Chapter 15: The First Sunday
The first Sunday morning in the mountains was colder than the rest, with a thin skim of white frost glazing the wooden rails of the porch and the tall wild grasses bending stiffly in the dawn. I woke up wrapped in two heavy wool blankets on the narrow cot in the small back room, listening to the steady, rhythmic scrape of Jax’s hunting knife against a whetstone out on the porch.
I pushed the blankets off, shivering in my flannel pajamas, and walked out into the front room. The iron stove was already roaring, throwing a wave of dry, wood-scented heat across the floorboards. On the small kitchen table, Jax had set out a cast-iron skillet sizzling with thick-cut bacon and a loaf of sourdough bread he must have bought at the mercantile down in town.
Jax looked up as the floorboard creaked under my bare feet. He was wearing his gray thermal shirt, his long hair tied back loosely with a scrap of leather cord, the dark beard trimmed clean around his mouth.
"Morning, kid," he said, turning a strip of bacon with a battered metal fork. "Coffee's hot. Well, chicory stuff for you, black gold for me."
I pulled out my chair and sat down, wrapping my hands around the heavy ceramic mug he slid across the wood. The warmth seeped into my palms, chasing away the mountain chill. Through the small, multi-paned kitchen window, the sunlight was just beginning to hit the highest peaks of the evergreens across the canyon, turning the dark green needles into spears of glittering copper.
"You got church clothes?" Jax asked casually, leaning back against the counter with his own mug.
I shook my head, taking a cautious sip of the bitter, sweet brew. "Just these jeans and my old jacket."
"We'll fix that tomorrow," Jax said, setting his mug down with a soft thud. He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small, folded piece of paper—the very same birth certificate I had pulled out of my jacket at the diner counter a week ago. He laid it flat on the table between us, smoothing out the creases with his thumb.
Then he reached into his vest pocket hanging by the door, retrieved the faded photograph of himself holding me as an infant, and placed it right beside the official seal.
"Official record," Jax said, looking down at the two pieces of paper with a steady, unreadable expression. "And family record. They match now."
I looked from the photograph to his face, seeing the faint lines around his eyes, the heavy ink of the old tattoos fading slightly under his skin, and the quiet, solid weight of his presence across the table. For eight years, that photograph had been just a ghost story my mother told me when the wind howled against the single-pane windows of our trailer. It was a promise of someone who didn't exist, a shadow cast by a man who had vanished into the highway dust.
Now the shadow had sat down at the table, smelled of woodsmoke and coffee, and asked me how I wanted my eggs.
"We need to write Martha a letter," I said, tracing the edge of the photograph with my fingernail. "Tell her we made it."
Jax smiled, a slow, easy movement that finally chased away every remnant of the hard, bitter road we had traveled to get here. He reached across the table, his large, rough hand covering mine completely, pinning the photograph and the birth certificate safely to the wood between us.
"Already wrote it," Jax said softly, nodding toward the envelope propped against the sugar bowl by the window. "Drop it in the box down at the highway intersection when we walk to the bus stop tomorrow morning."
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I looked out the window again, watching a hawk drift lazily across the wide blue expanse of the mountain sky, riding the thermal currents high above the timber line. The road behind us was long gone, buried under miles of pine forest and winding asphalt, but for the first time in my life, I wasn't looking in the rearview mirror. I was looking straight ahead at the trail winding up through the trees, where the sun was burning off the last of the morning frost and the valley opened up wide and green under the clear Montana sky.
"Okay," I said, taking another bite of the crisp bacon. "Let's go."
