Chapter 11: Winter Warnings
The wind coming off the plains had teeth. It whistled through the bare branches of the oak tree and sliced through Cass’s thin sweater as she stacked the split logs Wade tossed from the pile. Each piece of firewood was heavy, cold, and rough against her palms, the fresh stitches in her right hand pulling with every lift and settle.
Wade worked in a silent, efficient rhythm. The ax rose and fell, a solid thwock that echoed in the brittle air, followed by the clean crack of the wood separating. He’d shed his heavier coat earlier, working in just a faded black t-shirt that stretched across his shoulders, sweat dampening it despite the chill. He didn’t speak, just glanced at her occasionally, checking her pace.
Her fingers were going numb. She blew on them, a futile gesture, and fumbled another log. It rolled off the uneven stack, thudding into the dirt.
“Take a break,” he said, not pausing in his swing.
“I’m fine.”
“Your lips are blue. You’re not fine.” He buried the ax head in the chopping block and turned. Before she could protest, he walked to where his oversized, battered flannel jacket lay draped over the fence post. He shook it out and came behind her, draping it over her shoulders. The weight of it was immediate, still warm from where it had been lying in a rare patch of sun, carrying the scent of sawdust, horse, and his plain soap.
She froze, then slowly pushed her arms through the sleeves. The hem hung past her hips, the cuffs swallowing her hands. The warmth was a profound, almost shocking relief. “Thanks,” she muttered, feeling suddenly twelve years old.
He gave a single nod, his eyes scanning her face. A flicker of something—concern, maybe—passed through them before he turned back to the woodpile. “Stack the smaller pieces. Kindling box is by the door.”
She was hauling a basket of splintered kindling toward the porch when the screen door shrieked open.
The sound was a nail down a blackboard. Cass looked up.
Her mother stood on the top step, backlit by the yellow kitchen light, a dish towel clenched in one fist. Her eyes, usually soft with a permanent apology, were sharp as flint. They went from Cass’s face to the enormous flannel jacket enveloping her frame, then to Wade, who had straightened up, ax in hand.
The silence lasted three heartbeats. Long enough for Cass to see the calculation, the jump to a conclusion, the fear that curdled into outrage.
“Cassidy Ann McAllister.”
Her full name. Spat like a curse. Cass hadn’t heard that tone since she was a teenager, caught sneaking in after midnight.
“Inside. Now.” Martha’s voice was low, trembling with a fury that was somehow more terrifying than her father’s bellows.
“I’m just stacking the—”
“I don’t care what you’re just doing!” The veneer of quiet Martha shattered. She stormed down the steps, her house shoes slapping on the wood. She grabbed Cass’s arm above the elbow, her nails digging through the thick flannel. “You take that off. You take it off right now and you give it back.”
“Mama, you’re hurting me.”
“You think this is hurt? You have no idea.” Martha’s face was inches from hers, her breath smelling of coffee and bitter anxiety. “You strut around here in another man’s clothes, in front of God and everyone, and you’re too stupid to see what it looks like? What it is?”
Wade took a step forward. “Martha.”
“You stay out of this!” she snapped without looking at him, her gaze locked on Cass. “This is family. You are help. You remember that.” She turned the full force of her glare back on Cass, her voice dropping to a venomous hiss. “Your father is in that house. He lost near a thousand dollars at that fair. His pride is in ribbons. And you’re out here playing house with the hired hand? Are you trying to get him killed?”
The question hung in the cold air, absurd and deadly serious. Cass felt the world tilt. It wasn’t about propriety. It was about preempting a storm. Her mother wasn’t angry about a jacket; she was terrified of the explosion that might follow if Robert saw it, if he let his own shame twist into a different, more familiar kind of rage.
“Nothing is happening,” Cass said, her own voice tight. “I was cold. He loaned me a coat. That’s all.”
“That’s not all!” Martha’s whisper was frayed. “In this town, with these people, it’s a billboard. I see the way you look at each other. You think I’m blind? You think he won’t see it?” She finally released Cass’s arm, pointing a shaking finger toward the house. “You take that off, you finish your work, and you come inside and you be invisible. You hear me? You make yourself small. That’s how we survive.”
The words, the strategy of a lifetime, laid bare. Make yourself small. Cass looked at her mother—really looked. She saw the deep lines of swallowed anger around her mouth, the permanent slump of her shoulders, the eyes that had learned to see everything and acknowledge nothing. This was the woman who had bandaged her scrapes and then quietly closed the door when the shouting started. Love and betrayal, woven into a single, fraying thread.
Cass slowly unbuttoned the large flannel jacket. The cold rushed back in, sharper than before. She folded it, the action deliberate, and walked past her mother to where Wade stood. She held it out.
He took it, his jaw a hard line. His eyes asked a silent question.
She gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shake of her head. Not now.
She turned back to the kindling basket, her body humming with a new kind of cold, one that came from the inside. She felt her mother watching her for another long moment before the screen door squeaked and slammed shut.
The silence that followed was thick. Wade pulled his jacket back on. He didn’t resume chopping. He just stood there, watching her stack the small sticks with robotic precision.
“She’s wrong, you know,” he said finally, his voice quiet. “About surviving.”
Cass didn’t look up. “Is she? What’s your alternative? You saw what he did over a bad bet. What do you think he’d do over this?” She gestured between them, a vague, desperate motion.
“I’m not scared of your father, Cass.”
“Well, maybe I am!” The words burst out, louder than she intended. She dropped a handful of kindling, the sticks clattering. “And maybe I’m scared for you. Maybe I’m scared that… that this…” She couldn’t finish. This fragile, impossible thing. “Maybe it’s just another thing I ruin.”
He crossed the distance between them in two strides. He didn’t touch her. He just stood close enough that she had to look up at him. “You listen to me. You are not your mother. You don’t have to make yourself small. Not for him. Not for her. Not for this whole damned town.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is.” He said it with a conviction that felt like a physical force. “You get a job. You save money. You leave. The same thing you did before, but this time you don’t go empty. You go with a plan.”
“A job?” A hollow laugh escaped her. “Doing what? The diner won’t hire me. Brenda at the post office still calls me ‘the little traitor’ to my face. My degree might as well be written in Sanskrit for all the good it does here.”
“Then use it,” he said, relentless. “You write. You told me you wrote in New York. So write here.”
“About what?” she whispered, the anguish raw. “About the glorious vista of cow manure? The thrilling social scene at the feed store?”
“About the truth,” he said, his voice dropping. “About the fair. About the numbers in his ledger that don’t add up. About whatever it is you’re afraid to put on paper.”
She stared at him, a cold thrill of fear shooting through her. He knew. He’d always known. About the ledger she’d found, the secret debts. He was telling her to weaponize it.
“That’s not writing,” she said. “That’s a declaration of war.”
“Maybe it’s time for one.” He held her gaze, unwavering. “But start smaller. Write something for the County Clarion. Old Man Higgins prints anything that fills space. A human-interest piece. History of the fairgrounds. I don’t care. Get your name in print. Get twenty dollars. It’s a start.”
It was a thread, thin but tangible. A way to use the very thing this town scorned her for. The idea took root, a tiny, stubborn shoot in frozen ground.
Inside, the house was a tomb. Her father was in his recliner, the local news buzzing on the TV, a beer can sweating on the side table. He didn’t look at her. Her mother was at the sink, scrubbing a pot with furious, silent energy.
Cass went straight upstairs to her room. She closed the door and leaned against it. The confrontation on the porch replayed in her mind, her mother’s terrified eyes, Wade’s defiant ones. Make yourself small. You go with a plan.
She walked to her desk, a childish thing painted white years ago. She pulled open a drawer and took out a fresh notebook, one she’d bought at the drugstore with her last few dollars, hoping for inspiration that never came. She opened it to the first blank page.
She stared at the lines. Then, she picked up a pen.
She didn’t write about New York. She didn’t write a story. She wrote a list. Not of chores or debts, but of facts. Ledger: bottom desk drawer, false back. Blue notebook. Veterinary bills from ’89 never paid to Dr. Evans. Second mortgage taken ’91, from First Ag. Still active. Fair payout: $950 lost. Owed to…?
Her handwriting was steady. It was a start. It was a map of the battlefield. Downstairs, a chair scraped, and her father’s heavy footsteps crossed the floor. She heard the fridge open, the crack of another can.
Cass kept writing, the sound of her pen the only rebellion in the quiet house.
Cass kept writing, the sound of her pen the only rebellion in the quiet house. The list grew, a cryptic catalog of her father’s failures, until her hand cramped and the windows turned black. She slept fitfully, the notebook hidden under her mattress like contraband.
The next morning was colder, the sky a sheet of dull iron. Robert was already gone, likely to the diner to nurse his pride with other men who’d lost money. Martha moved through the kitchen like a ghost, not speaking, placing a bowl of oatmeal on the table for Cass before turning back to the sink.
Cass ate in silence, then pulled on her only sweater over a long-sleeved t-shirt. Two layers. They did little against the determined wind as she trudged out to the south field where Wade was repairing a section of fence the bull had tested. He had a coil of barbed wire over his shoulder and a pair of heavy-duty pliers in his hand.
“Need a third hand?” she asked, her breath frosting.
He glanced at her layers, a frown flickering across his face. “Hold this post steady.” He’d already set the new cedar post in the hole. She braced it while he shoveled the packed dirt and gravel back around its base, his movements efficient. They worked in a companionable quiet for a while, the only sounds their breathing and the scrape of metal on stone.
