She and the Thomases had been the ones to call the Feds, though.
“I don’t understand. What did he do?”
“He tried to get people to attack the agents. When they wouldn’t ... there was a hostage situation,” the chief answered. “Hall and some of his gang pulled weapons and rounded up as many people as they could get.”
“But it was the Sun Dance. He was dancing. He took his own people hostage?”
“Yes. He heard that the elders were talking to the agents, and he must have decided they meant to give him up.”
“They wouldn’t have,” she replied.
“No, I don’t think they would have. But when he took up against his own, the tribe welcomed the agents in before it turned into something like Waco. Hall and five other Warriors were arrested.”
They’d desecrated the Sun Dance. Broken up a powwow. Evan Hall, self-appointed champion of the old ways, had pissed all over the oldest of their ways. No wonder their people had turned on him at last.
“He was arrested?” she asked anyone who would answer.
Honor did. “Yeah. From what I’ve been privy to, I think they have a strong case.”
Victor picked up the thread. “Some people were able to get off the rez in the first chaos. I guess Frannie was one. That’s why she was coming home.”
“Did anybody get hurt at the powwow? Did Evan hurt anybody?”
“Some cuts and bruises,” Victor answered. “They knocked a few people around. But nothing serious.”
So Frannie would have been safer if she’d stayed. But it was Gigi who’d told her there was danger. Maybe if she’d said nothing, Frannie wouldn’t have been primed to run.
No. She had a lot to be guilty for, but Frannie driving drunk wasn’t her fault. If she’d left when Gigi wanted her to, with her, she’d have been long gone before Evan Hall got twitchy.
She wouldn’t feel guilty about alerting the Feds, either. That had been the right thing to do.
“So we’re safe? The Warriors aren’t a threat anymore?”
Frank smiled. “Looks that way.”
“Okay. Good. That’s good, then.” She turned to Reese, who watched her carefully. “That’s good.”
“It is, baby. It’s good.” He opened his arms, and she leaned on him and let him wrap her close.
*****
Her mom went home late that afternoon; she wanted to be back to put Tyson to bed. Though their life was plain and often bleak, it was rhythmic, and Ty had never gone to sleep anywhere but home, tucked in every night by his grandmother.
The rest of their friends and family left at the same time, when Reese and Gigi told them they were solid on their own. Reese wouldn’t leave her, and she didn’t ask him to. It helped to have him close, and he took care of the little errands and calls so she could focus on her sister.
They were sitting together in Frannie’s room, talking about Honor’s offer to help her with the DUI—which, it turned out, would be her second in less than five years, so it would be a felony charge, and a conviction would mean prison time. Honor had offered to take the case pro bono, which was good, since free was all Frannie could afford, but Gigi felt weird about it. Honor barely knew Gigi or her family. All she knew was their trouble.
It wasn’t her charity to take or decline, that was up to Frannie, if and when she woke and was charged, but Gigi needed to talk it out nonetheless. She was building relationships, and she wanted their foundation to be stronger than her family’s relentless need.
“Mac, let people help. All you have to do is be there for them in ret—” he stopped and grabbed her hand. “Baby, look.”
He was looking at the bed. Gigi looked, and saw Frannie’s one good arm flailing weakly, like she was trying to figure out what was wrong but was too disoriented to understand even where her hand was. She wasn’t supposed to move; none of her bones was fully set yet. Gigi leapt up and grabbed that hand.
“Hey. Hey, I’m here.”
Frannie’s eyes were still closed, but they were so swollen they probably couldn’t be anything else.
A muffled, thick grunt rose from the general vicinity of Frannie’s mouth.
The door creaked softly as Reese ran out.
“Easy, sis. You got in a wreck. You’re hurt bad, so shhh. But you’re gonna be fine. Everything’s gonna be fine now.” She didn’t know if it was true, so many things could still be wrong, could still go wrong, but this was a turn toward right, and her family hardly ever got even that much.
