Page 39 of Rogue
“You’ve got opinions is what you’ve got.”
“Same thing,” I said, and took another drink.
He laughed.The sound was open and unguarded, the kind of laugh that came from the chest and didn’t worry about who heard it, and I laughed with him, my shoulders shaking, the coffee sloshing in the mug.The laugh filled the yard for a second, and when it died down the cicadas picked up where they’d left off and the world kept turning.
One of the Prospects walked past on his way to the woodpile.He was carrying an armload of split logs, his face red from the heat.Another walked with him and gave me a quick smile.These people were my family now, and I’d never felt more welcome anywhere else.
Beast came out of the clubhouse with a beer in his hand, which at nine in the morning was either very early or very late depending on how you counted the hours.He nodded at me, took a long pull from the bottle, and settled onto the bench across the fire pit with the particular heaviness of a man who had decided the day could start whenever he said it started.
“Your husband’s in the house losing his mind over a crib,” he said.
“I know.”
“He’s been at it since five.”
“I know that too.”
“He’s muttering.Loud.I could hear him through the wall.”
I set my mug down on the flat stone beside the bench.The baby shifted, a slow roll from one side to the other, and I adjusted my weight and felt the bench creak under me.“He’s building a crib, Beast.It’s not brain surgery.”
“It’s Ikea.”
“Same difference.”
Beast took another drink.The sun caught the gray in his beard and turned it silver, and for a second he looked older than he was, the lines around his eyes deeper in the morning light.“Man’s been hovering over you like you’re made of glass.You sneeze, he brings you tissues.You stand up, he’s got a hand under your elbow.You want to tell him you’re pregnant, not dying?”
The table behind us had filled up.Two of the brothers, a woman I didn’t know by name but recognized from the clubhouse kitchen, someone’s cousin visiting from Memphis.They were playing cards, the soft slap of plastic on wood keeping time under the conversation, and when Beast finished his sentence the table went quiet for a beat and then someone snorted.
I rolled my eyes.The motion was so practiced by now it felt rehearsed, and maybe it was.“He’s excited.”
“He’s something.”
“He’s building a crib.”
“He’s building a fortress.I’ve seen less security around a bank vault.”
I picked up my coffee.Drank.Set it down.The ring caught the light, the same one Rogue had slid onto my finger in a county courthouse that felt like it belonged to someone else’s life now.“You want to tell him to back off, be my guest.I’ve tried.He just brings me more water and asks if my feet hurt.”
“Your feet hurt?”
“They’re the size of canoes.”
The table laughed.I felt it in my chest the way I felt all their laughter now -- not as something separate from me that I had to earn or deflect, but as another piece of the life I lived, no different than the cicadas, the motorcycles, or the smell of the grill drifting across the yard.
Beast raised his bottle in a toast that wasn’t really a toast.“To canoes, then.”
“To canoes,” I said, and raised my mug, and we drank, and the morning settled deeper into the compound around us, steady and mine in a way I was still learning to name.
* * *
The house was cooler than the yard, the air inside holding the particular stillness of a space that hadn’t been opened to the morning yet.I left the screen door unlatched behind me and the song of the cicadas came in with the breeze, their sound thinning as it moved through the rooms, and I refilled my mug at the kitchen sink and stood for a minute with the water running over my wrists because the heat had found its way under my skin and I wanted it gone.
The second bedroom door was open.
I hadn’t closed it when I left that morning.Rogue had been in there since before dawn, the sounds of cardboard tearing and plastic rustling carrying through the wall while I lay in bed with my eyes closed, listening to him move through the space with the particular focused rhythm of a man who had decided something needed doing and was going to do it whether the instructions made sense or not.
I stopped in the doorway.
