"My tent," she said with sudden decisiveness, and marched out the back door.
Clate rolled up off his chair and followed her out. It was dark and chilly, a stiff breeze kicking up. He admired the purposeful-ness of her walk as she headed across the terrace and down onto his lawn. A woman with a plan. After a day like hers, he'd have sunk into the nearest bed by now, never mind who else had slept under the same roof in the past two centuries. But she was off to pitch a tent.
"Where are you going to pitch this tent?" he asked, coming up beside her. He didn't relish the idea of spending the night in a tent, but he'd do it. Not that she planned to invite him. But he didn't plan to wait for an invitation, either. She wasn't spending the night out here alone.
"Outside my studio. It's far enough from the house it shouldn't smell there, and the ground's nice and even. I don't think it'll rain." She glanced up at the sky as if to check, then marched on toward the break in the hedge. "And there aren't any rabid animals around."
"Always a positive."
She ducked through the hedges, and he went right after her. He supposed she could accuse him of hovering. He didn't care. He planned to hover until whoever had said she was finished this afternoon on the phone was in the custody of Ernie-the-police-chief.
The stars were just coming out, the moon almost full. Piper stumbled several times on the way up to her studio, but never fell. The tent was musty and old, up on a high shelf in her studio closet. They got it down and laid it out on the ground just outside the little shed she'd fixed up, painted, and converted into her studio. He imagined her doing it, working hard, planning, arguing, dreaming.
"I suppose you're not planning to let me sleep out here alone," she said, hands on hips, breathing hard.
He gave her a steady look. "I don't think that's what you want, Piper."
"Would it matter?"
"Not in this case, no."
A small smile. "If I had a dog, it might be different."
He grinned back at her. "It'd have to be a big dog."
She stood back to calculate which spike and pole went where, and Clate could feel the peace settle between them. It was decided. He would stay—which she knew already had been decided—but she wouldn't argue. She'd had a bad scare today, and her first impulse, Clate knew, was to assert her independence. The lingering effect, he expected, of losing a mother at two and having a father and two older brothers raise her.
Familiar with the tent's design, Clate started in to work. "I used to sleep in a tent a lot like this when I first came to Nashville. I'd pitch it way out in Percy Warner Park. I'd get kicked out periodically, go out on the river, get kicked out there. Finally, I saved up enough for a little apartment on West End." He reached for a spike, glinting in the silvery light. He hadn't talked about those early days in Nashville in a long, long time. "Irma Bryar gave that tent to me. I think I still have it somewhere."
Piper was quiet next to him. "Irma Bryar. She's the woman who died."
"That's right. She took me under her wing when I was eleven and on the road to hell." He stopped, glanced up at her. Could she ever imagine, ever understand? "My parents married young. My mother was self-destructive, and my father was a mean drunk. They couldn't take responsibility for themselves much less a kid. Irma Bryar helped me take responsibility for myself. When my mother died in a fall when she was drunk one night, I left home."
Piper's face had gone deathly pale against the night sky. "I'm so sorry."
When he saw her expression, he regretted having said anything. She had enough of her own problems.
"What about your father?" she asked quietly. "Is he still alive?"
His shoulders ached, and the wind suddenly seemed colder. "He's tried to see me a couple of times. Supposedly he's been sober twelve years and has a new wife, two kids. A boy and a girl. Seven and nine years old. God, I hope he can do better by them than he did me. For their sake. I've accepted my own past. It was what it was."
But Piper wasn't interested in his past. "You mean you have a brother and sister you've never seen?" He could hear the shock in her voice, the absolute certainty of what she would do. She shook her head. "I couldn't stand it. I'd have to see them."