Reese came back with a nurse. “I met her in the hall. She saw on the monitors that she was awake.”
“Okay,” the nurse said with a smile. “Let’s see how we’re doing. Hi there, honey. Be still for me, okay? I know it’s scary, but let’s not get more hurt.”
As the nurse spoke sweetly to Frannie, telling her, and them, what would happen next, Reese hooked his arm around Gigi’s waist. She leaned close and breathed a full breath.
Maybe everything would be fine.
PART SIX
Chapter Twenty-One
Mac rolled over to her back and stretched like a cat under the dappled sunlight. She lifted her hips and adjusted the bottom of her tropical-print bikini, and Reese’s mouth filled. Despite the ruin they’d returned to after his first trip away from home, he meant to take her away at least once every year or two, and one of those trips was going to be someplace with palm trees and ocean, where she could wear teensy bathing suits like this one all the time. Goddamn.
They lay together on a big, tattered old quilt that had been kept at the bottom of a chest in the cabin longer than Reese was alive, maybe, and brought out for uses just like this—for lazing near the stream or as a picnic blanket.
“This was a good idea,” Mac said and pushed her sunglasses up her nose.
“Yeah.” He lay back and found her hand on the blanket.
It was the Fourth of July. Independence Day. Also Founders’ Day—Jasper Ridge claimed the Fourth as its own birthday as well. Founders’ Day was the biggest day of the Jasper Ridge calendar, with all sorts of celebratory events planned across three days, but Reese and Mac were sitting it out this year. With the Jack gone, and new construction on its replacement barely underway, it hurt too damn much to be in town for the party. He didn’t know what his place was without the saloon.
He’d never been a fan of all that chest-thumping for either Independence Day or Founders’ Day, anyway. Though he was as much a homebody as ever anybody was, though he loved Jasper Ridge with all his heart, the gushing displays of hometown or national pride made no sense to him. No one chose their hometown. No one earned the country of their birth. It just was. You were born, and there you were, and it was home, whether you liked it or not. Love it or hate it, home was home. It didn’t need a party.
Also: fireworks freaked his shit out. Tiny bombs for playtime. Whose stupid idea had that been?
So, while the rest of Jasper Ridge, and a sizeable share of the Sawtooth Jasper reservation as well, partied in town, Reese and Mac were spending a few days a few miles away, lost in the world of his little slice of heaven.
“Can I ask you something?”
Hearing a strange tone in her question, Reese lifted his head, and then propped himself on his elbows, so he could see her. “Sure. Shoot.”
She turned and looked at him through the burnished tint of her sunglasses. “Could the Jack be anything else?”
He’d just approved a new set of changes to the plans for the rebuild. Everything about the project felt wrong and awkward. How was he supposed to replace a building older than the town everybody was celebrating today? What could possibly fill the hole, literal and figurative, that had been left in the ash? He’d woken that morning feeling anxious about the new plans, and they’d spent some time over breakfast talking his worries through. The topic had been quiet for a few hours now, though.
“What do you mean?”
“Does it have to be a bar? Could it be a regular restaurant instead?”
Reese
intuited the subtext of her question, but he didn’t know what to say. Mac had good reason to hate booze. He understood, and he watched his own consumption in deference to her. But six weeks, they’d been home. Six weeks since the fire. For more than a month, he’d been actively working on moving toward rebuilding the Jack, and Mac had never asked such a question or made a comment like it. The Apple Jack Saloon was a bar. Always had been.
“Is this about Frannie?”
Two weeks after the powwow, Frannie was still in the ICU, and still on a ventilator. She’d undergone three surgeries to set her many broken bones and was enduring an infection in her lungs they couldn’t get control of. Her doctors still didn’t have a firm handle on her long-term prognosis. With her on the ventilator, they didn’t have a full understanding of her cognitive recovery, either. She was conscious, and belligerent in her frustration, but she couldn’t write or speak, so they didn’t know how much she understood.
