Page 30 of Mud & Moxie
He grunts. “Safety’s underrated.” After a beat: “So is showing up.”
“I’m going back.”
“I figured.” He says it like the weather report. “You want me to drive you or you want to pretend I’m not going to do that?”
My laugh surprises both of us. “Drive me. Please.”
He nods, finishes his coffee, cleans his mug like it insulted him. Neither of us mentions the letter or the pen or the toolbox. Neither of us says Dylan’s name out loud like it might spook the moment.
The road between Matthew’s place and the farm is short and long at the same time. We don’t talk the whole way. He hums under his breath in a rhythm that matches the rain on the windshield. When he turns up the lane, the cottonwoods lift into view, all ragged and brave. The porch light is still on.
I grip my letterless hands in my lap. “Do you think—” I start, then stop.
Matthew glances over. “He’s not a man who sleeps when there’s talking to be done.” He pauses, mouth pressed thin. “Not anymore.”
I nod. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For letting me leave without calling me a coward.”
He exhales through his nose, soft and fond. “Kid, if I called everybody a coward who needed a night or two to look themselves in the eye, I’d never shut up.”
He pulls to a stop at the porch steps and puts the truck in park but doesn’t turn it off. “You want me to come in?”
I shake my head yes. “I know we’ve got to do our own talking, but I’d like you to come in to help us stay focused on what the farm needs.”
“Alright, then.” He tips his chin at the house. “Go on, I’ll follow behind.”
The porch boards creak under my boots. The light burns steady in the morning gray, throwing a warm square onto the threshold. There’s a sticky note on the screen door in Dylan’s blocky handwriting. It says nothing. It just has an arrow pointing to the handle, like he was thinking of writingpleaseand changed his mind.
I take a breath that feels like an inhale after a long swim and reach for the door.
***
DYLAN
The house is too quiet to be empty. After she left, it took me exactly thirteen minutes to realize silence is its own kind of noise, and exactly fourteen to understand I’d made something worse by the way I tried to make it better.
Ray’s chair has a shape in it that fits a man who believed patience was something you could set down on a table for other people to borrow. I sit there because grief is bossy with its rituals. The Chronicle leans against the salt shaker like we’re waiting on the crossword, not on an apology.
I think about driving after her. I don’t. The kind of fixing I wanted to do last night would have been a chase, not a choice, and Matthew has a way of answering the door with his whole chest when he thinks a choice needs defending. So I sat. I cleaned the stovetop like it had offended me. I put a new bulb in the porch light.
Around midnight, I stopped pretending I was going to sleep. The rain came back hard enough to scrub the day. I went into the office to do the kind of paperwork that looks like survival: ledger entries, seed orders, a tattered file folder where Ray wrote PLANS and never used a second sheet of paper.
The pen in the desk drawer is the one Ray used for checks and signatures and to underline in the almanac. It’s weighted funny, too heavy at the front, like it wants to teach you something about balance. My hand found it before my head knew why. I pulled a piece of paper from the printer and started writing because talking had gone about as well as trying to staple wind to a fence.
Ray,
I don’t know where to put this that isn’t inside my chest where it keeps rattling. You were always better at inventory; consider this is me trying.
You left me something I don’t know how to hold without holding too tight. The farm and its work. The part where the work is people. The part where one of those people is a woman who makes the house feel like it’s got a heart beating in it.
I should have said more out loud. I should have said, “She’s not a strategy; she’s a person I care about, and if the folks in town want a story, they can find a better one than ours.” I should have said, “If there’s a line between protecting the farm and protecting her, I’m going to erase it and start over until we’re both under the same roof.” I should have told her what I keep telling myself: I was gone on her before my mouth learned the language for it.
Here’s what I’m going to do if I get another swing at this: I’ll make the apology the kind that costs me something. Not a DM. I’ll say it where it counts, in the daylight, with the coffee burning and the bills on the table. I’ll sign my name to decisions that affect both of us. She won’t carry the weight of the storyalone. If the posts get made, they’ll be because we said yes to them, not because we were afraid of saying no.
For the farm: I’ll keep the porch light on. I’ll mill flour that tastes like something a grandfather would recognize and a kid would ask for seconds of. I’ll keep graduating fences and building beds and letting the cottonwoods keep their dead so the living have a place to go with their names when they need to.
