stiffly, holding her the way you would hold a sack of feed you did not want to drop. Halfway through the song he said, looking over her head, “That rodeo.”
She waited.
“I was mad as hell,” he said. “At you. For about a month.” He moved her around in a slow circle. “Then I wasn’t.”
“What happened?”
“Sharon.” He cleared his throat. “Sharon told me about the branding. That she told you. And I went out and sat in the truck a long time.” He looked at the ground. “I didn’t know that boy remembered. In the back seat. I thought he was too little.”
Rae let him dance her around.
“You’re a good hand, Rae,” Russ said finally, gruffly, to the top of her head. “You always were.”
That was all. It was more than she had ever expected.
When the song ended, he went back to Sharon. He did not dance with anybody else all night.
* * *
Renee’s radio went off at nine-thirty.
She was eating cobbler, and she put it down and grabbed her bag and said “Sorry, sorry, congratulations,” over her shoulder.
She ran to her car. Five minutes later they heard the helicopter come up out of headquarters.
It went over the barn low enough that the dust blew up, and everybody stopped and looked up.
Rae stood in the dirt in front of her barn and watched it go. Cole came and stood beside her and put his arm around her waist. Neither of them said anything.
It went south, toward the highway. Its light was going.
“Somebody’s having a bad night,” Cole said quietly.
“They’ll be all right,” Rae said. “It’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He pulled her closer against his side.
Everybody went back to their pie. Later Carly came over and stood on Rae’s other side, and handed her a Shiner. Carly looked at Cole up and down, the way Hope had in the hallway.
“You did okay,” Carly told him finally. “I’m not saying you did great. I’m saying okay.”
“I’ll take okay,” Cole said.
“You’d better,” Carly said, and went to find more cobbler.
* * *
The house was a quarter mile from the barn.
It was the old foreman’s house, stone like the bunkhouse, with a tin roof and a porch that faced east. No one had lived in it since before Manny, who had his own place in Pardee. Cole had fixed it up over the winter, with the hands, while Rae was still in the white house past the gin.