Page 35 of Thunder

Then she detonates.

"She's COMING? Tonight? To OUR house?" She's up on her toes, Biscuit protesting loudly. "Is she gonna see my room? Can I show her the tooth I saved? Daddy, she likes cows and horses and everything, we gotta—I gotta clean my room, is she gonna sit by me, what's she bringing⁠—"

"Breathe, wild thing."

"I am breathing!"

No, she isn’t.

She's vibrating in place like a struck fence wire, lit up brighter than I've seen her since before the whole ranch went dark and tense and careful, and watching my kid come alive like that over the idea of that woman at our table does something to me I don't have a clean word for.

"Go clean your room, then," I tell her, rough around the edges. "Since you're so worried about it."

She's gone down the hall at a dead run before I finish the sentence, hollering something at the cat about company coming.

Presley shows up at six with two grocery sacks and a foil pan.

Raine meets her at the door like she's the second coming.

I hang back in the kitchen doorway and let it happen, because there's nothing for me to do here but watch, and watching is suddenly the best job I've got.

My girl takes Presley by the hand, just grabs it, the way kids do, no permission asked, and hauls her down the hall to show her the clean room and the saved tooth and the cat who did, in fact, get big.

Presley goes, laughing, letting herself be dragged, and the sound of the two of them carries back to me while I lean on the counter and try to keep my weight off the bad leg.

Supper's chicken and dumplings, and it's good, and Raine talks the entire time exactly like I warned her she would.

She tells Presley about school and about Nash and about how she's decided she's going to be a large-animal vet now, like Miss Grace, except also a barrel racer, and possibly the President.

Presley takes every word of it dead serious, asks follow-up questions, treats a nine-year-old's rambling like it's the most interesting thing she's heard all week.

She's good at this.

Better than good.

She leans in and she listens, and she teases Raine right back, and my kid blooms under it like a plant that finally got put in the window.

I don't say much. I don't need to.

I sit at the head of my own table with my hip aching and my daughter glowing and a woman across from me who keeps catching my eye and looking away, and I think that this is what I've been missing and couldn't name.

Not the sex, though God knows I missed that too.

This.

The full table.

The noise.

The kid and the woman and a hot meal I didn't cook alone.

"Daddy, you're not eating," Raine informs me. "You're just looking at everybody."

"Man can look at his supper."

"You're not lookin' at your supper." She rolls her eyes at Presley, conspiratorially. "He's being weird. He's been weird all day."

"Has he?" Presley doesn't look at me when she says it, but her mouth curves. "Weird how?"