He held his palm against my face for a count of three, long enough that I understood what it meant and short enough that he wasn't pushing it, and then he dropped his hand.
"We've got a wedding to get back to," he said.
He stood up and held his hand out.
I took it.
WE WALKED BACK THROUGHthe ranch in the early morning light. The catering crew had started running cable near the reception tent. A horse moved somewhere in the far pasture. I had the camera across my body and the warm memory of a palm against my face and absolutely no plan for what to do with either.
MeeMaw was on the porch of the old homestead.
A quarter-mile east, down the live-oak drive, in the rocking chair. She was watching us cross the property with the steady attention of a woman who had been observing her family make romantic decisions for fifty years and had kept score.
She raised her hand. The gesture was not a wave.
Dutch looked at me. "You'd better go."
"Is that optional?"
"Not even a little," he said.
The live-oak drive smelled like woodsmoke and morning, and MeeMaw was already off the porch and at the bottom of the steps by the time I got there.
She took me by the elbow and marched me inside.
The old homestead smelled like cedar and Chanel No. 5 and fifty years of a family in the same rooms. The rugs had been walked on long enough to belong to the floors. Family photographs covered every wall going back four generations: women in hats, men on horseback, children squinting into summer light, and pressed wildflowers in frames between them. I read every new space like a photographer: light source, depth, what the room is telling me about who lives in it. This one hadgood bones and fifty years of someone who cared about what went on the walls.
MeeMaw walked me through the hall and directly into the back bedroom.
She opened the closet door.
Inside, on its own hanger, was the shirt. Pink. Rhinestone-encrusted. Western-cut, pearl snaps, silver piping at the yoke, and embroidery across the shoulders that could only be described as ambitious, and that would be visible from a moving vehicle.
"1972 Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo pageant," MeeMaw said, with the tone of someone presenting evidence. "I wore it the night I won and the night I rubbed Dorothy Whitfield's nose in it, rest her soul. She had the nerve to say my stitching was uneven." A brief pause. "Her stitching was uneven."
"MeeMaw," I said carefully. "I'm working today. I was thinking something more—"
"Arms up," she said.
I put my arms up.
She buttoned me into it herself, bottom to top, with the focused efficiency of someone completing a motion they'd decided on before I'd arrived. The rhinestones caught the light from the bedroom window. The shoulder embroidery was, as it looked, scratchy. The pearl snaps made small, definitive sounds.
She stepped back and looked at me with the expression of a woman surveying completed work.
"Caprice tried to borrow this shirt this morning," she said. "I told her no." She tilted her head. "You're wearing it to win a man."
She took my elbow again and steered me to the back porch, where sweet tea and a plate of biscuits and ham were already waiting on the small table between the chairs.
"Sit," she said. "You haven't eaten a real thing since yesterday."
I sat.
"That man at the barn," MeeMaw said, settling into her chair, "is fixing to lose his mind when he sees you. And you have got to stop fighting it." She picked up her tea glass. "We don't get many like that one in this family. Take what's offered."
She didn't seem to require a response. I ate a biscuit.
The porch faced east, away from the main property, out over the back field where MeeMaw's land ran to a tree line. The morning light was at the angle that makes everything look like it's been thought about. The bluebonnet median along the drive had gone deeply, completely blue. I ate the ham and watched it and didn't try to organize it, just let it be the light and the bluebonnets and the sound of MeeMaw in her rocking chair.
