9 Letters (24 page)

Rae didn’t even step
inside.

She rang the bell, and I came
over, opened the door, and I saw her there all dressed-down and
pretty. Yeah, she’d turn some heads today. Wasn’t why I
was bringing her, of course, but it was true. She’d turn some
heads.

“You look nice,” she
said.

Honest to God, all I’d done
different from usual was tuck my flannel in, but if I looked nice,
then I’d done right.

“So do you.”

“Should we go?” she
asked.

I had no reason to invite her in,
I realized. Well, at least the house looked good from where she was
standing in the doorway.

We got to the truck, and King
stood around waiting by the driver’s door. “Oh no, King,
you’re in the back.” I went around and dropped the
tailgate. “Load up!”

He hopped up there with no
complaints, and Rae started petting him, rubbing his head and shaking
all that extra skin around. No need to get jealous of a dog, I told
myself.

“Things are going better
with him,” Rae said. It wasn’t a question.

“We’re getting
along,” I said.

“He listens to you.”

“He’s a good dog.”

“You’re a good
master,” she said.

I smiled, climbed into the
driver’s seat, and she got in next to me. I turned north onto
the highway, and headed out into the country.

The celebration was at a park
just down the road from where we’d been building. It was a
perfect day, with just enough cloud cover to keep the sun from doing
its worst but no sign of rain. There were about forty people there,
mostly volunteers and their family. The guests of honor, though, were
Nathan and his wife and their three teenage girls. They were already
happy as hell by the time we pulled into the parking lot and walked
up.

I was right: Rae turned heads.
Maybe the two of us did. I felt good walking up with her. I was
proud. Not just because she was beautiful, though I’ll never
complain about having a woman like her in my company. But because she
looked like she was happy, like she cared about what Heartland did.
Oh, and because King heeled next to her without even a leash, even
though there were other dogs around.

Before anyone else had a chance
to say hi, Nathan walked up, family in tow, and shook my hand.

“Luke, I want you to meet
Jennifer, my wife,” he said. She offered her hand, and I shook
it. “Luke here is the reason we’re moving in now and not
three months from now. He knows everything there is to know and I’ve
never seen a man teach so well. Must have taught fifty people who
didn’t even know which end of the hammer to hold how to put
together a house.”

“Well I’ll be
damned,” Rae said. “Luke, you didn’t tell me you
ran the show around here.”

“This is Rae,” I
said. I didn’t say girlfriend. Maybe, if I played my cards
right, one day I might introduce her as my girlfriend. That might be
nice. More than nice.

Jennifer and the kids went off
back towards the barbecue, and Judy and Georgia came up to join us
and Nathan.

“How come you never said
anything about her?” Judy asked, after I introduced Rae to
everyone.

“Well, uh, you know I don’t
talk too much about anything personal,” I said.

“We just met,” Rae
said, cutting in. “Just recently.”

“Oh! New love!” Judy
said.

Morris walked up and saved me.
“You must be Rae,” he said.

“And you’ve got to be
Morris.”

“Well if my reputation has
got ahead of me, I’ve got some work in front of me before
you’ll give me the time of day, I figure.”

On the way up, Rae had been full
of questions about Heartland, about how it’s been working.
She’d been doing her social research, trying to figure out whom
she could talk to about what. I’d told her a lot about Morris.
Not what he’d said to me in the truck on the way home, though.
Couldn’t tell her that just yet, or maybe ever.

“All good things,”
Rae said. “Sounded like you gave him the ass-kicking he
needed.”

“Well. I don’t know
about needed,” I said.

“Damn right I did,”
Morris said. “And then he got his act together and he built a
house.”

“I don’t know about
needed,” I said. Not that anyone was listening to me.

The grill was running after that,
and Nathan and Gary served us up everything good in the world.
Burgers, hot dogs, corn grilled in the husk. One of Nathan’s
daughters was a vegetarian, even, and grilled up portobello caps. I
tried one, it wasn’t bad.

Then I realized Rae was eating
one instead of a burger.

