Page 41 of The Jackal

"There's my girl." His voice, that steady bass, the one that had talked me through every hard night of my life, and it went through me like warm water and made my eyes sting instantly. "You've been quiet. Your mother says you ran into somebody. I don't like being the last to know things, Magnolia, it offends my sense of order."

I laughed, wet, and glanced at Cash. He was watching the road, giving me the privacy of his eyes elsewhere, but I saw the small tip of his head—an offer, not a push. I put the phone on speaker and set it on my knee, because I was done, so done, with keeping the pieces of my life in separate boxes.

"Dad, you're on speaker. I want you to meet somebody." My heart was going. "This is Cash."

A pause. I could feel my father recalibrating, the colonel in him coming to attention.

"Cash," he said, careful, the single syllable doing a lot of work.

"Colonel Bennett." Cash's voice came out different than I'd ever heard it—still low, still even, but with a respect in it that stood up straight. "It's an honor, sir. Maggie's told me a good deal about you. All of it the kind of thing a man hopes gets said about him someday."

There was a silence on the line, and I knew my father, knew the exact narrowing of his eyes as he took the measure of a man through a phone the way he'd taken the measure of a thousand men across a thousand tables. Cash let him do it. He didn't fill the quiet or rush to prove himself. He just drove, calm, and let a father look him over.

"You’re still in," my dad said finally. Not a question. He could hear it. It takes one to know one, and my father had spent thirty-one years learning the sound of it in a man's voice.

"Yes, sir." Cash didn't elaborate, and my father, who'd spent his own career around men who couldn't elaborate, didn't press. Something passed between them in that, an understanding, a whole conversation held in what neither of them said.

"And you're looking after my daughter.”

"With everything I've got, sir." No hesitation. No hedge. Just that flat, bedrock certainty I was coming to lean on like a wall. "For as long as she'll let me."

I had to look out the window then, because my face had done something I didn't want either of them to hear in my voice.

My father was quiet a moment. Then he said, "Magnolia?”

"Yeah, Dad."

"I'm coming out there." Not a question, either. An order, gentle, the kind he'd spent his life giving. "Don't argue with me. I've had a feeling in my gut since your mother called and I've learned to stop ignoring that feeling. I'll be there tomorrow, and I'd like to shake this young man's hand and see your face and put my eyes on you myself. A father needs to put his eyes on his kid sometimes. That's not up for a vote."

"Okay, Daddy," I said, and my voice broke wide open on it, because I hadn't known until that second how badly I needed my father to come, how much of the morning I'd been holding up alone even surrounded by all that kindness. "Okay. Come down. I'd—yeah. Come."

"Good." I heard the relief in it, the way a task settled him. "Cash?”

"Sir."

"I'll want a proper conversation with you when I get there."

"I'd expect nothing less, Colonel. I'll look forward to it."

And I swear I heard my father almost smile, that gruff downward tuck he did instead of grinning.

We said our goodbyes and I ended the call. I sat there with the phone in my lap and my whole chest aching in about six directions at once.

"He's a good man, your father," Cash said quietly, eyes on the road.

"He is." I wiped my face with the back of my hand. "You didn't have to do that. Speaker. All of it."

"Yeah, I did." He reached over without looking and found my hand and folded it into his, warm and rough, and put both our hands down on his thigh and left them there. "No more closed boxes, Mags. Not with me."

I didn't have words for what that did to me, so, I just held on to his hand and watched Charleston give way to the dirt road I knew by heart. Something in me steadied, one notch, for the first time all day.

The gate at Lowcountry Working K9 was propped open the way it always was. I got out into the smell of the place—diesel and hay and dog and warm dust—and it undid me a little, because it smelled like my life, like the life I'd had before last night. I stood there a second and just breathed it.

Then, Banjo saw me.

He'd been dozing in his run and he came up off the concrete like a fool in love, all sixty pounds of him hurling himself at the chain-link, that one bad ear flopping, his whole body a single wag, screaming his ridiculous joy at the sight of me like I was the best thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. I got the gate open and he hit me square in the chest. I went down on one knee in the dirt and let him lick my face, this big, anxious wash-out that nobody ever wanted. I hugged him hard around the neck and laughed for what felt like the first time in a year.

"Hey, buddy," I said into his fur. "Hey. You ready? You've got a home. A real one. I promised." Cash stood a few feet off with his hands in his pockets, watching me with that unreadable softness. Beans and Tiny circled the reunion with tails going, and for one clean, bright minute, the whole broken morning fell away and there was just a dog who was finally, finally going somewhere he'd be kept.