“Well you bled all over the hammer,” Morris said.
I looked up from my reverie. I’d built a hell of a lot of bits of house in one day. Not as many as if I’d had a nail gun, of course.
“Good enough though,” he went on. “Quitting time.”
We rode back in silence, but for the country radio and the wind rushing in the cracked windows. King had the run of the back, since it was empty, and he paced around happily a bit, but mostly kept his face firmly plastered in the wind.
I looked at my phone for the first time that day. Maggie had texted me: “Sorry I called you a jerk. But, well, I get defensive. I dunno if this ‘no strings’ thing is working for me anymore. We could talk about it. Maybe better if we don’t. I don’t know.”
I didn’t know what to tell her about that. “No strings” wasn’t working for me either—never really had, as a rule—but I wasn’t ready to be serious with anyone, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to be serious with Maggie at all. Maybe I’d text her back when I knew what to say.
Morris dropped me off by my truck, then stepped out to help King down out the back.
“See you tomorrow, Cawley,” he said. “Same time. The dog can come too.”
King looked up at that, wagged his tail. Morris reached down and pet his head, then closed the tailgate and sauntered back to the driver’s seat.
As he drove out of the parking lot, King looked up at me, pleased with himself.
I frowned. “Traitor.”
All I got was a doggy smile I couldn’t help but return. Damn fine dog I had there.
I stopped at the store on the way home, got myself real groceries. Yeah, you can live off of just meat and eggs, but if I was going to be working as hard as that, I needed more. Vegetables, fruit. I couldn’t really remember the last time I’d bought vegetables. Cooking had meant nuking something frozen or it had meant, well, meat and eggs. Sometimes potatoes, especially before I’d gotten hired by Warren, when money had been hard to come by.
Can’t pump crap into your system though, not forever. I got myself a good steak, some asparagus, lemon, onion, garlic, everything a real dinner needs. A dinner like Emily always liked. Except to hell with cooking the steak till it was ruined, of course.
I couldn’t say I was happy when I kicked open the door with groceries under my arm. But I was exhausted, with just enough energy left over to cook myself something worth eating. And that’s kind of like happy. Maybe that’s all you ever get of happy, once you’re grown up. If so, I’d get by.
King, though, was having the time of his life. I bet he smelled that steak even through the plastic wrap, and I know he smelled it once it started cooking. Meanwhile I cooked some rice with greens on the side.
That’s when I learned that not everything reminded me of Emily. Or, rather, that not everything that reminded me of her had to hurt. In the back of my mind, when I’d been going through the checkout line with my groceries, I’d figured I was going to be in for a hell of an emotional night. I figured since Emily was the one who’d gotten me to get over my knee-jerk hatred of asparagus, cooking myself a real dinner was just going to bring on those waves of grief.
I’d felt shored up against them, mind you. An exhausted body is a happy body. But I expected those waves nonetheless.
As I cooked, and I thought about some of the times I’d cooked the same damn thing in the same damn kitchen alongside the love of my life, I realized it was alright. Kind of melancholy. But I could handle that.
I took King’s half of the steak off even sooner than mine, served it up in a bowl with some of his dried food underneath. Maybe I’d learn to cook for him. Why not?
Then I sat down and I enjoyed that meal more than I’d enjoyed food in a long time. I’d forgotten food could taste as good as that. Not that I’m the best cook—I try, but I never was half as good as Emily—but exhaustion and hunger and sore muscles all give food a spice of their own. Every morsel of that meal I savored like it was the first and last thing I’d ever tasted in my life.
I washed it down with a beer, then turned on the TV and flipped through channels until I found people throwing baseballs around.
“King,” I said, and my new dog came over, jumped up on the couch. “I’m going to be alright, right? I’m going to make it through this.”
King didn’t say nothing, just looked at me, all dog-like and happy.
After an hour or so, I realized I should sleep. Had to wake up early again, and no reason to stay up. I’d just crack open another letter though. The fifth letter. I knew I should wait, but I felt like I’d earned it.
I went back to the table, cleared up from dinner, and set the letters back out like they belonged. The first four on the left, open: King, a clean house, playing my Gibson again, the volunteer work. The remaining unopened letters sat lined up on the right.
I picked up the fifth envelope. The “5” scrawled on it was written more sloppily than any of the letters I’d opened thus far. I thought that through, then in a barely-controlled frenzy I grabbed the unopened stack and looked at their numbers.
Each successive letter was larger and shakier than the one before.
It was like watching a movie, when you know it’s going to end tragically but you just can’t help yourself from wishing it wouldn’t. I knew Emily was dead. But these letters, they were probably the last words she’d committed to paper, and they traced her downfall as she’d come to terms with her own death. I was reliving her last days, and I wanted her story to end differently. I wanted our happily-ever-after.
And there I was, just worried about me. My wife had died. For so long, she’d literally been in her deathbed, dying, and she and I both had thought about me.
She was an angel. Literal, now, up in heaven; and figurative, back when she’d been alive.
But I couldn’t let myself cry. I unclipped my knife from my pocket and folded it open. Cut open letter number five, closed the knife, re-clipped it.
