“When I was your age, there was this girl who loved me. I’d been out of the Army a couple years, then in and out of jail after that. Never anything major, just petty stuff that would build up. Worst thing I ever did, in the eyes of the law, I hit an off-duty cop because he’d smacked my beer out of my hand because I was being drunk and stupid. That wasn’t worth a year of my life, of course. But I was in and out, like I was saying, until I met Connie. She was...she was something else. They don’t make girls like Connie too often. Beautiful, smart, funny. Could open a beer with her teeth. Best thing in bed, too. I met her down in Oklahoma City and I swore I was never looking back. Happiest six months of my life.”
“What happened?”
“I blew it. I skipped parole, and they took me in on a traffic stop. She posted bail, and I skipped on it again to go get drunk with my buddies. She was a wild girl, but she wasn’t stupid. She left me. Now I know you didn’t do nothing like that. But here’s how we’re the same kind of idiot: I just figured I’d never get anything like that again. I figured: shit, Morris, you had your chance, and you’re done and the game’s over. You had it all, now you’ve got nothing, and they don’t make them like Connie anyway. So no reason to bother. Women, they’d come and go, because I didn’t try to hold onto them. Either they’d come on too strong, and I wouldn’t treat them with the respect they deserved, or they’d have some walls up the same as me, and I would just assume there was no way they’d love a guy like me so I’d stay so distant they’d walk right away, marry someone else. Shit, how do you think I know Judy?”
“It’s too late for that?” I asked. For some reason, I loved the idea of him and Judy.
“Judy’s a widow now, but she’s not after me anymore. Too many years as friends. But she’ll marry someone else, I’m sure of it. Because you know what her dead husband don’t want her to do? He don’t want her to sit around feeling sorry for herself. Your dead wife sure as there’s a moon in the sky don’t want you feeling sorry for your dumb self either. You have a chance at something, you go for it.”
I had nothing to say to that.
“But don’t get so hung up on her that you stop building houses with me. You’re the best damn volunteer I’ve had in years when you’re not being a surly son-of-a-bitch.”
He dropped me off, and I climbed up into my truck. Turned the engine over, felt it alive underneath me. I knocked Granddad Cawley’s dog tags for luck.
It was only eight. That’s a reasonable hour, right?
Flower shops were all closed, so I pulled over at the first field I saw. Took out my folding knife and went to work on the wildflowers. I didn’t know their names, but they were pretty. Tied them up with some twine from the tool box, then drove to Rae’s.
I didn’t give myself time to be nervous. Once you make a decision, there’s no damn point in doubting yourself. The worst that could happen was as bad as I had it now. You have a chance at something, you go for it.
The living room light was on. I rang the doorbell.
I waited there for a good minute, just long enough for me to think she wasn’t home after all, or she knew it was me and didn’t want to answer. But the door opened, and there she was. She’d just tried to straighten up, I realized, and her hair was in the kind of loose bun that meant she was trying to look presentable at the last minute.
Rae wasn’t smiling to see me, she was just looking at me like she didn’t know what I wanted. I pulled the flowers out from behind my back, and I realized what a filthy mess I was, standing there in my work clothes with a bundle of wildflowers tied up by twine.
“Want to go on a picnic?” I asked.
She thought it over. That’s something good about her. I could see her mulling it over, calm and collected like always. Then a smile broke across her face like the sun coming out from the clouds, and she took the flowers and smelled them.
“Sure,” she said.
I smiled too, then. She started giggling, and I started at it too.
“I’d love to go on a picnic with you,” she said.
And there was hope in the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Rae came over to meet me at my place, so I’d spent more hours on my knees scrubbing up the grit between tiles than I had when Emily’s letter had told me to clean.
There’s clean enough for me to feel good, clean enough to have company, and then clean enough to impress a girl like Rae. Three different levels of clean. I had to scrub my way through two of them.
Emily had taught me a lot of tricks, even without meaning to, over the years. It had never occurred to me to clean down the walls next to doorways, but that’s where people put their grubby mitts when they walk through doors, and after a year alone that had built up. Cleaning is like cooking, is like playing music. There’s little things that make all the difference that you wouldn’t even think of.
You look at a doorway that’s been scrubbed and you don’t even know it’s scrubbed. But you look at a house before and after, you might not know what’s changed, you might not even see that something’s changed, but there’s a difference. It’s like the difference between starting the pasta in the water like you shouldn’t or throwing it in once the water’s boiling. Little things like that, they build up. Like all the little pull-offs and hammer-ons and slides and strumming patterns you can use when you make up a song. Sure, if you play the right chords and your guitar’s in tune and so is your voice, you’ve played the song. But if you put more thought into it, if you finesse all the details, then you’ve played some magic.
Which is why I cleaned the ever-loving hell out of that house.
Rae didn’t even step inside.
She rang the bell, and I came over, opened the door, and I saw her there all dressed-down and pretty. Yeah, she’d turn some heads today. Wasn’t why I was bringing her, of course, but it was true. She’d turn some heads.
“You look nice,” she said.
