Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter3

Cash hauled the charter boat out a little after ten, backing the trailer down the ramp with the easy competence of somebody who'd been doing it since before he had a license to drive on the road part of the trip. Raine watched from the shop doorway longer than she meant to, arms crossed, telling herself she was checking his trailer lights and not much else.

He came back up to say goodbye instead of just driving off, which she noticed, because leaving without a word would have been easier for both of them and he'd never once in his life taken the easier option when a harder one was sitting right there.

"I'll be back through in a couple weeks. Different client, different boat." He squinted at her in the sun like he was trying to read something off her face she hadn't decided to put there. "Can I call you before that?"

"I don't know."

"That's not a no."

"It's also not a yes."

"I'll take it." He almost smiled, the first real one she'd seen out of him since he'd shown up at her gate, and it did something unfair to the arrangement of her chest that she chose to blame on the heat. "Thanks for the pump."

"Thanks for pulling it yourself. Saved me twenty minutes."

"Old habits."

He didn't try to touch her. She noticed that too, the careful distance he kept, like he understood that closing it himself would cost him more than waiting for her to close it would, and she resented how well he still knew how to handle her even after six years of not knowing her at all.

The truck pulled out onto the county road with the trailer rattling behind it, and she stood in the doorway until the sound of it folded into the ordinary noise of the yard, gulls and compressor hum and somebody's radio playing low in the next bay over.

She didn't listen to the voicemail until almost nine that night, sitting on her back steps with a beer going warm in her hand and the citronella candle Gus's wife had given her for Christmas burning low on the rail. She'd known who it was since the second buzz that morning. Knowing hadn't made picking up any easier, and not picking up hadn't made the knowledge go away.

Her father's voice came through smaller than she remembered it, or maybe she'd just gotten used to remembering it louder than it actually was.

"Raine. It's Dad." A pause long enough that she could hear the clubhouse behind him, somebody's dog barking, a radio tuned to a station that hadn't changed in fifteen years. "Wren's getting married in October. I'd like you there. I know that's a lot to ask, and I know I don't have much room to be asking it." Another pause, longer than the first. "Call me back. Or don't. But think about it."

That was the whole message. Twenty-two seconds, by the little timestamp on her phone. Not a single word about the six years in between, not a single word about the last conversation they'd actually had, the one in the garage the night before she left, him telling her that family stuck together and her asking him, quietly, which family he meant, because it clearly wasn't the one that had raised her.

She remembered that night in pieces, the way you remember things you've spent years trying not to. Duke had been wiping down a wrench he didn't need to wipe down, the same nervous habit she'd inherited without meaning to, and he'd said her name twice before he managed to say anything after it. He hadn't asked her to stay. She'd waited for it, standing there with her bag already packed and sitting by the door like a decision she'd made before she walked in, and he never asked. He'd just told her family stuck together, like the words alone were supposed to undo eighteen months of watching him choose the easier peace every single time it mattered.

She thought about the bonfire the summer she turned sixteen, the one that came back to her at odd hours for no reason she could ever predict. Wren had been at the club eight months by then, long enough to know exactly which jokes landed with which boys, and she'd told a story that night about Raine falling off her dirt bike at twelve, a story that wasn't even true, not the way Wren told it, and the boys had laughed anyway, laughed the way you laugh when the version you're being handed is more entertaining than the true one you already know. Cash had laughed too. She remembered that specifically, the shape of his laugh in the firelight, and she remembered deciding, right then, at sixteen, that it didn't matter, that she was being too sensitive, that a person who wanted to belong somewhere had to let some things go.

She had let a lot of things go. She understood now, on the back steps with a warm beer and her father's small careful voice still sitting in her ear, that letting things go had not made her belong there any more than fighting for herself would have. It had just made the leaving quieter when it finally came.

She didn't call him back. She also didn't delete the voicemail, which she noticed about herself with the same clinical distance she'd use on an engine that wasn't running right, filing the observation away without deciding yet what to do about it.

Her phone buzzed once more before she went inside, a text this time, different number, one she did have saved.

*Made it back to Route's End. Thanks again for the pump. Talk soon?*

She looked at it for a long moment, the cursor blinking in the empty reply box, the candle guttering low enough now that moths had mostly given up on it. Then she typed three words, deleted them, typed two different ones, deleted those too, and finally set the phone face down on the step beside her and went inside without answering either message, both of them still sitting there unread by anyone but her, waiting the way most things from home had always waited, patient, unresolved, and not nearly as far away as she needed them to be.