“Sorry you got drafted,” I said at last, my eyes on the road. “This isn’t in your groomsman job description.”
“I’m glad to have something to do that I’m good at.”
“Driving?”
“Getting things from point A to point B in bad conditions.”
That shut me up for a mile. The heater whirred. Sun flashed off the hood and stung my eyes. I adjusted the vent and forced my shoulders to unclench one knot at a time. The road narrowed to two lanes with ditches on either side waiting to swallow us whole. A truck ahead of us fishtailed, corrected, then fishtailed again before the tires found road. I exhaled long and slow. I’d been holding air in my lungs like I could keep us on the road by sheer force of will.
“You always try to carry everything yourself, don’t you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. Honesty was faster than deflection, and I didn’t have time for games. “Not because I want to. Because if I drop something, it might break.”
He glanced over, not long, just enough to say he’d heard me. “Sometimes you need to hand it over to someone who won’t drop it.”
If only it could be that easy. “And sometimes you don’t have that someone.”
“Today you do.”
I didn’t answer, but the truth sat between us like an extra passenger the whole way into town.
Kalispell showed up all at once in a sprawl of low, flat buildings, roofs patched with old snow. We hit the greenhouse first because it closed the earliest. The parking lot was a sheet of hard-packed ice. Hayes parked at an angle that only made sense to someone who understood traction like a second language.
Inside, it was warm and damp and quiet enough to hear the drip of condensation from the rafters. The woman at the counter had dirt under her nails and a pencil tucked behind her ear. When I said “wedding,” her mouth twitched the way people’s do when they’re about to say, “oh, honey”and decide they like you too much to say it out loud.
“We can do ruscus and eucalyptus,” she said, ticking items off with the side of her pencil. “Spruce tips if you want that winter look. The roses you’ll have to get at the wholesaler.”
“We’ll take what you have,” I said. “Blue-leaning on the spruce if you can.”
We loaded the truck. The air outside knifed inside our open coats and turned our breath into frost. The local florist was next.
“I need winter white roses,” I said when it was my turn at the counter. “As many as you can spare. And anything textural and white that isn’t yellow.”
“For roses, I can give you seventy-five. Maybe eighty if you don’t mind them tight.”
“Tight is fine,” I said.
In the parking lot we loaded again, boxes fitting together like a puzzle, and the puzzle locked into place with a thunk. The light had flattened to dull pewter, and a fine grain of snow drifted in out of nowhere, clinging to the edge of Hayes’s jaw and melting down into the collar of his coat.
We drove in a quiet that didn’t feel hostile. He adjusted the heat toward my side without comment. I pushed my sleeves up to my wrists and made notes, reworking the ceremony pillars in my head with the exact quantities we’d managed to scavenge.
“Have you ever thought about doing something else?” Hayes asked after a while. “Something with fewer emergencies?”
“This isn’t an emergency,” I said, and heard how defensive I sounded. “It’s a problem. Problems I can fix. Emergencies take time away from the fixing.”
He huffed, not quite a laugh. “Stetson always said you ran the ranch like a small country.”
“Someone had to.” Hearing my brother’s name was like putting up a tall wall between us. “And also, he exaggerated.”
Hayes didn’t respond, just navigated the truck along the snow-covered highway. A pickup in the oncoming lane hit a drift and threw up a wave of white that covered the windshield. Hayes didn’t flinch. The wipers swept once, and the road reappeared. He kept his hands low on the wheel, one finger barely moving, making small corrections that kept us where the tires wanted to be.
We made the last stop at a small shop that looked like it had been built from two garages and a dream. It had exactly twenty-five decent roses, a handful of cream spray roses, and a clerk who apologized like she’d failed me personally.
The drive back to the resort was slow going. Finally, the lodge came into view at four on the dot, the roof cut clean against the darkening sky. By the time we backed up to the service door, a bellman had a dolly ready and two banquet servers were waitingwith buckets of water. I didn’t have to ask; someone had made a call while we were on the road. The sight of those buckets made my throat go tight.
We moved fast. Hayes cut twine. I triaged stems. The roses were in better shape than I’d hoped, and the greenery was perfect.
I started with bouquets, wiring ruscus into loose spirals and tucking in roses until the shape felt right. My chest loosened like a knot coming undone.
