Rowdy barks, then groans as he lies down. He’s the most chill dog I’ve ever met.
We lay there, while the home improvement show wraps up its dramatic countertop reveal.
After a while, she says, muffled against my shoulder, "Medical leave."
There it is.
"Yeah," I say.
"How long?"
I think about what I know. I think about the arm, thepin work, the concussion protocol, and flight medical clearance. I think about what it takes to get back in a cockpit.
"Minimum twelve weeks," I say. "More likely fourteen."
She goes quiet.
"Mom says he's coming home and will be here for the Fourth," she says.
"Probably."
Another quiet stretch. The TV cycles into a new episode.
I know what she's thinking, because I'm thinking it too. Tyler coming home is good news. Tyler is stable and alive, and he is coming home. Every part of me knows that.
The other part of me knows what he'll find when he gets here.
She falls asleep in my arms. I pull the covers over her shoulders and pull her in close.
One minute she's smiling, but still a little worried, the next her breathing changes and her weight shifts, and she's out like a light.
I can't sleep, not now. Not after all the stress and worry. Not after my friend crashes, then has surgery, and not after I find out he’s coming home to see his sister in my arms. The more I thought about it, the worse it was. I’d been lying to him by not telling him. He was being heroic, and I felt a little like a coward, afraid to face his rejection.
I gently pulled out of her arms. I need to clear my head. Rowdy followed me outside, and we walked together. I check on the horses. Mischief is awake, gnawing on the wood paneling that Falon put up to keep him from the hay.
“She is not going to like that,” I tell him.
At this hour, there wasn’t anything for me to do, not without waking the ranch hands and the dogs, so I headed back inside and sat at the table.
The farmhouse is quiet. Except for the creak of the floor near the pantry, and the tick of the baseboard heat.
I stand in the kitchen for a while. This is Falon’s heart and soul. She loves her family, her house, and her ranch, and I think I’m in there too.
Falon's been at this backsplash for two weeks. I can see where she stopped the other day. Like most days, life sometimes gets in the way. She was mid-row, dead center, when Mischief went barreling past the window. He’d gotten out again. Falon dropped the whole thing to wrangle the horse. When she returned later, she bagged the whole thing, and we sat on the porch and watched the stars. The leftover grout sits in a sealed bag on the counter. The tile scraper is clean and set aside, like she expected to come back to it.
I pick it up. Put it back.
Not tonight.
But I walk through the kitchen slowly, and I look at what she's built. The cabinets she sanded and repainted herself. The window trim is perfectly level. The little rack of hooks by the back door, where she hung a metal dog paw for Rowdy's leash, even though he mostly stays in the guest house, because she thought about it and made room for us here.
This house is going to be beautiful.
Tyler is going to see that. Whatever else happens, he's going to walk in here and see what his sister built, and he's going to know.
I lean against the counter and look at the far wall.
Six weeks. Give or take.
