The question lands heavier than I expect. I haven't heard him say her name in a year. He's not asking me what Ithinkhappened to her, because I know.
He's asking me something else.
"What about her, Prez?"
"You're going to marry my daughter, and you're going to carry it. For the rest of your life. You know that."
"Yes, I do, Prez. It’s not my business to tell her, even if I do think she has a right to know she’ll never see her mother again. That fucks with her, Prez. I hate seeing it on her face. She hides it well, but I fucking see it."
Phantom takes a breath, the heaviness weighing on him. "You were there after it happened. Within ten minutes, you were one of the people that helped dispose of her body. Dakota doesn't know. Grace doesn't know. Shiver doesn't know. My little girl, the one you're putting a ring on tomorrow, is going to ask you about her mother someday, and you’re going to have to look her in the face and tell her you don't know where her mother went."
I want to sigh, but know that’ll be a dumb mistake. "I know, Phantom. If I was going to crack, I would’ve done it by now. I don’t want to keep any secrets, but I will."
"Some men can't carry that, Spur. Some men come apart at year three. Year five. Year ten. They hold the secret too long and one night they're a bottle deep on a porch and they tell their wife, and the wife loses everything in one sentence."
"Prez."
"I'm not saying you would. I'm saying I have to ask."
"I know you do."
He's looking at me steadily. The Bible is closed. The coffee is on the rail. The man asking me the question is the man who has been carrying it himself for the last year.
I take a breath. "Phantom. I know what happened, and I don’t need a recap of it. I’ve looked at your daughter every day since that night and not said a word. I can keep doing that for the next fifty years. Until I'm in the ground beside the woman I'm asking to marry me. The day Dakota asks me where her mother went, I tell her the same thing you told her—she left and she didn't come back. That's the answer. That stays the answer."
He closes his eyes for a second before opening them. "You take care of her, Spur."
"Until I'm in the ground."
"And the secret stays between the men who already know it."
I don’t say anything else. I give him a nod.
He's quiet for a long time after that.
He stands up. I stand up with him. "You got a ring, Spur?"
"I've got my grandmother's. In a box in my cabin."
"You've had it the whole time?"
"Since she died. I was twenty-eight. I had a feeling then I was going to give it to your daughter someday."
He gives me a nod and walks back in the house, the screen door closing behind him.
* * *
The next morning I wake up before her.
Dakota's on her side facing me, braid coming loose on the pillow, wrapped wrist resting on her stomach. The cabin is gray with the pre-dawn light through the window.
Today istheday.
I get out of the bed as quietly and carefully as possible, pull on jeans and a t-shirt, walk barefoot to the kitchen, and reach behind the spare coffee mugs in the cabinet over the sink.
The small cedar box is where I left it years ago.
I sit at the kitchen table and open it.