Took a deep breath. Sipped about half a shot of whiskey. Still wasn’t brave enough to do this sober. Someday, maybe.
“Well how about that,” it started. “My Luke, off doing God’s work like I knew he’d always do. How was it? I don’t even know what month it is, where you’re reading this. Did I make you go build houses in the dead heat of the summer? With snow on the ground? No, I don’t think it would be snow. I won’t be around that much longer, and you’re going to get these a year after...”
Her handwriting trailed off, and a lot of the simple grace was gone from her pen strokes.
“But these letters aren’t for me, they’re for you. I’ll tell you in person, here and now, with the words from my lips, how I’m feeling. What it’s like to have your body abandon you. What it’s like to accept that what God has in store for you is different than what you’d hoped. But that’s the way of it, ain’t it?”
Yeah, that was the way of it. She’d told me as much, when I held her hand there in the dark of the hospital room at night. When she’d wake up, startled, while I read at her bedside. She’d told me about her pain, her fear, her epiphanies. I saw her come to terms with mortality and I saw her reach out to God more than she’d ever done when she’d been too busy riding horses to do much praying. She’d told me. She’d told me everything about her, out of her own lips, out of the lips I kissed in illness and in health. Till death did we part.
“You must be exhausted. You work yourself hard. So your only instruction is this: get a good night’s sleep tonight. Whenever else you can, too, but at least tonight. You earned it. I always did love watching you sleep.”
Her letter ended, abruptly as that. I smiled, though. Put the letter back in the envelope, then strode upstairs to bed. Stripped off my undershirt, felt my muscles just start in to being sore. I knew I should stretch, maybe take a hot shower. But sometimes, when you’re drinking, you want the hangover, because you want to remember what hell you put yourself through. And sometimes, when you work your body harder than it’s been worke
d in a year, you want to wake up sore. Because you want to remember what hell your body can go through and come out stronger.
You want both because you want to wake up and throw yourself back into life and really feel your body, even if the way it feels is bad.
That’s what I was telling myself, anyway, but I think I didn’t stretch because I was tired as all hell and besides, Emily had told me to go to sleep. Who was I to argue with a ghost?
I dragged my sorry butt into the bed, pulled up the sheets. My head hit the pillow, and just as I started to doze, King jumped up alongside me, put his head on my chest. I fell asleep.
CHAPTER TEN
It’s what you get for a discount. That’s what I kept telling myself, on my wedding day. When I was twenty years old and life was open and waiting for me. And I was waiting on chairs.
There weren’t any chairs.
There were supposed to be chairs, of course. Wedding guests, they expect to sit.
But Emily had it handled. She was eighteen and running her own wedding. I tried my best not to see her in her dress before she walked down the aisle, but you don’t handle a crisis and avoid getting seen all at once.
And honest to everything I’ve ever believed in, she looked just as good stalking around the rose garden, shouting into her phone, while one of her rodeo bridesmaids ran after her keeping the train out of the mud, as she’d ever looked anywhere.
Oh, it was going to rain, too.
Well, it had rained, the night before, even though the weather was supposed to be perfect, warm enough in late September for a wedding in the rose garden. Of course, it’s daffodil season in September, which is why we got such a good deal on the venue.
And I barely had to worry about any of it, because Emily was on it.
My mom, though, my mom was all made of worries. She had her salt-and-pepper hair tied up into a neat bun, had on her best blue dress. The one that Dad loved her in.
I was in a back room of the reception hall, finicking with the suit in the mirror. My dad was leaning against a counter, cross-legged, while my mom paced.
“The thing about marriage,” my dad started, then trailed off.
I tied and re-tied my tie maybe eight times. It was perfect the first time, probably, but that day nothing was going to be perfect enough. I wanted Emily to remember how I looked that day for the rest of our lives. I was sure that on our fiftieth anniversary, me seventy, her sixty-eight, she was going to remember me like that. You can’t risk messing up your tie with that kind of pressure on you.
“I remember when I was,” my dad went on, then trailed off again.
“Honey, don’t worry about the rain,” my mom said. “And don’t worry about the chairs.”
“I’m not,” I said. It was mostly true.
“When it’s overcast, color comes out better,” she said. My mother, she liked to paint. “I shoot my reference photos of flowers when it’s overcast anyway. The color. It’s just, it’s just more magical. Not burned out by the sun.”
“That makes sense, Mom.”
“So even if it starts raining, that’s what you should think about, you should think about how great the photos are going to turn out.”
“How’re there going to be photos if it’s raining?” my dad asked. “No one’s going to let their camera get wet.”
“Stop putting worries into his head. I’m sure the photographer will do a great job, rain or no rain. He’s a professional.”
He was a professional, all right. Professional rodeo photographer. I had no doubt his gear was built for bad weather. What I doubted was that he actually knew how to photograph a damn wedding. Didn’t say that, though. And of course I’d find out later just what kind of magic that photographer was capable of. If I hadn’t already learned it enough from Emily, that man showed me I’d got no place ever judging rodeo folk again.
My mom never really approved of much of Emily’s family, though. She didn’t approve of much of anything, really. Part of her charm.
“It’ll be fine,” I said. “Emily’s got it.”
