The Funeral You Missed

You don't say anything about the banker. Neither does he.

He just appears at the bunkhouse door at eight with his keys and says, "Therapy," and you follow him to the truck like you've been doing it all your life.

Ninety days. July thirty-first. The words sit in your stomach like a stone the whole drive.

Sweetgrass is four blocks of brick storefronts and a grain elevator, a bank, a pharmacy, a bar called the Rusty Spur that everybody calls the Spur because it serves breakfast too. Bartholomew parks in front of the pharmacy. There's a hand-painted sign beside a narrow staircase: SWANICK PHYSICAL THERAPY. Upstairs. Yes, the stairs are part of it.

"Cute," you say.

"Loy's not cute."

He's right. Loy Swanick is a bald, broad man in his late forties with an army tattoo on one forearm and the gentlest hands you've ever felt on an injury. He reads your Cheyenne file without a word. Then he makes you lift your arm until you swear, and makes you do it again.

"Ethan Kestler," he says. "You were a bronc rider."

"Am."

"Were, till I say otherwise." He presses a thumb into the meat behind your shoulder blade and you see stars. "Eleven screws and a plate. Torn labrum. Somebody in Cheyenne did nice work. Somebody in Cheyenne also told you six weeks of rest, and you rested for three and then tried to rope a calf, didn't you."

"…It was a small calf."

Loy looks at Bartholomew, who's leaning in the doorway pretending not to listen. "He always this dumb?"

"Yes," Bartholomew says.

"Great. I love a project." Loy hands you a red resistance band. "Twice a day. Every day. You skip, I'll know."

"How?"

"Because I'll ask him." He points at Bartholomew. "And he can't lie worth a damn."

You make it down the stairs gray and sweating. Bartholomew steers you into the Spur without asking and sits you in a booth.

The whole room turns to look.

At first you think it's you. The returning champion, the one who left. Then you realize half of them are looking at him the way people look at a sunset they've seen a thousand times and still can't believe. The waitress, a young redhead with a pencil behind her ear, forgets to bring menus. The old men at the counter nod at him with respect. A woman in a booth by the window actually fixes her hair.

Then their eyes slide to you. Him. You. Him again. And you watch Sweetgrass do the math.

Your shoulders go tight. You know that look. You've spent ten years in locker rooms making sure nobody ever got to finish that equation about you.

Bartholomew doesn't even seem to notice. He orders two coffees and two plates of eggs and drinks his coffee black, perfectly calm, while half the room watches him.

"They're staring," you say under your breath.

"They do that."

"At you?"

He looks at you over the rim of the cup. "At you, kid. You're the guy on the poster at the feed store."

There is, it turns out, a faded poster of you at the feed store. World Finals, three years ago. You on a black bronc with your hat flying. Somebody in Sweetgrass hung it up and never took it down.

You don't know what to do with that, so you eat your eggs.

The fight starts on the drive home, the way fights always do: with something small.

"You didn't have to come to every appointment," you say. "I can get Ysidro to drive me."

"Ysidro drives like he's mad at the road."

"Then I'll hitch."

"With one arm."

"I've done dumber things."

"I know you have." His hands tighten on the wheel. "I was there for a few."

The road unspools in front of you, gravel now, washboard, the ridge rising up ahead. You should leave it. You don't.

"Say it, Bart."

"Say what."

"Whatever you've been not saying since the bus." Your voice comes out too loud in the small cab. "You hate that I left. Fine. I know. I was twenty-two and you asked me to stay and I got in a truck and went to Pendleton. I know what I did."

He brakes. Not hard. Just enough that the truck stops on the empty road, dust rolling past the windows.

He turns and looks at you, and it's the first time since the bus he's really looked.

"I don't hate that you left," he says. "You were good. You were always going to be good. I hate that you didn't come back for Faustina."

The name hits you like a kick in the chest.

Your grandmother. Faustina Kestler, five-foot-nothing, who took you in at twenty-two when your father died and you had nowhere else to go. Who fed you fry bread you never learned to make right. Who died four years ago in the little yellow house on Pine Street while you were in Calgary, two days out from a final you couldn't afford to miss.

"I was in Canada," you say. It sounds as weak out loud as it always does in your head.

"I know where you were." His voice is very quiet. "I carried her, Ethan. Me and Ysidro and four guys from the church. She asked for you right up to the end. And I had to stand there and tell her you were coming."

You can't breathe.

He looks away. Puts the truck back in gear. Neither of you says another word the whole way home.

By midnight the shoulder is screaming.

Loy warned you. First week's the worst. Don't be a hero. You took the ibuprofen. You did the band. It doesn't matter. The pain is a living thing under the plate, hot and electric, and lying down makes it worse, and sitting up makes it worse, and the bunkhouse walls feel like they're leaning in.

You go out to the barn because it's the only place you can think of. Ransom sticks his head over the stall door. You lean your forehead against his neck and breathe in horse and hay and try not to make a sound.

You don't hear Bartholomew come in.

You just feel a hand settle, very lightly, between your shoulder blades.

You go still. So does he.

"Sit, Ethan," he says.

There's an overturned bucket. You sit. He disappears into the tack room and comes back with a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a dish towel and kneels in front of you in the straw.

"This is going to hurt," he says.

"It already hurts."

He presses the ice against the front of your shoulder, and his other hand comes up to hold it there from behind, his palm flat and warm against your back. You're caught between cold and heat. Between his hands.

Your breath shudders out of you. You close your eyes.

Neither of you talks. The barn ticks and settles. Ransom blows softly through his nose. Somewhere down the aisle, Chinook squeaks in her sleep.

Ten years. Ten years and you'd forgotten what it was like to be held by someone who knew exactly where it hurt.

After a long time, his thumb moves. Once. A slow, small stroke along your spine, so light you might have imagined it.

Then he stands up, sets the peas in your good hand, and walks out of the barn without a single word.

You're back in the bunkhouse, ice melting into your shirt, staring at the ceiling, when your phone buzzes on the table.

A number you haven't seen in ten years. You never deleted it.

It's a photo. Chinook, asleep in the straw, one fuzzy ear flicked up toward the camera.

And under it, three words.

come up to the ridge