Page 18 of At First Dance
I take my peaches and my opinions to the porch.
The call runs forty-two minutes. I know because I learn the shape of their voices through the screen door—Celeste’s sweet-knife cadence, a man from the label with a calendar for a spine, and a PR girl who says “just” before every demand. Ivy agrees when she needs to, pushes back twice (soft, smart), and the third time says she’s on a break and means it with her whole mouth. When it ends, quiet rushes into the house like wind through a new opening.
She appears in the doorway with her laptop tucked to her ribs, eyes a little too bright. I don’t ask if she’s okay. I hand her a cold bottle of water and a dish towel for show, because sometimes you need something to hold to remind your hands what they’re for.
“They want me in Nashville next week,” she says, tone carefully even.
I take a drink so I don’t say the wrong thing.
“You want quiet or company?” I ask instead. It costs me.
She opens her eyes and lets me see the truth without the paint. “Company,” she says, then glances at the door. “Until you get bored with me not being sparkly.”
“Sparkly’s a seller’s trick,” I say. “I’ll take you when you’re matte.”
Her breath catches. Mine, too. We stand in that for three counts, and then I ruin it by remembering I’m an adult with chores and a huge reason I should say no to everything I’m feeling. “I have to pull the bush hog around and make a pass on the back easement,” I tell her. “You can ride if you don’t mind being dusted.”
“I don’t mind at all,” she says, grabbing the worn-out baseball cap hanging by the back door. She steals it fair and square. “Let me earn my company.”
We rumble the tractor down to the low strip where the property shrugs its shoulders against the creek. She sits sideways on the fender, one hand on the guardrail, the other on my bicep because gravity votes that way when we take the turn. I forget how to shift for two stalls, then blame the soil when it bucks. She laughs against my shoulder and doesn’t move her hand.
“You do this every day?” she asks over the clatter.
“Only on days that end in y,” I call back.
Dust turns us into something out of a sepia photograph—edges softened, lines honest. The mower coughs once and then settles into a rhythm, knocking back weeds in tidy testimony that someone gave a damn today. We do two passes and call it. We aren’t trying to win a ribbon, just keep erosion from eating the land. On the slow drive back, she points at the bend where the creek fattens and then slips narrow under the footbridge.
“You said to sit there when the tide turns,” she says. “Why?”
“Because you can feel the river change its mind,” I answer, not trying to make poetry and stumbling into it anyway. “Feels like somebody bigger than you just took a breath.”
She goes quiet. When we park by the barn, she hops down, dusts her thighs off, and gives me a look I can’t file yet. “Show me.”
We take the path under the pines, light falling through in fat coins, insects sawing a steady note. The creek’s high from last night and moving with purpose, shadowed by overgrown banks. We sit on the flat rock that’s been a bench for five Wright kids and half the cousins in three counties. I’ve carved hearts here I don’t admit to. I’ve thrown stones, insults, and prayers.
“You’re not going to narrate?” she teases, fingers skimming the surface.
“You’ll hear it,” I say.
We do.
When the tide of the bay pushes back up the little artery, there’s a stitched moment where the surface goes slick as breath—no ripples, no run—and then the water decides. It shivers, then turns. You can watch the eddies reverse like someone flipped a diagram upside down and dared the world to keep up. Ivy inhales like the relief hurts.
“There it is,” she whispers.
“Yeah.”
We don’t talk for a while. It’s good not to. Pines whisper to each other in a language I pretended to understand as a kid and now respect enough to leave alone. A heron reels out a croak that’s eighty percent prehistoric. My shoulder brushes hers on purpose or because the rock slopes. She doesn’t move.
“Rowan?” she says finally.
“Yeah.”
“Do you ever feel like… nothing you say in the city is real? Like words bounce off glass and come back at you wrong?”
“All the time,” I say, even though my city is a low building with bad coffee and county paperwork. “That’s why I talk to fences.”
She laughs, not because it’s funny but because I offered a crack for her to climb through. The sound lands on my sternum and makes it easier to stand when we do.