“Right,” my dad said. “Emily can do anything.”
“Damn right,” I said. My dad didn’t like me cussing. That day, though, I didn’t much care what my dad had to say. It was my day. It was Emily’s day.
Way too soon after that, I was standing there outside in the overcast, and the caterer hadn’t come through with chairs, so all the guests were standing. Mostly on the grass or the flagstone, but some people were standing in the mud.
Adversity brings people together, though, and pretty soon everyone was laughing and happy and talking to strangers. One side of the aisle, my family—military folks, God-loving folks. Some farmers, some businessmen. My cousin Ned had flown in from Raleigh, North Carolina. On the other side, Emily’s family—they were wild, that bunch. Mostly rodeo, some bikers. A couple gentlemen I didn’t really want to ask what they did for a living because I didn’t want to know. But overall, they were devout, as devout or more so than me and mine. Good people. Everyone who was there was good people, because they were family. In another hour, everyone there on both sides of the aisle was going to be my family, in God’s eyes at least.
I was standing in front of everyone, my friends next to me, nervous. I didn’t have cold feet. Well, I did literally. But I didn’t doubt that I was doing the right thing, I never doubted that for a moment. I was just nervous, a kind of aimless nervous. A nervousness that couldn’t land on any specific worry or problem.
All my wandering thoughts were brought back into focus when Emily showed up, walking down the aisle on the crook of her father’s arm. It didn’t matter than I’d known her three years, or even that I’d seen her in her dress an hour prior. It was like I’d never seen her before in my life, like I was struck with love at first sight.
With the clouds up above her, she glowed brighter than the sky. My soul had never known such peace.
The pastor said his bit, but I wasn’t listening. I was lost in Emily’s eyes, lost memorizing every little line in her faint crow’s feet. Lost tracing the bow of her lips. Lost in how indescribably lucky I was. Lost in love.
“I understand you have prepared your own vows,” the pastor said.
We both nodded.
“Luke Cawley,” Emily said. “You are my heart.”
She waited a beat.
“You are my own, beating heart, as much a part of me as the earth I walk on, as much a part of me as the heaven above. You are the best thing I’ve found here in this world, and if you’d have me, I am yours.”
She was crying a little, and both our moms were crying a lot.
My best man, Dave, edged a little closer to me, handed me my guitar. “Don’t do it,” he said. “Just say something cute and get it over with.”
I ignored him, took the guitar.
Yeah, it’s cheesy.
It was also my wedding day, so what did I care.
“I wrote this song for you,” I said, and then I sang.
I’ve got a simple voice, a plain voice. It’s clear, and I sing in key, but no one’s beating down my door to sign me to a label. I sang her a simple song, a short song.
The chorus, I sang twice.
“I will be yours / I will always be yours.”
Some of my friends were kind of laughing, in the audience, but honestly I think her family was into it. None of that much mattered though, to be honest. Because Emily stared at me the whole time like I was the only thing in the world. That’s what mattered.
In the eyes of God, in front of most everyone who mattered to us on Earth, we were joined. I kissed her.
“The caterer messed up dinner,” she whispered into my ear, after our kiss.
“What?” I asked.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I got it.”
The sky opened up just then, and we ran into the reception hall just before the rain turned torrential. Everyone made it in, relatively dry, and I was convinced it was Emily who made that happen, who had kept the
clouds at bay.
Whether or not she had the power to fend off rain, she certainly had the power to save a botched dinner. The caterer had only brought booze and cake, for some unknowable reason, but Emily had called a rodeo favor in and a taco truck was waiting outside, just under the overhang. El Jeffe’s tacos, it said, painted on the side of the old bread truck. The boss’s tacos. It was great.
“Well that could have gone worse, I guess,” my brother said, coming up to me while I was holding a paper plate of tacos de pollo in one hand and a plastic cup of Coors in the other.
“It genuinely couldn’t have gone better,” I said.
Mike laughed. “Well, the caterer could have brought chairs, to start. And I’m not saying that I would have done a better job officiating, but I would have done a better job officiating.”
“It couldn’t have gone better.” I started to walk away from Mike, because I was too happy to bother defending my position. He wasn’t a pastor yet, was still in seminary, and I hadn’t really wanted him to officiate. He hadn’t taken that too well.
He came after me, grabbed my arm. I flinched—Mike hadn’t always been the kindest older brother, growing up. He meant well, toughened me up, but I still couldn’t help but flinch.
“I’m happy for you. I’m no good at saying it, so I say dumb things instead, but I mean it. I’m happy for you.”
We weren’t really the hugging sort, he and I, and my hands were full anyway. “Thanks, man,” I said.
I had it in my head that a wedding is a microcosm for your life, and mine was going to be magical and adventurous and just inconvenient enough to keep me from letting down my guard.
I was twenty. Twenty-year-olds are idiots.
“Alright, y’all, gather round.” That was Natalie, Emily’s older sister. The ‘better’ daughter, the one committed to the family business. She stuck her fingers in her mouth and let out an ear-splitting whistle, because you can’t knock a plastic fork on a plastic cup to much effect. Everyone grew quiet.
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