Honest to God, all I’d done different from usual was tuck my flannel in, but if I looked nice, then I’d done right.
“So do you.”
“Should we go?” she asked.
I had no reason to invite her in, I realized. Well, at least the house looked good from where she was standing in the doorway.
We got to the truck, and King stood around waiting by the driver’s door. “Oh no, King, you’re in the back.” I went around and dropped the tailgate. “Load up!”
He hopped up there with no complaints, and Rae started petting him, rubbing his head and shaking all that extra skin around. No need to get jealous of a dog, I told myself.
“Things are going better with him,” Rae said. It wasn’t a question.
“We’re getting along,” I said.
“He listens to you.”
“He’s a good dog.”
“You’re a good master,” she said.
I smiled, climbed into the driver’s seat, and she got in next to me. I turned north onto the highway, and headed out into the country.
The celebration was at a park just down the road from where we’d been building. It was a perfect day, with just enough cloud cover to keep the sun from doing its worst but no sign of rain. There were about forty people there, mostly volunteers and their family. The guests of honor, though, were Nathan and his wife and their three teenage girls. They were already happy as hell by the time we pulled into the parking lot and walked up.
I was right: Rae turned heads. Maybe the two of us did. I felt good walking up with her. I was proud. Not just because she was beautiful, though I’ll never complain about having a woman like her in my company. But because she looked like she was happy, like she cared about what Heartland did. Oh, and because King heeled next to her without even a leash, even though there were other dogs around.
Before anyone else had a chance to say hi, Nathan walked up, family in tow, and shook my hand.
“Luke, I want you to meet Jennifer, my wife,” he said. She offered her hand, and I shook it. “Luke here is the reaso
n we’re moving in now and not three months from now. He knows everything there is to know and I’ve never seen a man teach so well. Must have taught fifty people who didn’t even know which end of the hammer to hold how to put together a house.”
“Well I’ll be damned,” Rae said. “Luke, you didn’t tell me you ran the show around here.”
“This is Rae,” I said. I didn’t say girlfriend. Maybe, if I played my cards right, one day I might introduce her as my girlfriend. That might be nice. More than nice.
Jennifer and the kids went off back towards the barbecue, and Judy and Georgia came up to join us and Nathan.
“How come you never said anything about her?” Judy asked, after I introduced Rae to everyone.
“Well, uh, you know I don’t talk too much about anything personal,” I said.
“We just met,” Rae said, cutting in. “Just recently.”
“Oh! New love!” Judy said.
Morris walked up and saved me. “You must be Rae,” he said.
“And you’ve got to be Morris.”
“Well if my reputation has got ahead of me, I’ve got some work in front of me before you’ll give me the time of day, I figure.”
On the way up, Rae had been full of questions about Heartland, about how it’s been working. She’d been doing her social research, trying to figure out whom she could talk to about what. I’d told her a lot about Morris. Not what he’d said to me in the truck on the way home, though. Couldn’t tell her that just yet, or maybe ever.
“All good things,” Rae said. “Sounded like you gave him the ass-kicking he needed.”
“Well. I don’t know about needed,” I said.
“Damn right I did,” Morris said. “And then he got his act together and he built a house.”
“I don’t know about needed,” I said. Not that anyone was listening to me.
The grill was running after that, and Nathan and Gary served us up everything good in the world. Burgers, hot dogs, corn grilled in the husk. One of Nathan’s daughters was a vegetarian, even, and grilled up portobello caps. I tried one, it wasn’t bad.
Then I realized Rae was eating one instead of a burger.
“Are you a vegetarian?” I asked. My brain ran through the evidence: she loved animals, she grew up in the city, and she was eating a portobello cap instead of burger. I went into crisis mode, problem-solving mode. Could I date a vegetarian? I mean...bacon. Venison. Damn, I’d hated it when Emily had liked her meat well-done. But at least she ate meat!
But I suppose, if she didn’t make me stop, if she didn’t care about the deep-freeze, then who was I to judge? Dave’s brother was a vegan, even, and he’d never given any of us any hassle. I’d have to explain it to my family. But whatever, they’d get over it. Emily’s family had gotten over her marrying a city boy. My family would just have to get used to the idea that my girlfriend didn’t eat meat. If Rae became my girlfriend. If she was a vegetarian.
“You saw me eating a ham sandwich at my birthday party,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
She started laughing.
“I’d still like you if you were a vegetarian,” I said.
“That’s the best compliment I think you’ve ever given me,” Rae said. “And yeah, I was vegetarian for awhile right after college. Lasted all of a week. But I only eat meat every now and then.”
“Alright,” I said.
I must have looked unconvinced, because she took my burger right out of my hands, took a big old bite out of it, and chewed it with her mouth open right there in front of me. “Nom nom nom meat,” she said, her mouth full of food.
I was laughing too.
“Hell, I even like my steak rare,” she said.
Goddamn.
After we ate, Jennifer stood up on the picnic table bench, and everyone grew quiet.
“I don’t do this speech thing, really,” she said. “But I guess I’m going to try.”
A few people cheered.