“I wrote something last night,” she said finally, the words feeling too loud for the vast, empty field.
“Yeah?” He didn’t look up, tightening a bracket.
“Not a story. A list. Of… things. About the farm.” She tested the words. “You were right. It felt like starting.”
“Good.” He snipped a length of wire. “That’s the hard part. The starting.”
“I was thinking about what you said. The County Clarion.” She adjusted her grip on the cold post. “I could maybe write about the history of that old theater on Main. It’s boarded up now. Higgins might go for that.”
“He might.” Wade strung the wire, pulling it taut with a satisfying zing. “You should ask him. Today.”
The simplicity of his faith was both comforting and terrifying. “Just walk in and ask for a job? He’ll laugh me out of the office.”
“So let him laugh.” Wade finally looked at her, his eyes grey like the morning. “Then you write it anyway and slide it under his door. He’ll print it. He’s desperate for copy.”
She managed a small smile. “You have a lot of answers today.”
“Only for you.” He turned back to the fence, but the air between them had shifted, warmed slightly. “You’ll get out of here, Cass. You’ll write your way out. Get a job at a real paper somewhere with trees that aren’t covered in dust. An apartment with heat that doesn’t rattle.”
She held the next post for him, listening. His words painted a faint, hopeful sketch. She could see it, almost. A small desk, a city street outside a window, the weight of a real byline.
“It sounds… quiet,” she said.
“Quiet’s good. Quiet means safe.” He drove a staple home with two sharp blows. “You can build a life in the quiet.”
She nodded, watching his profile as he worked. The future he described had shape, color. But as the picture clarified in her mind, she realized a central figure was missing. The person who knew about ledgers and fairground brawls and the way a hill looks at sunset. The person beside her right now.
An awkward laugh bubbled out of her. “But of course you’ll be there too, right? I mean, you’re giving the tour. You have to at least visit.”
He went very still. The pliers hung motionless in his grip. He stared at the horizon where the fence line vanished into a copse of bare trees. The seconds stretched, filled only by the whipping wind.
Her smile died. “Wade?”
He swallowed, a hard movement in his throat. “My uncle’s worse. The home called. I need to go to Lubbock. Soon.”
“Okay,” she said slowly, a coldness seeping into her that had nothing to do with the weather. “So you’ll go. And then you’ll come back. Or… or I’ll meet you somewhere. After I get settled.” The plan, their fledgling plan, felt like it was tearing at the edges.
He finally looked at her, and his eyes were full of a distance she couldn’t bridge. “Cass…”
The unspoken word hung in the air. No.
Unless… you don’t plan to be there in the future. She didn’t say it aloud this time. She just took a step back, releasing the post she’d been holding. The space between them widened from inches to a chasm.
She turned away from him, her vision blurring. She blinked rapidly, focusing on the bleak, brown landscape. She was a grown woman. She would not let him see her cry over a presumption, over a hope she’d knitted together from his few quiet kindnesses.
“Cass, wait.” His boots crunched on the gravel behind her.
“Leave me alone.” The words were flat, final. She wrapped her arms around herself, the two layers of cotton laughably thin, and started walking back toward the house. Each step was an effort, as if the field had turned to mud.
He didn’t follow. She could feel him standing there, a still point in the empty field, watching her go. The truth was a stone in her gut. He saw a future for her, a clean one. He just didn’t see himself in it. Maybe, after everything he’d told her on that hill, he simply didn’t believe he deserved to be.
Maybe, after everything he’d told her on that hill, he simply didn’t believe he deserved to be.
The thought was a physical ache, a hollowed-out place beneath her ribs that the wind whistled straight through. She didn’t go back to the house. She walked past it, down the gravel drive toward the county road, her mind a white noise of static. The cold was a blunt fact now, seeping into her bones, but she welcomed its numbness. It was better than feeling the careful, fragile thing she’d been building inside herself splinter apart.
Cars didn’t pass. The world was stripped down to grey fields, grey sky, and the crunch of her own footsteps. She walked for an hour, until her toes were frozen and the lights of the town hazed the horizon. Then she turned back. The farm looked small from a distance, a lonely cluster of shapes huddled against the immense land. A prison, a refuge, a failed inheritance. It was all those things.
By the time she reached her porch, the sky was deepening to charcoal. Warm, yellow light spilled from the kitchen window. She could see the shadow of her mother moving behind the glass. The normalcy of it was a mockery.
She ate dinner in silence that night. Meatloaf, peas, mashed potatoes from a box. Robert grumbled about the price of diesel. Martha asked if the south fence was secure. Cass said yes. The words tasted like ash. She helped wash the dishes, the hot water stinging her cracked knuckles, then pleaded a headache and escaped upstairs.
