Page 35

"Sit," John said. "You're hovering."

Dean sat, on the edge of the bed they'd moved down for him, in the low light off the hall.

For a while neither of them said anything. It was the first quiet of the whole loud day, just the two of them, the way it had been a thousand times across a fence or a truck cab or a hospital chair, the Royston men's whole vocabulary of love conducted in shared silence and the occasional grunt.

"You been good to her," John said. It wasn't quite a question.

Dean looked at his hands.

"That's what I figured." His father shifted in the chair, working a breath, and when he spoke again it was quieter, and it cost him, and Dean knew before the words came that the old man was about to say the thing he'd driven home all day not to have to hear. "You need to pull your head out of your ass, son. About that woman. About all of it." A pause. "Move on from the ghosts. Lucia's gone."

The name landed in the dark room like a stone in still water.

It was the first time. Four years, and John Royston had not once said his daughter-in-law's name out loud in front of Dean, not at the funeral, not after, not through all the long grey time. They'd built a whole house's worth of careful around the not-saying of it. And here it was, plain, in his father's tired voice on his first night home from nearly dying: Lucia's gone.

"Dad—"

"She's gone, and you're not," John said, "and you've spent four years acting like that's a debt you owe her instead of the worst thing that ever happened to you. It's not loyalty, what you're doing. I let you call it that a long time because grief earns a man some room. But that room's up, Dean. There's a good woman driving back to town right now who looks at you like… " he stopped, breathed, "…like your mother used to look at me. And you're going to stand there with your jaw set and let her go because you're scared. I know scared. Don't you dare teach those kids that's how a man does it."

Dean sat in the dark with his elbows on his knees and his hands hanging and could not say one single word.

"That's all," John said, spent, leaning his head back. "That's the whole sermon. Help me into the damn bed."

He came back to the kitchen with his father's voice still going in him — don't you dare teach those kids that's how a man does it — and Lara was at the sink with her sleeves pushed up and the last pan in her hands and her hair coming down, and the want and the words hit him at the same time and he could not, for once, hold both.

"You didn't have to do all this," he said, and his voice came out wrong, lower than he meant.

"I know." She set the pan in the rack and turned, drying her hands on the towel at her hip, and found him closer than she'd thought, because he'd crossed the kitchen without deciding to. She went still. Didn't step back. "Dean."

He didn't have a next word and didn't need one. She was right there, the lamp low and the house asleep around them and his father's sermon ringing in his ears, and he was so tired of the wall, so tired of forty-minute drives and cold beds and being the man who didn't, and he looked at her mouth and watched her see him look, watched her breath go shallow and her chin come up the smallest fraction, not away. Toward. Toward. She was letting him. She'd been letting him for weeks and he kept not taking it, and here it was again, offered, her face tipped up and her eyes gone dark and soft and steady on his, and all he had to do was close the last six inches.

Don't you dare teach those kids that's how a man does it.

His father meant be braver. Dean's whole body heard it as the opposite — heard every reason he'd built in four years for why a woman in his kitchen was a thing he ruined, why the kindest thing he could do for her was nothing — and the wall came up out of pure exhausted habit, even now, even with her mouth six inches from his and her wanting it as plain as his own pulse.

He stepped back.

"It's late," he said, rough. "I'll walk you out."

Something crossed her face, not hurt, worse, understanding, like she'd watched the whole war happen and knew exactly who'd won it again, and she folded the towel and set it down with a care that wasn't necessary. "I know the way," she said, level, the kind of level that costs. And she went, and he let her, and the screen door and the engine and the dark took her down the track, and Dean Royston stood in his kitchen having been handed the thing twice in one night, by his father in words and by her without any, and turned both of them down.

The house rang with the lack of her.

When his phone went off on the counter a few minutes later he was almost grateful for it.

Harvey's. Get down here. Jett's already three deep and telling the bull story. —Chase

Then, a second later: Mason says bring money.

He almost didn't. He hadn't been out in months, hadn't had it in him between the kids and the ranch and his father, and lately between the thing he wasn't letting himself think about. But the house was ringing with the lack of her and his father's voice and the look on her face when she said I know the way, and the thought of lying in his bed a second night running, staring at the ceiling and losing the same argument, was more than he had in him.

One beer. He'd have one beer with his cousins and let them be loud at him and come home.

He looked in on the kids, told a half-asleep Helen in the hall he was going out, and drove the twenty minutes into town under a sky thick with stars.

Harvey's on a Friday was the whole of Soluno's nightlife in one low room — the long bar, the pool table with the bad felt, the jukebox that had played the same hundred songs for twenty years, and Harvey himself behind the taps, mid-seventies and sour as a lemon and secretly delighted by every soul who walked through his door.

The back corner had always been theirs, the booth and the pool table beside it, close enough to be one camp. It was theirs tonight: Chase lining up a shot at the table, Jett — who'd apparently routed his Friday through here — tipped back in the booth, and Mason across from him nursing a beer, the Clay-side cousin who'd been turning up at Royston tables Dean's whole life because the feud was the fathers' and never the sons'. Three beers deep already; they'd started without him. John's sons and Clay's sons at the same scarred table, all of them Roystons, whatever their fathers had made of that, the way it had always been once you got a generation down from the men who'd drawn the line.