Page 18 of Thunder

That some stupid, starved part of me wanted him to want me at that table even though I've been telling myself for weeks that the last thing on earth I want is to sit in that man's kitchen.

Maybe he doesn't want me there.

Maybe the rattlesnake on his neck and the visit to my pens was the whole of what he had in him, and the actual day-to-day of me, the supper-table me, the me his daughter wants—maybe that's more than he's asking for.

I hate how much that thought hurts.

I have no right to it.

I'm the one who ended it.

I'm the one who said no more lies and walked out his door.

"I was pretty busy," I tell her, and my voice comes out steadier than I feel. "But it was real sweet of you to want to invite me."

Raine goes still for a second.

Then she looks up at me with Thunder's dark eyes in a nine-year-old's face, and she says the one sentence that takes the ground out from under me.

"I think my daddy misses you."

Everything in me goes still.

"He hasn't said it or anything," she goes on, matter-of-fact, back to petting the heifer like she hasn't just reached into my chest and closed a fist. "Daddy doesn't say stuff like that. But he just looks sad a lot. Since a while ago. He looks at his phone and doesn't call anybody and then he looks sad, and one time I asked him what was wrong and he said nothin', baby but it was a lie, I could tell, 'cause his voice went funny."

She shrugs, a small terrible shrug. "I think he misses somebody. And you used to come around, and now you don't, and he got sad right around then. So."

So.

All of it laid out by a nine-year-old with a kitten under her arm, the plain sum I've been refusing to add up, done for me in the sun at a sick pen while a heifer coughs.

He looks sad.

He got sad right around when I stopped coming.

I have to look away from her, out across the pasture at nothing.

I breathe through the burning behind my eyes so I don’t cry in front of this child, because if I start I won't be crying about a heifer and she's too smart not to know it.

That's when the second engine comes.

Two of them — Grace's truck rolling up the ranch road, and behind it, further back, slower, the low rumble of a bike easing across the property.

He's come for his daughter.

Of course he has.

She took off across the ranch on a side-by-side with a kitten, and Thunder doesn't let Raine get more than a holler away from him these days.

Not since the bunkhouse, not with whatever's got the whole club riding tight and watchful lately.

Grace gets to me first.

She parks and gets out, and she's all business, vet bag in hand, ballcap pulled low, and she gives Raine a real smile because Grace's ice was only ever for me.

Then the smile's gone when she turns to the chute, and it's just the heifer and the work. "Let's see her."

I hold Number 68's head while my sister works, and Grace is good.