Iron Daughter

IRON DAUGHTER Chapter5

She called Cash before she'd even decided to call Cash, her thumb moving over the screen faster than the rest of her could catch up to, and it wasn't until it was already ringing that she understood what she'd just done, reaching for the one number in her phone she'd spent three days pointedly not answering.

He picked up on the second ring, which told her something too, something she didn't have room to examine right now.

"Hey." A pause, some kind of engine noise behind him, wind through a window. "You okay?"

"Wren called me."

"I know. She told me she was going to." Careful, that, the way he said it, like he was already bracing for what direction this conversation was about to go.

"She said Dad's heart's doing something. Some kind of rhythm thing. She made it sound like nothing, like I shouldn't spiral, and then she hung up to go taste cake." Raine heard her own voice climbing and didn't do anything to stop it. "Is it nothing, Cash. Tell me the truth. Is it nothing."

The wind noise cut out. He'd pulled over, she realized, or rolled the window up, and either way it meant he was taking the question seriously enough to give it his full attention, which scared her more than anything Wren had said.

"It's not nothing." He said it slow, like he was choosing the words carefully and still couldn't find ones that didn't land hard. "He had an episode about ten days ago. AFib, the doctor called it. He was at the clubhouse, sitting right there at the bar, and Marcus found him gray in the face and barely able to get a sentence out. They took him to Baptist in the ambulance. He was there two nights."

"Two nights." Her hand found the edge of the workbench and gripped it, metal cool and a little sticky with old grease under her palm. "Nobody called me."

"Duke told everybody not to. Said you had a life down there and he wasn't going to be the reason it got interrupted." A short, humorless breath, not quite a laugh. "I told him that was a stupid call. He told me to mind my business."

"That sounds like him."

"Yeah." A beat. "Marcus wanted to call you himself, actually. Got as far as pulling your number up. Duke caught him doing it in the hallway outside the room and about took his head off."

Raine closed her eyes. She could picture it exactly, her father in a hospital gown with wires taped to his chest, still somehow managing to run the room like it was the clubhouse and everyone in it answered to him, even flat on his back with a heart that wasn't behaving.

"So why are you telling me now."

"Because Wren already cracked the door open, badly, and I'd rather you hear the real version from somebody who was actually standing in that hospital room than piece it together from whatever she decides to feed you a little at a time." Something in his voice tightened. "And because I think you should know, regardless of what you decide to do with it. That's not me trying to get you to come home. That's just me not wanting to lie to you by leaving things out."

Raine looked around the shop like she expected to find some kind of instruction written on the wall, the water stains, the parts diagram taped up by the compressor, none of it telling her anything useful. Six years of not needing this place, this family, this man's voice on the other end of a phone, and it had taken exactly one phone call from Wren to put a c***k straight through the middle of it.

"Is he stable now."

"He's stable. On medication, supposed to be taking it easy, which you and I both know means he's already back to doing everything he shouldn't be doing." Cash exhaled, and she could picture that too, the particular way he used to rub the back of his neck when he was working up to saying something he didn't want to say. "He's stubborn, Raine. He's not dying tomorrow. But this isn't nothing either, and I wasn't going to sit here and let you find that out from a phone call about cake tasting."

She didn't say anything for a while. Out in the yard, Gus was hosing down the concrete, the water hissing against the heat, steam rising in thin curls that vanished before they got anywhere. He glanced over once, must have read something in the way she was standing, and turned the water off without being asked, giving her the quiet without making a thing of offering it.

"I'm coming up," she said finally, surprising herself with how steady it came out. "Not for the wedding. For him."

"Okay." No push, no relief in his voice either, just that same careful attention he'd been giving the whole call. "You want me to come get you, or you driving yourself."

"Myself. I need the drive." Four hours alone with the radio and her own thoughts sounded less like a punishment right now than a necessity, a way to arrive already having said some of what needed saying, even if only to herself.

"Alright." A pause. "I'm glad you called me."

"I didn't call you for that."

"I know. I'm still glad."

She hung up before either of them could turn that into something bigger than it already was, and stood there in the bay with the phone warm in her hand, the decision made and already sitting heavy in her chest in a way she hadn't fully braced for. Six years of telling herself Route's End was a place she used to live, not a place that still had a claim on her, and it had taken one call about a bad heartbeat to prove how much of that had been talk.

The phone buzzed again almost immediately; her whole body flinched before her eyes even found the screen, half expecting Wren again, some new piece of information delivered sideways.

It wasn't Wren.

DAD, the screen said, plain as anything, a name she hadn't seen light up her phone in six years, and underneath it the number kept ringing, patient, insistent, waiting to find out whether she was finally ready to pick up.