Page 55 of Just Say When

“Is it one you have an answer to?”

“No,” I said after a long pause, during which I studied the paint peeling off the porch rail like there would be a test on it tomorrow. “I can’t say that I do.” Not one he would like hearing, at any rate.

Jack grunted at that.

“Essie wanted this,” I said. “No one made the choice for her.”

He squinted into the distance. “She wanted to marry you, or she wanted to ride?”

I didn’t have a good answer to that, either.

“Yeah. That’s what I thought.” He got to his feet, unfolding his body slowly. It looked lazy, the way he moved. I wasn’t fooled. “You made me a promise.”

I pushed to stand, too. “We were seventeen. Things were different then. You had a reason, and we both knew it was right. That reason doesn’t exist anymore.”

“Some things don’t change, Brax. I reckon your feelings for Essie are one of them.”

He wasn’t looking at me when he said this, but once again, I wasn’t fooled. Back then, when we were kids, it was easy to think he wasn’t paying attention simply because it never seemed like he was. Now I knew better. Jack Price saw everything. It wasn’t that he never showed his hand. It was that he never showed he had a hand to begin with. All the time I thought we were playing dice, he was playing poker.

And winning.

I leaned against the porch rail, mirroring his position. “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “As Essie pointed out not ten minutes ago, this isn’t 1950. She can file for divorce any time she wants. I won’t stop her.”

But shit.

I didn’t say that out loud, but my face must have said it for me.

He laughed and shook his head. “You poor dumb fuck. You know you can’t keep this from her.”

“I’m telling you, it doesn’t matter,” I bit out. “She’s an adult. She can make her own choices regardless of how I feel about it.”

“Then why haven’t you told her yet?” he challenged.

It would be real great if he’d stop asking questions he knew I didn’t want to answer.

“Chickenshit. About emotions, of all things. Jesus Christ, man.” Jack made a disgusted sound. “I didn’t come cross an ocean to punch you in the stomach because you married her. I punched you because you didn’t tell her why. When I read Mom’s letter, I knew you hadn’t told her. Because Mom said it was because of a horse.” He snorted. “It was never about the fucking horse. I know that and you know that. The only person who doesn’t know that is Essie.”

I grunted, which was as much an admission as I would ever give him.

“You have to tell her, Brax,” Jack said quietly. “It’s the only way she’ll stay.”

“I know,” I said, but that wasn’t true at all.

Telling her was the fastest way to make her leave.

Fifteen YearsAgo

“I lovethe smell of petrichor in the morning,” Essie said.

She lifted her face to the sky and sniffed the air like a hound dog catching the scent of prey, then flashed me a grin. Proud of herself for using one of her favorite words in combination with a quote fromApocolypse Now, the movie we had watched with Jack last weekend. Essie’s taste in movies usually trended toward action flicks or romantic comedies, but lately she had been choosing old war movies in a not-so-subtle bid to keep Jack from enlisting in the military when we graduated.

“It’s not going to work,” I said. I glanced at her through the windshield to gauge her reaction as I leaned into the truck and emptied my backpack of everything but my lunch and water bottle. I lifted the bottle, testing its weight. Full enough to share, I figured. We weren’t going far.

“It could work,” she argued, immediately connecting the dots of our conversation. We knew each other too well.

I shook my head, slammed the door shut—not because I was mad, but because the old hinge needed convincing—and locked the truck. There was no point in arguing. Essie would do what Essie did. And so would Jack.

“You ready?” I asked, looking over her jeans, tee shirt, and sneakers.

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