He Let Them Think She Was His novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Eyes
At the Renner barbecue a stranger brings a two-year-old with Jesse's gray eyes, and Abby learns her birth date is the night she lost their baby. Jesse doesn't deny it, and Abby walks to her truck.
Sixty people were standing on the Renner lawn with paper plates when the dusty green Subaru came up the drive.
It was the first Saturday in May, the branding barbecue, and I was topping off the sweet tea.
Jesse was at the grill with his back to the road.
The car parked crooked across the end of the row.
A thin young woman got out and opened the back door.
She lifted out a little girl in a straw cowboy hat three sizes too big.
Nobody stopped her, because she looked like somebody's cousin carrying a kid.
She walked across the grass and stood at the grill.
"Jesse," she said.
He turned around with the tongs still in his hand.
"Kit," he said. "You can't be here."
I came up beside him with the pitcher, still smiling at the foreman's wife.
"Who's this?" I asked.
The woman looked at me, then at him, and her voice cracked when she answered.
"Ask him whose she is."
The talk on the lawn died from the grill outward.
"If he wants to stop sending money, he can look at her first."
Sending money.
I turned to my husband and waited for him to laugh and say she had the wrong ranch.
He didn't laugh.
The little girl pushed her hat back with both hands.
Her eyes were gray, with a dark ring around the edge of each iris.
They were Jesse's eyes.
I had looked into them at six that morning over a cup of coffee.
She was about two years old, and I had been married to him for ten.
"Jesse?" I said.
He was staring at the child.
He wasn't surprised.
He was afraid.
"All right, folks, that's enough," Ward Renner said behind me.
My father-in-law came around the grill with his big easy walk and a hand already up for the crowd.
"Plates up, everybody. Somebody help the cook with that brisket. Nothing to see here."
Lorna was inside with her feet up, and her doctor had told the whole family no shocks.
Ward steered every head on the lawn away from the porch windows.
Then he reached into his shirt pocket and put a folded envelope in the young woman's hand.
She took it without looking at it.
He said something to her too low for me to hear.
I remember being grateful that he'd had an envelope ready.
"Abby, honey," Ward said, turning to me. "A man's past is a man's past."
"Jesse's a good boy. Let me settle this."
"How old is she?" I asked Kit.
My own voice sounded polite and far away.
"Two in March," Kit said. "March ninth."
I knew that date before she finished saying it.
On March ninth, two years ago, I was five months along in a bed at Sheridan Memorial, losing our third baby.
The nurse held my hand because my husband's phone kept going to voicemail.
Jesse walked in at nine the next morning with dust on his boots.
He said the Cheyenne cattle sale had run late.
I turned to him.
"Where were you on March ninth?"
"Abby." His voice came out rough. "Not here."
"Cheyenne," I said. "You were in Cheyenne."
He didn't answer.
"He wasn't in Cheyenne," Kit said. "He was in Casper, in the delivery room with me. He held my hand the whole time."
Somebody on the lawn dropped a plate.
It hit the grass and nobody picked it up.
I set the pitcher down on the edge of the grill table, very carefully, so I wouldn't throw it.
Then I took my keys out of my back pocket.
"Abby, don't drive like this," Ward said.
"I'll drive how I want."
So I walked to my truck.
Jesse came after me across the lawn, and he caught the door before I could close it.
"Abby, please. Let me explain tonight."
"Is she yours?"
He looked at his boots, then at the girl, then at me.
He said my name again.
He never said she wasn't.
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