The medical bills had already reached the stratosphere, and, in the best-case scenario, she had several more weeks of hospital care and then a stint in an extended-care facility. And the District Attorney was still holding the felony DUI over her head.
The situation had gotten so bad for Frannie that it had, ironically, almost become easier for the people around her to deal with—so much was out of anyone’s control, which had the effect of lightening the load of things that had to be done. The bills were too big to be paid, the prognosis too cloudy to plan for, the charges still pending, not official. There was nothing they could do except stay with her and offer moral support, which they did on an organized schedule.
Mac was exhausted, so Reese had arranged to get her off the schedule for this little piece of time and give her a break. They both needed to get away, and here at the cabin, they were close enough to be in reach if anything significant happened.
“Do you understand how many people in my family have been drunks? How many of them have died of being drunks? I try to think of the Jack as this historic place, the heart of the town, all that, but it’s a bar, Reese. You have money because you sell booze to drunks.”
“Do you think they’ll stop drinking if I stop selling booze?”
It was his standard line when they’d argued over this in the past, a standard because it was true. He didn’t make people drink too much. He did what he could to keep them safe—and point of fact, nobody had ever left the Jack, in all the years he’d been in charge, and had a bad wreck on the way home. He kept his people safe.
The one time someone had left his bar and gone out and died had been Heath’s first wife and Brandon fucking Black. He’d sent them packing because they’d had Ruthie with them, and the Jack after dark on a weekend night was no place for a preschooler to be.
They’d found somewhere else to drink. And then Sybil had driven drunk, crashed her car into a ravine, and killed herself and little Ruthie in a fiery horror. Black had run off and left them to die, like the pussy piece of shit he’d been.
If Reese had let them stay, maybe ... he closed his eyes and shoved that thought away.
“I know you don’t make them drink. I’m not blaming you for what they are, not at all. But ... I don’t know. I’ve been alright with what the Jack was. I think I’m still alright with it. But with Frannie going through all this, I don’t know. It’s hard to think of being around all the booze and drunks all the time, being involved in making them drunk.”
She sighed and sat up. Watching the stream roll by, she said, “I was just wondering if now that you’re building something new, could you do something new inside?”
Reese sat up, too, and watched the water. The tree-dappled sunlight made diamonds glitter over the surface of the gentle current. Pushing aside his first defensive instinct, he really considered her question: could he make the Jack something other than a saloon?
Jasper Ridge was a small town and didn’t have a state liquor store. In Idaho, liquor licenses were nearly impossible to get. Supermarkets could sell only beer and wine, and towns were limited to one bar per 1500 residents. Coming in at just over two thousand, they technically could have had a second bar, he supposed, but they didn’t. They didn’t even have a real restaurant for dinner. A couple little places for breakfast and lunch, and a little pizza parlor—none of which was licensed for more than beer and wine,. And the Moondancer, which had a very nice restaurant, but they served only their own guests.
The Jack was it. Without the Jack, there was nothing for miles. That was why it had always been the heart of the town: people celebrated with booze. They came together with booze. Booze was the great social lubricant. The Apple Jack was where the booze was.
Even setting aside his essential love of things staying the way they’d been—and God, he was having enough trouble contending with the idea of the old building being gone; Mac knew how hard it was for him to get right just with that alone—no, there was nothing else the Jack could be. It was a bar. He was a bartender. And Jasper Ridge needed it—and him. To keep them safe when they drank too much.
“No, baby. I know you hate it, but the Jack is a bar. And I’m a bartender.”
She sighed. “I know.”
“Are you gonna be okay with that?”
It suddenly occurred to him that their whole relationship could be balanced on the blade’s edge of this conversation. They’d hardly spoken of being engaged in all the time they’d been back. They’d told their friends, but that was it. He hadn’t bought her a ring. She hadn’t wanted an engagement ring the first time; he didn’t know if her feelings were the same on that point. Their attention had been on the calamities surrounding them, and they hadn’t made a single plan toward marriage.
