How to Say I Do

How to Say I Do TAL BAUER All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, Tal Bauer, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. First Edition 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Copyright © 2023 Tal Bauer Edited by Morgan Macedo, Glasswing Editing Cover Art by Angela Haddon Book Cover Design © Copyright 2023 Published in 2023 by Tal Bauer United States of America Contents 1. Wyatt 2. Noël 3. Noël 4. Noël 5. Wyatt 6. Wyatt 7. Noël 8. Noël 9. Wyatt 10. Noël 11. Wyatt 12. Noël 13. Wyatt 14. Noël 15. Noël 16. Wyatt 17. Wyatt 18. Wyatt 19. Noël 20. Noël 21. Noël 22. Noël 23. Noël 24. Wyatt 25. Wyatt 26. Noël 27. Noël 28. Noël Acknowledgments About the Author Also by Tal Bauer CHAPTER 1 Wyatt I am my father’s son. My father pinned a deputy sheriff badge on his chest the morning of his nineteenth birthday, and, for twenty-two years, he kept our little corner of Nowhere, Texas, safe and sound. He had a reliable streak that stretched as far as the fourteen-hour haul it took to drive from one Texas border to the other. In Texas, you don’t describe distance in miles. You talk in hours. And when you stand up and say you’re a man people can rely on, well. They do. The trust everyone put in my dad flowed like blood rivers running through the Earth. My father's legacy lived in every part of me. I inherited his powerfully fierce need to help others, along with that everlasting McKinley dependability, and a tenaciousness that rose out of the marrow of my bones. I was four years old when he taught me how to hold a shotgun and aim for a line of cans he’d set up on our back fence. And right before my fifth birthday, I started sneaking out of bed to watch from the upstairs landing whenever someone came pounding on our door after midnight. Those knocks meant trouble, and nighttime strangers bringing their anger to our home. Six months later, after Dad caught me on the landing one night, he handed me his shotgun when one of those after-dark knocks came, and he positioned me so I had a clear-as-day view of him standing on our porch. My little heart was beating as fast as a mourning dove’s, but I kept that barrel level and the stock hard up against the meat of my scrawny shoulder, my eyes peeled on the two figures discussing matters beneath the melted-butter glow of our porch light. Even when things began with fists banging on our door and bellowed curses I wasn’t supposed to repeat, they always ended with a handshake. My father knew how to take care of people. He took care of me after those shotgun midnights, too, ruffling my hair when he tucked me back into bed and calling me his “chief deputy” and my mother and baby brother’s protector. I basked under his praise. Every time we had a school assignment that asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up, I always, always, said, “I want to be my daddy.” If I could have, I would have ditched first grade and ridden around with him in his sheriff’s truck, helping people all day long. By six, I knew how to change a tire. Dad used to let me answer his radio sometimes, sitting me on his knee as I called out “ten-four” in my little boy lisp. That radio was the background soundtrack to my childhood, humming and crackling a never-ending white noise interspersed with dispatcher calls and ten-codes and lonely late-night voices. When they found my father's body, he was curled around my mother, and his charred bones were mixed with hers so thoroughly that it took a forensic anthropologist two days to sort out who was who. We buried them in the same coffin anyway. Responsible. I am responsible, people say. It took me a long time to accept only a few definitions and synonyms of that word, and disavow the guilt that ran my soul raw and ragged. So: I am my father’s son. I am the best of him left on this Earth. Which is why I, apparently, was the only man who was going to do a damn thing about what we were all watching unfold not ten feet away. Every one of us, all strangers, were tucked into this little hole-in-the-wall airport bar in Dallas/Fort Worth International, and it was two o’clock in the afternoon. The man we were all watching, like he was a prize bull or a rodeo clown, was bellied up to the bar with a line of empty shot glasses in front of him. He was tall and slender, with fine-boned features that called to mind aristocracies and royal lineages. He was my type, too, if I let myself think about things like that. He would have caught my attention no matter what. My gaze had locked onto him as soon as my boots crossed over the threshold of this bar, and for the past twenty minutes, an electric restlessness had built inside of me, coming out through my jiggering heel and my fingers tap-tap-tapping. He was wearing full dress tails: a tuxedo that smelled like big money, a satin vest, and a paisley puff tie with the pearl pin, all yanked to the right, the loose knot wickedly askew. His hair was worse than disheveled, like he’d put both hands up in it and yanked. His eyes were hidden by mirrored aviators, the expensive kind that weren’t $7.99 from RaceTrac. The bartender had left behind a bottle of Grey Goose Vodka three shots ago, and now