Bonus Scene: Kid Gloves

Bonus Scene - Delaney

Rain Check: an extended epilogue for readers who wanted one more incident report. Three months later.

     The storm rolls in off the west pasture at four o'clock like it has a delivery window, and I meet it from the hayloft of the new barn with my arms full of straw and my mood full of grievances.

    "You couldn't wait one hour," I inform the sky, which answers with a gust that rattles the loft door on its new hinges. Below me the barn hums along unbothered — Willa's pups three months old now and thundering around the weaning pen like furry felonies, June the brindle menace supervising from the top of the ramp she's not supposed to climb, everything dry and tight and cedar-sweet, because my partner builds barns the way he does everything, like the inspector's coming and the inspector is God.

    My partner. Fifteen months ago I re-shingled my own roof out of spite. Now I have a partner, a program with my grandmother's name on it, a goat with tenure, and a to-do list for a fall open house that Rosie has somehow made both optional and mandatory. The county calls us "the Boone-Mercer operation" now, all one word, boonmercer, like it's always been on the map.

    Thunder cracks close. The lights flicker, hold. And a truck comes up the lane through the gray sheets of it, headlights swinging, and parks crooked — crooked, Wade Mercer parks crooked when it's raining and I'm in a barn, this has been documented, and a large damp man comes through the barn door below at a speed just under running, rain off his hat brim, calling my name over the storm with that note in it I've stopped teasing him about, mostly, the one left over from a fire.

    "Up here, cowboy. Straw duty. Nobody's on fire."

    He climbs the loft ladder like it's a formality. Stands there dripping at the top, hat in hand, taking me in — straw in my hair, his jacket on my shoulders, presumably a general air of agricultural dishevelment, and the look on his face does what it does, which after all these months still lands somewhere between my ribs like a thrown horseshoe.

    "Storm cell's parked," he says. "Radar says an hour, maybe two. Roads'll be soup."

    "Tragic. Trapped in a barn." I toss the last flake of straw and dust my hands. "However will we pass the—"

    The loft door bangs. The rain goes to roar. And Wade Mercer crosses the hayloft, takes my face in both cold rain-damp hands, and kisses me like the radar promised him two hours and he's a man who plans to the minute, and somewhere in it I hear the wooden clack of the loft ladder's little gate, kicked shut behind him with one boot.

    Locked, actually. He installed a latch on the hayloft gate in August. I asked why a hayloft needs a latch.

    "Compliance," he said.

* * *

    He peels his jacket off my shoulders like he's unwrapping something he ordered and waited on, and lays it flat on the deep straw with a precision that makes me laugh out loud—"are you staging the—" "quiet, there's a protocol," and then there's no more laughing for a while, or rather the laughing moves inside everything else, where it lives now, where he likes it.

    The rain hammers the tin roof into one long silver sound. He takes his time, the maddening auditor — flannel buttons like an inventory, his mouth following the ledger down my throat, my collarbone, the freckles he once called buckshot and now calls by number, and I get even the only way I know, narrating, because it wrecks him: "and here we see the director conducting his quarterly review—" and his laugh gusts hot against my sternum and turns into something with teeth, and the narration goes to pieces exactly where he wants it to.

    "Six months," he says against my ribs, conversational, criminal, working the last button loose, "and you still talk through everything."

    "You still — count everything—"

    "Somebody has to keep the records." His hand slides warm up my spine, arching me like a question he already knows the answer to, and his voice drops to the register that has ended every argument we've had since June: "Thirty-one freckles, left shoulder. A scar from the fence on Kuykendall's line, 2019, you lost. A woman who laughs right before she—" and I do, right on schedule, damn him, laugh and gasp in one sound, and feel him smile against my skin like a man whose data holds.

    The straw is soft and the jacket is canvas and the storm has sealed us into a gray-gold room the size of the world. When I pull his shirt over his head the rain-chill's still on his skin and he hisses at my warm hands like a man touching a stove and leans into them anyway, always, both directions, that's the whole treaty, and when he finally settles over me, forehead to mine, conferring, the question he asks with his eyes gets answered with my heels at the small of his back, which is contract language where I come from.

    "Delaney." My name in the storm-dark, wrecked and reverent.

    "I'm here." And I am, that's the miracle nobody bet on, the long odds Wanda never posted, all the way here, nothing in any drawer, hips rising to meet him as he moves, slow and deep and certain as weather, the tin roof roaring its applause. He murmurs the inventory against my ear — every place we've been, the whelping barn, the guest house, the wall he still won't apologize for — building me like a case file until I'm shaking, until the storm outside and the one under my skin swap places, until I come apart with his name and half a laugh in the same broken sound and take him with me, his groan lost in thunder, his grip on my hip a document I'll be reading for days.

    After, we lie tangled on his ruined jacket watching the rain silver down past the open gable, and June the menace, who has scaled the forbidden ramp below, barks once at the storm to let it know she's aware of it.

    "Three months," Wade says, to the roof. His hand's doing lazy fence-line patrol along my spine. "Since the party. You realize the whole county thinks we're already—"

    "Loretta's got a bracket."

    "Loretta's had a bracket since the certified letter." He's quiet a moment, and I know his quiets now, I can pick them out of a lineup: this is the drafting one. "Dean's toast is going to be entirely goat stories."

    "Wade Mercer." I prop up on his chest, and he looks at me, straw in his hair, honest as a stud wall, and my heart does the thrown-horseshoe thing. "Was that a proposal-adjacent statement? In a hayloft? While I'm wearing straw?"

