A gleaming chestnut horse was behind them.

They looked what Izzy said they were.

Happy.

Not like people who needed government cheese.

The picture below was all three in a row: see no evil (a little-girl Addie with the fingers of both hands covering her eyes), hear no evil (Izzy’s mother with her hands over her ears) and speak no evil (Iz with her hand over her mouth). They all had huge smiles on their faces (Izzy’s he could see in her eyes). And that horse was behind them.

He moved to the other two and saw Addie with her mom up top, both of them striking a goofy pose. The three of them together at the bottom. Izzy’s mom in the middle with her arms around her girls’ shoulders, both of them with their arms around their mom’s middle, all of them staring straight at the camera, looking like they were laughing.

That woman was not beaten.

That woman was not broken.

She’d made two precious beings and she was right where she wanted to be, happy as a clam.

He stared at her laughing face and he knew without ever meeting the woman that she left that man to save her daughters. She left that man to give her girls moments like that. She left that man to show them the path of their lives and it wasn’t about things, it was about taking care of yourself and the ones you love, even if that meant sacrificing everything, that everything meaning nothing when you could hold the world right in the curve of your arms.

He’d never seen a more beautiful woman in his life.

Only looking hard did Johnny see the girls’ cheap, plastic sandals. The decals on the front of their tank tops faded from many washings. The at-home haircuts that didn’t really matter since they both had their mom’s thick, long, tawny mane of hair. But still, none of their hair was styled, layered, like Izzy’s was now. Just cut straight at the bottom and healthy.

He stared at Izzy’s sandals and his palms started to itch, his throat started to burn, his gut started to roil.

So he forced his gaze to her face.

Her smile.

Her holding on to her mother.

The pictures were faded, square, small, from an old camera that took an antiquated type of film.

But the frames were top notch.

He took ten steps back and stared at the room.

The fabric on the flowered chair was faded, worn.

The leather of the other chair was beat up, there were scratches everywhere and there was a short split through the leather along the front side, under the arm.

He looked up at the light fixture, which was kickass right there in that room with the tack and those chairs.

But under that veil Izzy threw over it, it was a piece of shit.

Images collided in his brain as the veil was pulled off.

The chandelier in her bedroom had probably once been like that light fixture, except Izzy had made it something else with her flair and her care.

Got a deal on the marble countertops because some lady ordered them and then decided she didn’t want them, she’d said about the marble in her kitchen.

Johnny had no doubt she rocked what she did at work. Her land was worth money. The farmhouse was solid. It had space. Three bedrooms. Two baths and a powder room downstairs. The stables added value. She took care of all of it and a bunch of animals including two horses. You couldn’t have all that without the means to have it.

She’d made it magical using magic.

You just couldn’t know what he now knew or look too close, because once the veil dropped, it all came clear.

He was a guy but he wasn’t dead, blind or stupid so he’d heard of the concept of shabby chic.

Izzy had a master’s hand.

She still made do.

She still surrounded herself with scraps of shit, other people’s castoffs, because it was the best she could do to have what she needed to make herself feel safe and happy.

“That shit ends,” he growled at the picture of her with her mother.

Johnny was rich.

He had six million dollars in checking, savings, property and investments. He also had eight garages with mini-marts that were locally-owned, priced right and had established customer loyalty over three generations, so they turned over a mint.

He’d picked his furniture at the mill and he’d fixed the place up himself, but he picked the furniture through an interior designer that cost a fortune. Her time and the furniture. His dining room table probably cost more than all the furniture on the first floor of Izzy’s house, including the front and back porches.

He lived simple because that was the life his father taught him and his father’s father before had taught his dad.

But if it mattered to him, he got the best.

And Izzy mattered to him. In her, he’d found the best.

So she was fucking going to have the best.

Addie had rallied the night before over pizza then copious beers at Home. She’d gotten loaded.

But with the troubled looks Izzy gave her sister as well as Johnny, he knew she hadn’t unloaded.

Eliza and Adeline Forrester both were still eating shit.

“And that shit has to end,” he said.

He turned on his boot and went up to the house, finding Izzy and Addie on the back porch, having late-morning coffee.

Izzy’s eyes on him were bright, sweet and still troubled.

Addie’s eyes on him were dull and dead.

He collected Brooks, his diaper bag, his lunch that came in jars, his schedule from his mother, and he strapped the boy in the car seat Addie had told him how to secure in the back seat of his truck.

He drove away with both sisters in his rearview and Brooks babbling in his back seat.

And Johnny drove away knowing he was going to shift the life course two sisters had been on.

With one, he knew how that was going to go.

With her sister, he had no clue.

If Izzy Wanted to Go, Absolutely

Johnny

LATE THAT AFTERNOON, after returning to Izzy’s, Johnny stood in her backyard.

And he stared.

There was a long, wide wooden table under a tree. The table was covered with a filmy lace tablecloth. It had three little vases stuffed full of fluffy flowers and four squat glass things filled with little candles intermingled in a line down the middle.

At the end, surrounded by those squat glass things with candles, was a big tin bucket (with a dent in it) that was filled mostly with ice, some water, and in it there were three bottles of wine and six bottles of beer. A lacy-edged napkin dangled off the side. There was a bottle opener and a corkscrew discretely tucked at the back.

The table was surrounded by chairs with ruffled pads on all of them, some wood with their paint chipping off, some miracles of curlicue iron.

When he sat his ass down, he was going for a wooden one.

The tree over the table now had a ton of Christmas lights in its branches with long strings of clear beads with crystals at the ends dangling down from it.

Needless to say, while he was hanging with Brooks, the sisters had not given each other facials.

He felt her come up beside him and looked down at her to see she was carrying a stack of melamine plates that were green with pink flowers all over them, a stack of pink cloth napkins laid on the top.

In that moment there was one thing he was not annoyed about.

She was wearing the dress she’d worn at the festival.

And knowing there was a good possibility he’d be taking it off her that night was the only thing she had going for her right then.

“Where’d that table come from?” he asked.

“The legs unscrew. I keep it in the hay room and pull it out when I want an outdoor party.”

“How heavy is it?”