CHAPTER 15 #2
He worked the pen in the slow patient geometry of it, approach and retreat, never asking more than the horse could give.
The dust rose gold. Sweat ran down his spine.
He talked the whole time in the low nothing-voice his mother had used on the barn cats, easy now, easy, nobody's going anywhere, you and me got all day, and somewhere in the second hour Diesel let him lay the flat of one hand on the great trembling slope of his shoulder, and stand there, and the horse did not kill him.
He stood with his palm on that hot hide and felt the animal's heart going like a fist on a door, slowing, deciding by degrees that the man might not be a thing that hurt it, and Beck's eyes stung, and he told himself it was the dust.
When he finally stepped back and let the horse go and came out through the gate, his legs were shaking and he was grinning like a fool, and Laney was looking at him over the top rail with an expression he had never once seen her aim at him. Like she was seeing somebody she didn't have on file.
“Where'd you learn that.” It wasn't really a question. Her voice had gone careful, the way it did, he was starting to remember, when something cost her.
“Nowhere. Everywhere.” He braced his forearms on the rail beside her, close, not touching, both of them looking in at the horse instead of at each other.
“Mostly the dumb way. Took me a decade of getting it backwards to figure out you can't make a scared thing trust you by being the biggest thing in the pen.”
“My dad used to say that.” Her voice did something on the last word. “Almost exactly that.”
“I know. He said it to me once. I was about nineteen, just got bucked off trying to muscle a colt, and Tom hauled me out of the dirt and said, son, you gentle a horse by being there longer than its fear can last, not by being bigger than it, and then made me go apologize to the colt.” Beck huffed out something that wasn't quite a laugh. “Took me ten more years to hear it.”
Laney had gone very still. He remembered what stillness meant in her, that the stiller she got the more it was costing her, and he turned his head and saw her green eyes gone bright and wet at the rims, held open against it by main force, vet-calm clamped down over something cracking underneath.
“He never told me he said that to you,” she said.
“It wasn't a big moment for him. Just a Tuesday.” He hesitated. “He was good to me, your dad. Better than mine, some days. I didn't come home when he died and there's no fixing that, I know it, but you should understand it wasn't for lack of loving him. I want you to at least have that right.”
The stillness held one second. Two. Then she let a hard breath out through her nose, the way she did before a hard truth. “I always thought you didn't come because you couldn't be bothered.”
“I know.”
“That was easier.”
“I know that too.”
She wiped under one eye fast with the heel of her hand and turned it into pushing her hair back, like he wouldn't notice, like he hadn't spent his whole young life learning every weather of her face.
Down in the pen Diesel had dropped his head and was lipping at the dust, a different animal than the one Beck had walked in on.
Look what being there longer than the fear gets you.
And the thought turned over and became something with her name on it, and he had to look away.
---
They ate lunch in the loft because Birdie had sent sandwiches out and because both of them climbed the ladder without a word about why, which was its own kind of confession, the kind made with the feet.
The gold bars of light had swung around to the west wall.
The warm hay-dust dark held them again, that high private hush, the day's heat pooled under the roof so thick you could lean on it.
They sat with their backs against the feed stack, a careful foot of charged air between them, and ate Birdie's roast beef and didn't talk much, and the not-talking was easy in a way it had no business being.
“I'll tell you a true small thing,” she said suddenly, like this was just another item to log.
“I almost left, after you went. Had an offer in Fort Collins, good money, no ghosts.” She turned the crust of her sandwich over in her fingers.
“I didn't take it because of the horses.
Juniper's dam was carrying then, my dad's whole life was in that line, and I couldn't hand it to a stranger. So I stayed for a pregnant mare.”
A dry, lopsided thing happened to her mouth. “Wound up rooting myself here out of pure stubbornness, too mulish to abandon a horse. Felt some kind of way about that, the day you came back.”
It was the most she'd ever handed him. He held it carefully, like a thing that could bolt.
“I'll trade you one,” he said. “I tracked the breeding line every year I was away.
Whenever Red Mesa horses sold at the big auctions I'd find the catalog.
Just to see the names, see Tom's program, your program, still running.” He turned the medal cord between two fingers.
“Told myself it was about the horses. Truth is, I wanted to know you were all right out here without me. Wanted it and was scared of it. Both.”
She held loose this time, the vet-calm nowhere in sight, and just looked at him, openly, the freckles and the wet-bright eyes and the loose copper hair full of chaff, and the foot of air between them got very loud.
And it was right there, in the warm hay-dust dark where they used to hide, with her looking at him like that, that the thing he'd carried for ten years climbed all the way up his throat and stood behind his teeth.
I bought you a ring.
The whole sentence was right there. He could feel the shape of it.
I bought you a ring, Laney, the week before it all came apart, it's been in a sock in the bottom of my gear bag for ten years and I could no more throw it out than I could throw out my own hand, and I was going to ask you on the porch in front of Eleanor's roses, and I have regretted exactly one thing every day of ten years and it is not the bull that wrecked my shoulder, it is the porch I never stood you on.
One breath and he could have laid it down between them on the hay.
He shut his teeth on it.
Not because he didn't want to. God, he wanted to.
But she'd just handed him something small and hard-won, and the ring wasn't small.
The ring was the whole thing — ten years and a bridge and a note left on a pillow — and if he dumped all of that into the warm gold quiet of this loft right now, between two sandwiches, he'd be doing it for himself, to set down the weight, to take.