“I’m coming.”
“I know.”
“Don’t leave him alone.” Her voice breaks on the last word. “Please, Lee. Don’t leave him.”
“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
She’s crying.
I can hear it—the muffled sound of a woman holding a phone and falling apart in a client’s driveway an hour away.
But she’ll pull herself together.
She’ll drive. She’ll come. Because that’s what Bex does. She shows up.
I make the second call—Shadow. Tell him in three words. He says, “We’re coming,” and hangs up.
I put the phone down, sit with Earl and wait for my family.
Bex arrives first.
I hear the truck before I see it—coming fast over the rise, gravel spraying, the engine running hard.
She parks crooked in the drive and she’s out before the truck stops rocking, crossing the yard in long strides, boots on the dirt, her face wrecked and her jaw set and her hands in fists at her sides.
She climbs the porch steps, sees Earl and stops.
He looks like he’s sleeping.
The rocker tipped slightly back, his head resting against the chair, the coffee cup still in his hand.
Peaceful.
The face of a man who put his affairs in order and his land in good hands and sat down on his porch and let go.
Bex kneels beside him, takes his free hand and presses it to her forehead—the same gesture she made with my hand the morning the ring came off, her forehead against his knuckles, her tears falling on his skin.
But his hand is still now.
Still and cooling and she holds it anyway because holding on to people is what Bex does, even after they’re gone.
“Thank you.” Her voice is a wreck. Shattered. “For everything. For the food and the barn and the horses and Rose and for making me your daughter when nobody else wanted the job.” She presses her lips to his knuckles. “I love you, Earl.”
I put my hand on her back.
She leans into me without letting go of Earl.
The three of us on the porch one last time—one living, one dead, one holding them both together.
The bikes come twenty minutes later.
I hear them the way I heard them at the standoff—distant, then building, then filling the road.
Phantom at the head. Shadow behind.
Brothers in formation, the choreography of men who show up for their own.
They don’t come for confrontation this time.
