"I never lie before noon."
Bex laughs from the urn. Marlena laughs from the stove. Grace—who is pregnant with her and Shadow’s second little boy that they’ve already named Braxton—laughs too.
Pops peers up from behind the paper. "You all gonna be eating biscuits or talking about looking pretty?"
"Both, Phantom," Bex says, her hand on her stomach.
Grace isn’t the only pregnant one around. Bex and Banshee are expecting a little girl. A girl they’re naming Rose, after the one person they lost and loved dearly. It’s morbid, but beautiful if you ask me.
"That's what I figured."
He turns another page of the paper. The whole kitchen is warm with the stove, the people in it, and the smell of biscuits and bacon and coffee. For a minute, I forget the silent text on my phone upstairs and just eat the breakfast Marlena put in front of me.
Marlena, behind me, low, in a voice the rest of the kitchen doesn't catch. "Whatever's sitting on you, kiddo, you tell me if you need to set it down."
She kisses the top of my head and goes back to her biscuits.
The day moves the way wedding days move—fast in patches and slow in patches.
Uncle Cash pulls in at eleven with his ol’ lady and two of his San Antonio brothers.
Uncle Roan comes up from Lubbock around noon with Coyote and one of his other men.
Uncle Holt's already here.
Three of the four Lyle brothers in the kitchen of the main house by lunchtime, drinking coffee and ribbing each other the way they ribbed each other in May.
Mr. Whitley pulls into the gravel drive at two in his old Ford pickup with his Sunday hat on the seat beside him.
Spur spoke to him a week ago about driving up from Llano.
He's eighty-three and the trip was an hour each way, and he wouldn't have missed it.
At four, Marlena, Bex, Grace, Presley, and I take over the back bedroom and the upstairs bathroom.
Grace does my hair. Bex does Presley's makeup. Presley does Grace's. Marlena moves between us with a curling iron in one hand and a mimosa in the other and that look on her face that says she's been crying alone in the kitchen for ten minutes already.
The dress on the back of the door. The pearls in their velvet box on the dresser. My man’s grandmother's turquoise on my left hand catching the afternoon light through the window.
At four-thirty Marlena pins the last of my hair up.
Then she steps back and looks at me in the mirror.
She doesn't speak for a long second.
She puts both her hands on my shoulders from behind.
The room is full but I'm only looking at her in the mirror—Grace has stepped to the side, Bex is at the doorway with another mimosa, Presley is sitting on the edge of the bed with her hands folded.
"Kiddo," Marlena says. "You look beautiful."
"Thank you, Mar." The words come out of me before I know they're going to. "I wish my mom could see this."
The room goes still.
Marlena's hand stops on my shoulder. Her eyes meet mine in the mirror. "She would be proud of who you became, baby."
"Would she?"
