He stood for a moment beside the chair, his hand resting on its back, the wood slightly warm under his palm. Then he tipped his hat at the women inside out of old habit, realized it was ridiculous in the dark of the porch, and walked across the backyard with Arlo to his truck.
Arlo paused at his fence. “You’ll see her tomorrow, then.”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” A pause. “I’d wear a clean shirt I was you.”
“I planned on it.”
“Mm.”
Brown Dog whuffed softly in farewell as he and the old man crossed the property line.
Dillon got in his truck and drove home through a valley turned blue by moonlight. He didn’t turn the radio on. He didn’t pick up his phone. He drove with both hands on the wheel and his head full of Bach’s partita behind a kitchen window, that and an eleven-year-old’s text saying, I want you to surprise her, too.
In his bedroom, he laid out a clean white shirt and his good jeans and the dark sport coat he only wore to funerals and weddings—and now, school talent shows.
He looked at himself in the mirror over the dresser. The man he saw was tired. In need of a shave. His eyes were red. Cal’s call had come in a little after three a.m. last night and he hadn’t slept since.
But he was not the empty man with nothing to give that Lexi had described.
He had never been that man.
He turned off the light and went to bed and slept, for the first time in long time, soundly and all the way through the night.
19
Tessa woke at five-fourteen in the morning, an hour before her alarm, because something was different.
She lay in the dark trying to identify what. The bed was warm. The house was quiet. She sat up and swung her feet to the floor, listening. Hamlet was a heavy snoring weight against her left shin — he’d claimed the beside her bed as his sleeping spot the night her mother’d called as if sensing she needed the company. He’d refused to yield the territory since. And honestly, she found his soft snores comforting.
Who’d have guessed a pig made such a great pet? He was smart and funny, perceptive of and sensitive to her moods, and always right there beside her whenever she felt sad or upset.
Outside, a single bird sent up a few tentative notes. She’d found a CD of Fern’s labeled in Ferm’s loopy hand, Birdcalls of Montana, and had been listening to it while she cooked and did dishes. She identified the early riser outside as one of the cardinals that had moved into the apple tree under her bedroom window last week. She hoped he got his proverbial worm.
As the cardinal’s song grew stronger and louder, knowing settled in her that nothing was wrong. In fact, she registered a faint feeling of something being right. As if something out of place had been put back where it belonged. Odd. It must just be a delayed reaction to her decision to stay here. Makayla had practically been floating around the house, singing and chattering non-stop since Tessa’d told her they weren’t leaving.
It was the right decision. She knew it all the way down to her bones. Right for Makayla and right for her.
She got out of bed carefully so as not to disturb Hamlet and padded barefoot down the stairs. She paused at the foot of the staircase. Something was different on the porch.
She crossed to the front window and looked out.
There were two chairs on the porch.
Makayla’s small blue rocker, where it had always been. And another, larger rocker beside it, sitting there naturally in the gray pre-dawn light as if it had spent years without number in that exact spot.
She stopped breathing.
She was vaguely aware of unlocking the door, of cold air on her skin, the rough porch boards under her toes. She ran her hand along the back of chair the way she had three days ago when she’d found it unfinished in Mick’s workshop.
It was not unfinished now.
She lowered herself into it.
It fit her exactly. The rockers were perfectly balanced. The arms held her elbows exactly where they wanted to be. The seat and back were scooped precisely to receive her body, the way a hand fits an old glove.
She rocked slowly, and a smile of wonder grew on her face. She sat there and watched the mountains across the lake shift from black to charcoal to gray. The willows glowed the color of fresh limes as the sky lightened overhead.