    "It's a radar report," he says, deadpan, but his hand's stopped patrolling and gone still and warm over the small of my back, holding. "The forecast is long. That's all I'm entering into the record today. Weather like this—" and there it is, the smile, the whole rare thing, first light through a fence board—"you want to see it coming a long way off."

    "I do," I say, and watch him hear both meanings, and file them, and glow about it in that contained federal way that I will spend the rest of my life —

    The rest of my life. Huh. There it is. Filed.

    "For the record," I add, because the loft is warm and the rain is honest and there's straw in his hair and I've never been able to leave a moment un-narrated, "when the forecast does come in, the long one, I have terms."

    "You always have terms."

    "The goat walks me down whatever there is to be walked down. Gary is locked in a structure two counties away. And Dean's toast gets a two-goat-story maximum, negotiated in writing." I prop my chin on his chest. "And you write it on the board first. Before anything official. That's how I want to find out — incident number whatever, subject W. Mercer. That's our paperwork. That's the real one."

    His hand stops on my spine. His heart, under my ear, files a report at volume. "Noted," says Wade Mercer, and the word has never once meant so much cargo, and outside the rain eases like even the sky wants to hear what number he picks.

* * *

Bonus Scene - Wade

     The storm gives us the full two hours, and I spend the second one exactly as unproductively, which for the record is a personal best.

     For the record, and I keep the records, the second hour goes like this: her asleep on my chest in the straw for forty minutes with the rain conducting overhead, my hand running fence-line patrol on her spine, and me doing the accounting I do now in place of the old kind. Six months since a fire dragged me over a fence at 0200. Four since a whiteboard learned to hold a love letter. Sixteen weeks since a county gave a woman her name back over eggs, and somewhere east of here a bid is still open, and Boyd's invoices still come monthly, and the LATER tab is still getting heavier, and none of it, not one line of it, gets to have this loft. That's the whole discipline now. I used to guard everything and hold nothing. The revised protocol holds.

     She wakes when the rain thins, nose first, like her dogs. "Time is it?"

     "Six. Storm's breaking."

     "Mm. Five more minutes." She burrows in, shameless, and gets fifteen, because the director's gone soft and the whole county knows it and the board outside says so in two handwritings.

     We come down the ladder at six-twenty into a barn gone gold — storm passed, sun under the clouds, every wet surface on the property lit up like it's been paid to. The pups are stacked in a heap in the weaning pen except June, who greets us at the bottom of the ladder with the loud specific outrage of a chaperone who knows exactly what a latch is for. Delaney picks her up. June bites her chin, gently, on principle, boss-but-only-because-she's-loud, and forgives us.

     The phone's got four messages, because a storm cell over this county is a family event. Rosie, confirming structures and offering soup. Jake, offering nothing, asking with maximum innocence whether we "found somewhere dry," followed by a second message that is only the eyes emoji, followed by, I show Delaney. She screams, a screenshot of the ledger, where Wanda has apparently opened a line titled HAYLOFT, DATE OF, with three bets already logged and Loretta's money down on "today, obviously."

     "There are no secrets in this county," Delaney says, awed, scandalized, thumbing a reply.

     "What are you sending?"

     "The eyes emoji back. It's the only language they respect." She pockets the phone and looks up at me, hair full of straw, my jacket on her shoulders, backlit by a barn her grandmother would be loud about, and I file the image where I file the permanent ones. "Loretta wins again, doesn't she?"

     "Loretta always wins. It's why nobody audits her."

     We walk the yard in the after-storm hush, checking what I check — gutters running clean, no limbs down, the corner post standing where it always stands, bronze plaque catching the light. THE FENCE WAS THE FRIENDSHIP. SOMETHING TO MEET AT. Brisket has ridden out the weather on my porch, dead center, dry as a deacon, and she watches us come up the lane with the flat satisfaction of an administrator whose systems all held.

     "Your porch held up," Delaney tells her.

     Chewing. Nothing in her mouth. Principle.

     At the office, the whiteboard's waiting under the eave — the new board, four months of fresh incidents, the county's Sunday reading. Delaney uncaps the marker to log the storm, because we log weather now, the junior handlers graph it, and she gets as far as:

          INCIDENT #29—1600-1800 HRS. SEVERE THUNDERSTORM. ALL STRUCTURES SOUND. ALL PERSONNEL SHELTERED IN PLACE IN THE

     — and stops. Marker hovering. Looks at me.

     I look back at her, innocent as a man can look with straw still in his collar, and hold out my hand for the marker, and she surrenders it, curious, and I finish the entry the only honest way it can be finished:

          BARN. FURTHER DETAILS NOT RELEASED. CORRECTIVE ACTION: RECURRING.

     "Recurring," she reads, and her laugh goes up through the gold evening air, up past the eave, out over the un-fenced land where two ranches used to be. "That's the most romantic incident report ever filed."

     "It's a maintenance schedule."

     "Wade."

     "Standing appointment. Weather permitting." I cap the marker. Somewhere behind the equipment barn, Gary — who has not been heard from all afternoon, who slept through the entire storm, who has never once in his broken-clock life crowed at an appropriate moment — chooses this precise second, 6:40 p.m., golden hour, to announce the dawn.

     Neither of us hears him. That's the point of a tin roof and a good latch and two hours of rain: some incidents finally, finally go unwitnessed.

     She takes my hand, procedure, and we do the last walk of the light together, keys on her hip, jacket on her shoulders, dog at our heels, goat in her perpetuity, and behind us on the board under the eave the storm entry dries in two inks, because she went back and added one line under mine, in her block letters, where the county will find it Sunday:

          REVIEWED AND APPROVED. INDEFINITELY.—D.A.B.

     Two handwritings. One incident report. No corrective action possible.

     None sought. None wanted. Open forever.