“Are you a vegetarian?”
I asked. My brain ran through the evidence: she loved animals, she
grew up in the city, and she was eating a portobello cap instead of
burger. I went into crisis mode, problem-solving mode. Could I date a
vegetarian? I mean...bacon. Venison. Damn, I’d hated it when
Emily had liked her meat well-done. But at least she ate meat!

But I suppose, if she didn’t
make me stop, if she didn’t care about the deep-freeze, then
who was I to judge? Dave’s brother was a vegan, even, and he’d
never given any of us any hassle. I’d have to explain it to my
family. But whatever, they’d get over it. Emily’s family
had gotten over her marrying a city boy. My family would just have to
get used to the idea that my girlfriend didn’t eat meat. If Rae
became my girlfriend. If she was a vegetarian.

“You saw me eating a ham
sandwich at my birthday party,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.
“Right.”

She started laughing.

“I’d still like you
if you were a vegetarian,” I said.

“That’s the best
compliment I think you’ve ever given me,” Rae said. “And
yeah, I was vegetarian for awhile right after college. Lasted all of
a week. But I only eat meat every now and then.”

“Alright,” I said.

I must have looked unconvinced,
because she took my burger right out of my hands, took a big old bite
out of it, and chewed it with her mouth open right there in front of
me. “Nom nom nom meat,” she said, her mouth full of food.

I was laughing too.

“Hell, I even like my steak
rare,” she said.

Goddamn.

After we ate, Jennifer stood up
on the picnic table bench, and everyone grew quiet.

“I don’t do this
speech thing, really,” she said. “But I guess I’m
going to try.”

A few people cheered.

“The thing is...we thought
that tornado has cost us everything. Our house, of course, and our
car. But without our car we couldn’t keep our jobs and no one
wants to hire you when your address is a shelter. It was bad times.
Bad times. Almost broke Nathan and I apart. I can’t tell you
what kind of stress it puts on a marriage to lose your house like
that and suddenly realize there’s nowhere you can all stay
together. But then you all came along, and Morris. Morris, you found
us and told us you’d build us a house, and I figured you’d
be as full of it as everyone else who’d ever given us empty
promises all along. Then Judy, Georgia. You set the example. Doing
that work, that’s what got Nathan back to his senses. Back to
church. And seeing him pull himself up like that, seeing how you all
were there to pull us up, that’s how I got back up, too.”

She started crying.

“Y’all know how to
look after people. You built us that house because you’re good
people, God’s people, and you do God’s work.
And...and...and we thank you.”

Rae was tearing up too, next to
me, and everyone was clapping and cheering.

She put her arm around my waist,
pulled me in tight. It was the first time we’d touched...really
touched. She was warm against me, and that warmth spread through the
whole of my body like something magic.

“You did a good thing,”
she said.

Yeah, I guess I did.

A little bit later, I was sitting
up on the picnic table playing songs for everyone. Rae put me up to
it. She hadn’t even come to open mic, had never heard me play.
But she went and found Nathan, and Nathan told Judy, and Judy was in
charge of everything whether the rest of us knew it or not. So she
told me to play, and I sat on the wooden table with that six string
in my hand, and I played some songs.

I played happy songs. Songs I
barely remembered, some of them, but people shouted out their
favorites and I even knew a couple of them. I didn’t go outlaw
or nothing. I played it straight. Sometimes you gotta play it
straight.

It got people dancing. Nathan and
Jennifer, at first, and then the kids started in and I started
picking up the pace. Rae danced politely with Morris, then she came
and stood next to me while I sang. Just listening to me, all happy.

Damn if that didn’t make me
happy.

After my set, Gary came up and
asked if he could play. “I don’t want you to not get a
chance to dance with that pretty girl you brought,” is what he
said.

I handed him the guitar, and he
kept the party going.

“Rae,” I said. “You
want to dance?”

Because I was starting over at
life, and when you start over at life sometimes you need to forget
about the things that you don’t do. I don’t dance, I’d
told myself so long I believed it. But I’d also told myself
there was only one girl in the world for me, and I was starting to
wonder if that was the whole truth, or if it’d really feel that
way forever.

