Chapter 4: Sunday Supper

Rance's eyes stayed gold until Coy's truck was out of the lot.

Then his shoulders dropped and they went dark again.

"We're not going," I said.

"We're going."

"Rance, I lived under that roof for five years. I know what Noreen does to people at that table."

"So do I. My sister eats there every night." He opened the truck door for me. "She doesn't get to sit through it alone."

Gran refused to come.

"I buried my son two years ago," she said from her rocker. "I'm not eating that woman's pot roast."

She looked at me over her glasses.

"Wear something that isn't his shirt."

The Jessup dining room seated thirty.

It had elk antlers over the fireplace and a long table of polished pine that I used to oil every spring on my knees.

Noreen sat at the head in a cream suede jacket and pearls.

Coy sat at her right hand. Kacey sat beside him in a blue dress buttoned to her chin, with her napkin twisted into a rope in her lap.

At the foot of the table, the old Alpha sat in his wheelchair.

His right side had gone slack since the stroke. His left hand rested on a board of printed letters strapped to his tray.

He watched me come in.

"Rance," Noreen said. "So glad. Sit by your sister."

Then she looked at me.

"Shiloh usually sits by the kitchen door."

The whole table went quiet.

Twenty wolves of the Jessup inner pack were at that table, and every one of them knew what that chair meant.

For five years I'd sat on the corner by the swinging door, so I could get up and clear.

Rance pulled out the chair next to his and held it.

"Not tonight," he said.

I sat.

He sat down beside me and laid his hand on my knee under the table.

He didn't look at me when he did it.

He just reached for the potatoes with his other hand and left it there, warm and heavy through my jeans.

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