Tessa was sitting on the porch step when the school bus dropped off Makayla after school. She waved to the driver and ran up the drive with Brown Dog, who’d met her at the road, today.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, sweetie. How was school?”
“Fine.” Makayla sat down on the step beside her and asked carefully, “Are you still working through something?”
“I figured a bunch of it out today.”
“Is that good or bad?”
“Some of both. But mostly good.”
Makayla leaned he head against Tessa’s shoulder, and Tessa looped her arm around her daughter’s waist. They sat there in silence, watching the light change over the valley, shifting from the bright light of afternoon into the golden hour that preceded sunset. Across the lake, Sik-sika Mountain was faded from gray to blue and then to purple.
After a while, Makayla said in a small voice, “Are we staying?”
“Yes, baby. We’re staying.”
Makayla nodded without moving her head off Tessa’s shoulder. “Good.”
They sat like that for a long time.
Whereas Mick had been all eager energy—constant motion, endless noise, a life built on momentum that had kept Tessa from ever having to sit still long enough to notice what she wanted—Dillon had a stillness about him she had soaked up like a parched plant soaked up rain.
She didn’t know where he was tonight, and she didn’t know whether he was going to let her say what she wanted to say to him, and she didn’t know how or if the not finished rocker in the workshop was going to find its way onto this porch.
But she knew it belonged here.
She knew that much.
The small rocker sat empty at the end behind them. Since they’d arrived, it had been the only good chair out here. It had felt incomplete the whole time, as if waiting for something.
It still felt that way. As if it was waiting for a version of life here that hadn’t quite arrived yet. This porch needed three chairs. For three people. A family.
A pair of mallards skidding in for a landing on the lake. A logging truck rumbled past and then it went quiet again.
Makayla’s breathing slowed against her shoulder. She was almost asleep.
Tessa looked out at the water and the mountains and the willows that were every color of green at once, and she thought, very quietly, to no one in particular and also to one person specifically?—
I’m trying, Gramps. I’m really trying. I think I’m finally figuring out how to be brave. For me.
18
Reno called at six-fifteen Tuesday morning.
Dillon was in the middle of performing a C-section on a cow when his phone buzzed, so the call went to voicemail. By the time he had Cal Hendricks’s calf wobbling toward its mother and himself scrubbed as clean as possible after performing major emergency surgery on a large animal, the sun was up and he had two more missed calls from his brother and a text that read, PICK UP, YOU TURNIP.
He climbed into his truck, blasted the heater on his blue-cold hands, and called his brother back. “You’re up early.”
“Up late. Drove back to Montana from Spokane last night and didn’t get to my motel till three.
“Why didn’t you come to my place? The guest room’s yours any time and you have a key.”
“Because I needed to be in court in Apple Pie Creek at 8 a.m. and I didn’t feel like driving all the way around the lake before dawn on three hours’ of sleep.”
“Court? Fern’s will? Everything okay with Tessa?”