“I’m awful at
dancing,” Rae said, color rising into her cheeks.

“I just saw you doing a
fine job of it.”

“Yeah but that was with
people I don’t need to impress,” she said.

“I don’t think it’s
possible for anyone to be more impressed than I am by you,” I
said.

“You mean it?” she
asked.

I took her by the arm, figured
I’d show her I meant it instead of just telling her.

Both of us were awful. I know
enough about dancing to know that both of us were awful. But it was
better that way. Better to just dance a little, better to ease myself
into it.

After one song, we went and stood
at the edge of the crowd. Still as close as we’d been when we
were dancing.

“I’m sorry I blew up
at you,” she said. “You didn’t deserve that.”

“I understand,” I
said. “You’ve been hurt. You’re protecting
yourself. Opening up is hard.”

“It is,” she said.

“You don’t have to do
it right away, either. Not with me. You can take your time.” I
fidgeted with the brim of my cap. “I mean, if you like me like
that.”

“Luke Cawley, I’ve
liked you since the day you walked into my shelter. I liked you even
more when you walked out with my favorite dog. Hell, I even liked
when you threw Derek through my fence.”

“I’ve felt the same,”
I said.

“Now you’re lying.”

“No, it’s true.”
I said. “I just didn’t know it yet. Sometimes that
happens, I guess. I liked you even though I was too closed off to let
myself realize it.”

She kissed me on the cheek,
caught me by surprise.

“You want to get out of
here?” I asked.

She smiled, and we started back
towards my truck.

Morris looked up from where he
was watching the dance, gave me a nod.

I nodded back.

In the parking lot, Rae followed
me around to the back of the truck while I was loading up King. I
slammed the tailgate shut, turned around, and she was right behind
me.

We kissed. Both went for it at
the same time. I cradled her head in my hands and pulled her tight
against me. She kissed like no one I’d ever kissed. She was
curious, excited. She explored me. She kissed me soft, then hard.
Closed mouth, opened mouth. But it was wonderful. It felt like she
wanted me, wanted to know me inside and out.

The whole drive back, I kept my
hand on the gearshift and she kept her hand on top of mine. She was
sitting sideways in the seat, just gazing at me, as she explored my
hand, ran her fingers along the back of it and up under my sleeve. It
was all I could do not pull over on the side of the road, right then
and there. But it wasn’t just that she wanted to get her hands
on me. It was a kind of curiosity. A playfulness. A discovery, the
anticipation of it. I felt it, too.

We ended up back at her place by
sole virtue of it being closer, further north. It helped, of course,
that her bed had never been her wedding bed. We walked to the door,
and before she let me in, she turned to face me.

“Can I trust you? You’re
not just playing me? Since Derek, a lot of guys have been trying to
just play me. I can’t have that.”

“You can trust me,” I
said. I wanted it to be true. So I promised myself, just as I was
promising her.

She let me in. She made me take
off my shoes by the door, and she led me by the hand through her
living room, down the hall to her bedroom.

It was sparse. Just a queen-size
bed with white sheets and white covers. The walls were a soft blue,
lit by a single lamp in the corner of the room. She closed the door
on King and Muffin, who had tried to follow us in. But as sad as they
looked when they saw the door shut, we heard the two of them playing
happily in the living room soon enough.

“It’s kind of a
mess,” she said, though I couldn’t tell what mess she
meant. I suppose there was a hamper of laundry on the floor.

“It’s not a problem,”
I said.

She sat down on the edge of the
bed, patted the covers next to her, and I sat too. For some reason, I
felt like a kid again. In good ways and bad ways both. Like I was
awkward, barely knew what to do.

Maggie, she’s gone right
for it. She’d known what she’d wanted (or at least what
she thought she’d wanted) and she’d just dove right in. I
knew Rae wouldn’t do that, so I tried to put myself in her
shoes, figure out what she needed me to do.

I put my arm around her shoulder,
and she slipped hers around my waist, and I brought her to me. We
kissed. More gently this time, less frantic. We had plenty of time.