Page 93 of Rune’s Solace

“I want you to be brave one time before I have a baby that grows up watching you be a coward its complete life.”

The room stopped.

Horse went absolutely still. Even I stopped breathing, back in my corner, because it landed on all of us at once, the way of it, the thing she hadn’t told anybody.

“...What,” Horse said.

“I’m pregnant.” Fiona’s chin came up, and the fury cracked all the way open and there were tears under it now, running down that cold, set face. “Almost four months. Bolt knows. Nobody else knows. I’ve been carrying it around this nightmare of a month keeping it to myself because there’s never a good time in this life, somebody’s always in danger, and I wasn’t going to tell you like this, I wanted it to be nice — ” She wiped her face hard with the back of her wrist, furious at her own tears. “But I am not going to bring a child into this family and let it grow up the way I grew up. Watching you. Watching you love somebody with your full heart and be too scared to say it out loud. Watching Brenda get old waiting on a word from you that never comes.” Her voice dropped, and this was the one that did it, this was the killing one. “You’re going to be a grandfather. And that baby is going to love Brenda, because everybody who comes into this family loves Brenda, she’s the warmest thing any of us ever had. And I need to know, before it gets here, whether it’s going to watch its grandfather finally be a man, or whether I’ve got to explain to my kid someday why Grandpa let the best woman any of us ever knew grow old thinking she was never worth more than a good time.”

Horse didn’t say anything.

That was the thing that struck me, watching from the wall. He didn’t defend himself. He didn’t bluster. He sat on that barstool and he took every word of it like a man standing in the open taking rounds, and when Fiona finally ran out of them, he just — sat there. His big hands open on his knees. His face gone somewhere far off and terrible. A man looking straight at all those years of his own cowardice because his daughter had reached down his throat and dragged it up where he had to look at it.

“Congratulations,” he said finally. Barely a voice at all. “On the — the baby. That’s real good. Bolt’s a good man.”

“That’s all you’ve got.”

“No.” He shook his head, slow, and I saw his eyes were wet. “No, it ain’t all I got. It’s just all I got right now, baby girl. You dropped a lot on an old man.” He rubbed a hand down his face. “Give me — I gotta sit with this. All of it. Let me sit with it.”

“Don’t sit with it too long,” Fiona said. “That’s the thing I’m telling you. That’s the entire lesson of your own life, if you’d ever once look at it. You sit with things until they’re gone.” And she picked her plates back up, because she’s Horse’s daughter and Brenda’s girl both and that means you don’t leave a mess even when you’re detonating, and she carried them into the kitchen and left him there.

* * *

For a while neither of us said anything. Horse didn’t know I was there, or he’d forgotten, the way people do.

Then he found me in the corner, and he didn’t startle, he just looked at me tired, a man who’d been seen at the worst moment of his year and didn’t have it in him to care.

“How much of that’d you catch,” he said.

“All of it.”

He nodded. Looked back at his drink. I got up off my stool and I came down the bar and I did the thing I don’t do, which is offer a man something he didn’t ask for, and I only did it because I’d been exactly where he was sitting and I’d only just climbed out and the climb was still fresh enough to bleed.

I set my full beer down in front of him next to his empty one. Didn’t say anything about it. Just left it there.

“I spent about a year,” I said, “telling myself that keeping away from somebody was how I loved her. That it was the noble thing. The safe thing, for her.” I put my hand on his shoulder, once, the way these men do, brief and heavy. “It wasn’t noble, Horse. It was just fear wearing a nicer coat. And the only thing it ever protected was me, from having to risk the one thing worth risking anything for. Damn near cost me her for good.” I took my hand back. “Fiona’s right. You don’t get forever to sit with it. None of us do. We just found that out the hard way with Amy.”

Horse looked at the beer I’d set down. Looked at it a long time.

“How’d you know,” he said. “How’d you finally know it was time to quit bein’ a coward about it.”

“I didn’t.” I picked up my cut off the back of the stool. “A nineteen-year-old girl walked down a dark path in the middle of the night and did it for me. Reached for me when I didn’t have the guts to reach first.” I shrugged into the cut. “Not everybody gets that, Horse. Somebody braver than you doing the brave part first. Brenda already did hers tonight. She walked across a room and reached for you in front of God and everybody, and you told her she was makin’ too much of it.” I looked at him. “You might not get offered it twice.”

And I left him there at the bar with two beers and fifteen years and a grandchild coming, and I went to find my girl, because I could, because I’d been lucky enough and she’d been brave enough that I got to.

Behind me, when I looked back once from the door, Horse hadn’t touched either beer.

He was just sitting there with his face in his hands.

It was the most hopeful thing I’d seen him do since I’d known him.

A month after everything, summer finally backed off enough to give us a decent morning, and I was on my knees in the empty corner of the garden digging holes for something I’d sworn for six years I had no use for.

Useless flowers.

Lilacs, specifically, which had no damn business in Charleston and would probably make me regret every cent I’d spent getting them here. I’d been reading about them half the night, looking for varieties stubborn enough to take the heat, and the six little plants lined up beside me didn’t look like much for all that trouble. Mostly sticks in pots. A few leaves. Hard to believe any of them had a field of purple in them.

Wrong time of year to plant them too.