Were they lying here in the peaceful sun, rethinking the engagement itself? How had that happened?
“Mac?”
She turned to face him and pushed her sunglasses to the top of her head. “I love you. The Jack is part of you. We don’t have to be perfect to be perfect for each other. The world is too broken and life is too hard to expect everything to be just the way we want it. It’s something I’m figuring out—happiness isn’t about finding everything you want, or never knowing pain or struggle. It’s about knowing what you have. You and I are just the way I want us, and that’s enough for me. The joy of loving you could power the whole rest of my life all by itself. So I’m okay with the Jack being what it is. I just ... had to ask.”
Reese held out his hand, and she put hers in it and let him pull her close. When he lay back, she settled beside him, resting her head on his bare chest and hooking her leg over his.
“Let me know when you want to get married,” he said after a spell of quiet and a return to security. “We can start planning whenever you’re ready.”
“I need things to settle down first. I can’t plan a celebration like that while there’s so much upheaval around us. When we’re not living with the Cahills anymore. And when we know more about what’s going to happen with Frannie.”
He nodded, and they were quiet again, until a thought occurred to him. Something he could maybe give her, since he wouldn’t, couldn’t, give her the Jack. “What would you think of living out here?”
She laughed. “It’s a bit rustic, I think. An outhouse is okay for a few days, but I prefer a flush toilet. And electricity. Not to sound too bougie about it.”
“Bougie?” She’d used that word once or twice, and he had no idea what it meant. He’d guessed from context that it was an insult of some kind.
“You know—like a spoiled rich chick who needs her toilet seat warmed and her coffee fancy. Of the bourgeoisie, if you remember your Marx.”
High school was a long time ago, but he understood. And he laughed. Mac could make literally any conversation political if you gave her time. “I mean build a house out here, silly. A real one.”
Her head came up. “But this is your hideaway. You like it like this.”
He did. He also loved living above his bar. Best commute ever. But he’d give it up t
o make her happy. If it were up to him, he’d never change anything about his life, and he was sensible enough to recognize that it wasn’t such a great thing, to be locked in one’s ways.
Mac was a fascinating mix of tradition and dynamism—both a natural esteem for history, especially the fading history of her people, and an open embrace of change and growth. She saw the value, and the limit, of memory, and of progress. Reese was suspicious of knee-jerk tradition, but hated change. Somewhere in those strange contradictions within them was the strength of their bond. They were perfect complements. Flawed, but perfect for each other.
“If you want to live away from the Jack, we’ve got this beautiful piece of Idaho to build a house on. And I am home anywhere you are.”
She smiled, and then she grinned, and then she kissed him. “I would love to build a house out here. Someday. Not right away. Let’s let life settle in and be married for a while. If we have kids, that would be a good time to think about another place to live. I wouldn’t want kids growing up over a bar.”
He had grown up over a bar. But he didn’t take offense, or point it out, because there was something more important in her words. “You want kids?” She hadn’t before. She’d been adamant, in fact, that she never wanted children, ever. She didn’t want to add to the line of fucked-up Mackenzies.
She shifted and sat up again. “Maybe. If everything else is right. What about you? Do you still want them?”
He shrugged. “I want you. If you want babies, we’ll have babies. If you don’t, we won’t.”
“You wanted them before.”
It was more correct to say he’d wanted kids with Mac before. He hadn’t felt a strong urge to reproduce generally, except to make a little person who was theirs. “I wanted you more, and that’s still true. It wasn’t a deal-breaker then. I’m eleven years older. It’s even less of a deal-breaker now.” He’d be forty-three next month. In not too many more years, he’d feel too old to start a family.
“I’m eleven years older, too. Maybe that’s why I feel less sure it’s a bad idea.” She lifted her shoulders and let them fall. “I’m just saying if it happened, I’d let it happen.”
Anywhere (Sawtooth Mountains Stories, #3) Page 26
