I feel it happen before I decide it is. A thing my body does in spite of me.
Eight years of trained stillness and the muscle between my thumb and finger tightens on a piece of ceramic like the mug is the thing I've been holding instead of what I've actually been holding.
I loosen my grip and count to three, trying not to look at the gate.
The screen door behind me opens. "Go say hello like an actual human being, Spur."
Shadow. In a clean shirt now. Fresh coffee in a travel mug I know is for Grace.
"I have horses to feed."
"You fed them an hour ago."
"Different horses."
"Cade." He says it soft. The way he says it when he means it. I know that voice.
It's the voice he used at my bedside in Laredo.
It's the voice he used at my patch-in.
It's the voice he used the one time in the last year he asked me if I was okay, and didn't take the shrug I gave him for an answer.
I stop. Hat down. Coffee cooling in my hand. "Fine."
"That's my boy."
He hits the porch step on his way to his truck. I hear the engine start, but I don't watch him go.
Instead, I watch the gate.
Her truck pulls into the yard. Black three-quarter-ton with a trailer hitched behind it. Gooseneck. Two-horse. Dust on the fenders the color of a county I know the name of and haven't been to in months.
She swings the driver's door open. Boot first. Always the boot first.
Scuffed at the toe, creased at the ankle, the kind of wear you put in a boot over years and not miles.
She hits the gravel with her full weight and the dust puffs up around her.
And for one second.
Onebadsecond.
I’m taken back eight years, with her in a clubhouse doorway. Half-braided head of hair. Silver buckle winning a stranger's attention.
Then reality snaps back and she's twenty-five. Grown.
She pulls her sunglasses off the bridge of her nose, folds them, and hooks them in the V of her shirt.
Her hair is in a braid down her back. Her shirt is one of her daddy's.
I can see the old Shotgun Saints logo half-faded across the front, sun-bleached from a summer she spent on somebody's porch I wasn't on.
She reaches up under her arm, stretches out the drive, and rolls her neck.
She hasn't seen me yet. She's going to in a second.
Eight years of not looking is a thing you can practice. It is a thing Ihavepracticed.
