Page 100 of At First Dance
Ivy:
I remember everything.
Days stack. A neighbor loses part of his field line to a storm. I take the truck and four hours of fence in trade for the look a man gives you when he didn’t have to ask. The kids come with Bailey for reading on Wednesday, and I pretend I’m not watching Ivy’s empty spot on the quilt under the oak while I show six-year-olds how to tell if a tomato wants to be picked or is still thinking about it. Butterscotch has decided gates are more of a mindset than a structure. She licks the back of my hand and bawls like I forgot her birthday. I take her picture and send it with the caption: Your girl misses you.
Ivy answers with a voice memo so tired it sounds like a song: Tell her I’m bringing her a new brush; she likes the purple one.
Crew shows up one afternoon with his shoulder taped like he lost a bet with a refrigerator. He doesn’t say he came to check on me, but he eats his mom’s cobbler at my table like he’s a boy again and not the face on a billboard. “You two okay?” he asks finally, spoon pointed like an accusation he doesn’t actually want to make.
“We talk every night,” I say, and that’s the truest sentence I own right now.
“You gonna go out there?” he asks. “She asked me not to tell you, but…” He stops, that Wright boy line between his brows. “She looks good when she says your name.”
I rinse two bowls in water that hasn’t decided whether it wants to be hot. “I thought about it,” I admit. “Flying into a city that treats me like a guest in my own skin. But this place”—I tap the window frame because there isn’t a better word—“it doesn’t do really well if you walk away from it when your hands are needed.”
He studies me like I’m an event he can’t run tape on. “You ever going to admit you’re a good man?”
“No,” I say, and he barks a laugh. Some part of me that has been clenching since the last airport feed loosens because my brother can stand in my kitchen and laugh at me, and I can laugh back.
On the twelfth night, she video calls from a trailer with a light bulb border and a couch that looks like it was made of credit card points. “Remember when I told you I needed to write by myself?” she says.
“I don’t think I do.”
She holds up a notebook and flips it open. The page is full of words. She hides the lyrics with her palm like superstition, then reads it anyway, her voice soft and flat the way it sounds when she’s not performing. The song isn’t about me, and it is, because anything honest is about the people who stood still when you couldn’t. When she’s finished, she waits without blinking.
“It’s good,” I say, because it is, and because good is the stone you start with before you start turning it into a house. “It sounds like you.”
She bites the inside of her cheek, and my entire torso wants to be a hand pressed between her shoulders. “Say the thing.”
“I’m proud of you,” I say, and it does the thing it always does—drops into the space and sits there like something heavy that promises it won’t slide.
A day becomes two, then becomes four. The calendar does that thing where it pretends it’s a neutral party. I don’t count. I replace counting with mending a stretch of creek bank the last storm chewed.
On the seventeenth night, she doesn’t make nine, and she doesn’t make eleven. At 1:24 a.m., the phone goes off on thenightstand like a bird got trapped in the house. I answer before I can think to be dignified.
“I’m okay,” she says, breathless.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
“I do now.”
There’s a long exhale, like someone finally opened a window. “We wrapped late. They added a press thing in the morning. I told them I needed two hours blocked out anyway, and when they asked what for, I said ‘call the farm.’”
“That what the calendar says?” I ask, and it feels like a kind of sacrament, those three words written next to a slice of corporate pie.
“It does,” she says, and laughs. The sound scrapes something tender on its way through me. “I miss the porch.”
“It’s still here,” I tell her. “I left the light on like it could read.”
“What if I’m late?” she asks, quiet again, the brave in her voice showing up without armor.
“Then I’ll be here when you’re not,” I say. “And I’ll be here when you are.”
“You’re not… mad?”
“I’m not a timer you set to stun me when you can’t get back by dessert,” I say. “I want you home. Want is the honest part. But if the choice is between a want that takes and a want that steadies, I’m going to be the second one every time.”