“The thing is...we thought that tornado has cost us everything. Our house, of course, and our car. But without our car we couldn’t keep our jobs and no one wants to hire you when your address is a shelter. It was bad times. Bad times. Almost broke Nathan and I apart. I can’t tell you what kind of stress it puts on a marriage to lose your house like that and suddenly realize there’s nowhere you can all stay together. But then you all came along, and Morris. Morris, you found us and told us you’d build us a house, and I figured you’d be as full of it as everyone else who’d ever given us empty promises all along. Then Judy, Georgia. You set the example. Doing that work, that’s what got Nathan back to his senses. Back to church. And seeing him pull himself up like that, seeing how you all were there to pull us up, that’s how I got back up, too.”
She started crying.
“Y’all know how to look after people. You built us that house because you’re good people, God’s people, and you do God’s work. And...and...and we thank you.”
Rae was tearing up too, next to me, and everyone was clapping and cheering.
She put her arm around my waist, pulled me in tight. It was the first time we’d touched...really touched. She was warm against me, and that warmth spread through the whole of my body like something magic.
“You did a good thing,” she said.
Yeah, I guess I did.
A little bit later, I was sitting up on the picnic table playing songs for everyone. Rae put me up to it. She hadn’t even come to open mic, had never heard me play. But she went and found Nathan, and Nathan told Judy, and Judy was in charge of everything whether the rest of us knew it or not. So she told me to play, and I sat on the wooden table with that six string in my hand, and I played some songs.
I played happy songs. Songs I barely remembered, some of them, but people shouted out their favorites and I even knew a couple of them. I didn’t go outlaw or nothing. I played it straight. Sometimes you gotta play it straight.
It got people dancing. Nathan and Jennifer, at first, and then the kids started in and I started picking up the pace. Rae danced politely with Morris, then she came and stood next to me while I sang. Just listening to me, all happy.
Damn if that didn’t make me happy.
After my set, Gary came up and asked if he could play. “I don’t want you to not get a chance to dance with that pretty girl you brought,” is what he said.
I handed him the guitar, and he kept the party going.
“Rae,” I said. “You want to dance?”
Because I was starting over at life, and when you start over at life sometimes you need to forget about the things that you don’t do. I don’t dance, I’d told myself so long I believed it. But I’d also told myself there was only one girl in the world for me, and I was starting to wonder if that was the whole truth, or if it’d really feel that way forever.
“I’m awful at dancing,” Rae said, color rising into her cheeks.
“I just saw you doing a fine job of it.”
“Yeah but that was with people I don’t need to impress,” she said.
“I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to be more impressed than I am by you,” I said.
“You mean it?” she asked.
I took her by the arm, figured I’d show her I meant it instead of just telling her.
Both of us were awful. I know enough about dancing to know that both of us were awful. But it was better that way. Better to just dance a little, better to ease myself into it.
After one song, we went and stood at the edge of the crowd. Still as close as we’d been when we were dancing.
“I’m sorry I blew up at you,” she said. “You didn’t deserve that.”
“I understand,” I said. “You’ve been hurt. You’re protecting yourself. Opening up is hard.”
“It is,” she said.
“You don’t have to do it right away, either. Not with me. You can take your time.” I fidgeted with the brim of my cap. “I mean, if you like me like that.”
“Luke Cawley, I’ve liked you since the day you walked into my shelter. I liked you even more when you walked out with my favorite dog. Hell, I even liked when you threw Derek through my fence.”
“I’ve felt the same,” I said.
“Now you’re lying.”
“No, it’s true.” I said. “I just didn’t know it yet. Sometimes that happens, I guess. I liked you even though I was too closed off to let myself realize it.”
She kissed me on the cheek, caught me by surprise.
“You want to get out of here?” I asked.
She smiled, and we started back towards my truck.
Morris looked up from where he was watching the dance, gave me a nod.
I nodded back.
In the parking lot, Rae followed me around to the back of the truck while I was loading up King. I slammed the tailgate shut, turned around, and she was right behind me.
We kissed. Both went for it at the same time. I cradled her head in my hands and pulled her tight against me. She kissed like no one I’d ever kissed. She was curious, excited. She explored me. She kissed me soft, then hard. Closed mouth, opened mouth. But it was wonderful. It felt like she wanted me, wanted to know me inside and out.
The whole drive back, I kept my hand on the gearshift and she kept her hand on top of mine. She was sitting sideways in the seat, just gazing at me, as she explored my hand, ran her fingers along the back of it and up under my sleeve. It was all I could do not pull over on the side of the road, right then and there. But it wasn’t just that she wanted to get her hands on me. It was a kind of curiosity. A playfulness. A discovery, the anticipation of it. I felt it, too.
We ended up back at her place by sole virtue of it being closer, further north. It helped, of course, that her bed had never been her wedding bed. We walked to the door, and before she let me in, she turned to face me.
“Can I trust you? You’re not just playing me? Since Derek, a lot of guys have been trying to just play me. I can’t have that.”
“You can trust me,” I said. I wanted it to be true. So I promised myself, just as I was promising her.
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