But she didn’t go to her room. She stood at the end of the dark hallway, listening. The rumble of the television, the clink of her father’s bottle against glass. Her mother’s soft footsteps on the linoleum. She waited until the patterns of the house settled into the rhythm of night.
Then she moved.
The door to the attic stairs was a narrow, painted-over thing beside the linen closet. It stuck, as it always had. She put her shoulder into it and shoved, the groan of wood muted by the television’s drone. The staircase beyond was pitch black, steep as a ladder. The air smelled of old insulation and dust.
She felt her way up, each step a creaking announcement. At the top, her fingers brushed the unfinished wood of the door. There, just above the frame on the right, her fingers found the ledge. It was gritty with years of dust. She felt along it, heart hammering.
Her fingertips touched cold metal.
The key. The same one she’d hidden at sixteen, after her father started locking the attic during one of his paranoid phases. She’d never needed it. She’d just wanted a secret, a way through a locked door. It was still here.
It fit stiffly into the old brass knob. She turned it, the click echoing in the tight space. The door swung inward.
Wade’s room was not her old room. Her frilly curtains and corkboard were gone. It was spartan, clean. A neatly made single bed, a simple dresser, a stack of books on the floor: a veterinary manual, a Louis L’Amour novel, a book on engine repair. His scent was here, that mix of soap and outside. It made her throat tight.
She sat on the edge of the bed, the wool blanket scratchy under her palms. She waited in the dark. The house settled into deeper silence. The television clicked off. Floorboards groaned as her parents moved down the hall to their room. A door closed. More waiting.
Finally, the soft sound of boots on the stairs. The door opened, and his broad shape filled the frame, backlit by the weak hall light. He went still.
“Cass.” Her name was a breath of pure surprise.
“We need to talk.” She kept her voice low, a thread of sound in the dark.
He stepped inside and closed the door softly behind him. He didn’t turn on a light. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“I don’t care.” She stood up, facing the shadow of him. “You don’t get to do this. You don’t get to become this… this huge part of everything and then just quietly vanish. You don’t get to plan my future like you’re some benevolent ghost and then leave yourself out of it.”
“It’s not that simple.”
“It is! You made it simple today. You just said ‘no’ without saying it.” She took a step closer, her eyes adjusting. She could see the tired lines around his eyes, the firm set of his mouth. “I’m not taking no for an answer, Wade. I care about you too much. I… I love you.”
The words hung in the cold attic air, shocking in their baldness. A shocked stillness followed. She hadn’t planned to say it. It just erupted, true and terrifying.
He was utterly motionless. “You love me?” he asked, the gentleness in his rough voice almost her undoing.
She looked away, toward the small window and the night. “Of course I do.” It was a whisper, a confession torn from her.
Then his hands were on her, solid and sure. He grabbed her, pulling her off her feet, swinging her around once in the dark room before his mouth found hers. The kiss wasn’t gentle. It was deep and consuming, an answer and a question all at once. It tasted like the cold outside and a desperate, shared heat. It was relief, and fear, and a joy so sharp it was almost pain.
When they broke apart, they were both breathing raggedly. His forehead rested against hers. “I love you, too.” The words were raw, unfiltered. “God, Cass. I love you so much it scares me.”
He kissed her again, slower this time, his hands cradling her face. Then he led her to the bed. He laid her down, the old springs sighing beneath them. His touch was reverent at first, soft explorations in the dark, mapping the shape of her. His calloused palms were surprisingly tender on her skin.
It was a slow uncovering, a silent conversation. Every shift, every sigh was a new word in a language they were inventing. Then the softness gave way to something more urgent, a current that pulled them both under. The bed began to protest, a rhythmic creak against the wall that sounded like a gunshot in the silent house.
He paused, breathing hard. With a soft, stifled laugh, he reached down and grabbed his pillow, shoving it firmly into the narrow space between the bedframe and the wall. The creak dulled to a muted thump. The practicality of it, the shared secrecy, made her smile against his shoulder.
Afterward, they lay tangled in the narrow bed, the old quilt pulled up to their chins. The air was warm with their breath. He held her left hand, his thumb tracing circles on her palm, carefully avoiding the healing wound.
“I have to go to Lubbock tomorrow,” he said into her hair. “Early. Your dad approved two days. Said he owes me for the fair.”
She stiffened. “Two days.”
“I’ll be back Sunday night.” He brought her hand to his lips, kissing her knuckles. “I promise I will come back to you.” The words were a vow, solid as stone.
She turned to look at him. In the faint light from the window, his face was all solemn lines and certainty. The hollow ache from the field was gone, filled with a new, terrifying fullness. He loved her. He was coming back.
“Okay,” she whispered.
He pulled her closer, tucking her head under his chin. She listened to the steady beat of his heart, a rhythm that promised return, and let herself believe it.