13. Mandy #3
The cabin was one dark room, twelve feet by sixteen.
A cast-iron stove stood against the east wall beside a bucket of kindling and a small stack of larger wood.
There was a pine table with two chairs, a galvanized basin on a nail, one south-facing window graying with snow, and a low bed under a heavy wool Pendleton faded to the smoke color of forty winters.
A lantern sat on a shelf. Three mismatched coffee cups hung above the basin.
Another shelf held canned food. A wooden crate beside the stove contained kindling, a folded canvas tarp, and a coil of wire.
The rough-cut floorboards matched the walls but had been worn smooth by boots.
She saw the bed the moment she entered. One narrow mattress against the north wall, a smoke-colored Pendleton folded across it. She left the fact alone for the moment.
Andrew shut the door behind her. He pulled the bar across. The bar was new, paler wood than the rest, and dropped into iron brackets on either side that weren’t new.
He went to the stove without looking at her.
He laid the fire. Kindling in a teepee, two sheets of crumpled newsprint from a tin under the wood box, a match from a small tin in his coat pocket, the stove door shut with the draft open.
The fire took. The iron threw its first heat after twenty seconds, and Mandy stood by the door with her gloves still on and watched the back of him over the stove and tried to count how many breaths she’d been holding since she came in.
She’d been holding more than she could count.
She pulled her gloves off and dropped them on the back of one of the chairs.
Got her hat off. The hat was wet. She set it on top of the gloves.
She shrugged out of the Carhartt and hung it on a peg by the door, wet on the shoulders.
Under it she was in the long-sleeved wool of his oversized flannel, which was dry.
She felt her face come back. Her left ear came back.
Her right hand came back badly, an ache where the numbness had been, and she put both hands inside her armpits and stood there in the firelight of a fire that wasn’t yet a fire, holding the cold she’d brought in against the heat that was starting.
Andrew turned from the stove, and she turned from the door, and they looked at each other.
The wind was on the south window in a long flat push, and the snow on the south window had gone all the way over to white and was sliding sideways.
The fire in the stove was orange and small and threw no light beyond a yard of itself.
Mandy had been in expensive rooms her whole life, and she’d been in beautiful rooms, and she’d been in rooms where everything in them had cost more than some people made in a year, and she hadn’t, in any of them, been the only woman in the room with the only man in the room with the door barred and no road home and a fire going.
He gave her the time she needed, then turned toward the stove. He went to the bed and pulled the Pendleton off and folded it once in his hands. He went to the table, pulled one of the two chairs an inch back and sat in it carefully. He set the folded Pendleton in his lap. He looked at the stove.
“You take the bed,” he said.
She took the smallest breath in her life.
“Andrew.”
“You take the bed. I’ll sit up. We’re here till the wind drops, and it won’t drop tonight, and you haven’t slept and I haven’t slept and one of us has to be functional in the morning to ride out and check the herd, and that one is going to be you, because the bed is going to be you.”
“I’m not taking the bed.”
“You’re taking the bed.”
“Andrew. There’s a bed and a chair. We are not putting you in the chair while I take the bed. I will set the cabin on fire before I let that happen and I have no matches, so I don’t know how I’m going to manage it, but I will.”
He almost smiled. It didn’t quite reach his mouth. It happened somewhere behind it.
“Mandy.”
“Andrew.”
His eyes had gone gray-blue with attention. Outside, the wind shuddered against the south wall. Inside, neither of them pretended anymore.
“All right,” he said. “Not the chair.”
“No.”
“What are you proposing?”
“I’m proposing we stop pretending the bed is the dangerous part. You don’t sit in a wooden chair three feet away while I pretend to sleep, and I don’t let you treat me like a sack of grain you’re sheltering from the rain.”
His attention stayed on her.
“All right,” he said.
He didn’t say it to please her. He said it because he’d decided it.
He stood up. He put the Pendleton back on the bed.
He went to the wood box and got two of the bigger pieces and put them in the stove, slow, and shut the door, and turned the damper a quarter down.
He sat back down in the chair on the side of the table by the door.
“I’m still sitting up till the room warms,” he said. “It’s not warm. You take the bed till it warms. When it’s warm I’ll lie down and we’ll see what we see.”
“All right.”
“You hungry?”
“I could eat that can with the lid on.”
He almost smiled the second time. Something steadier remained when the smile failed to surface. He’d been doing that with her for two weeks. He’d been doing that with her. She’d been pretending not to notice. Tonight she noticed.
He got up to find them something to eat.
She sat on the edge of the bed in his oversized flannel and too-big boots while he opened a can with the knife from his coat.
Andrew set the open can on the table between them. Outside, snow erased the trail home.