14. Andrew
Andrew
He opened the peaches with the knife from his coat, bent the lid back with his thumb, and carried the can to the table. The beans warmed against the side of the stove.
“Peaches,” he said.
“I heard the can.”
“There’s beans. They need a minute.”
“I can wait on the beans.”
He turned the sharp edge away from her and pushed the can across the boards. A fork lived somewhere in the crate by the stove. He left it there.
Mandy reached in and took a slice. Syrup ran over her fingers to her wrist. She caught it with her mouth and looked at him while she did it.
The fire had begun to push the cold out of the room. Iron ticked. Snow moved sideways over the south window, whitening the last of the light. He had not lit the lantern. The stove gave them enough to see by.
She pushed the peaches back. He took one.
They ate with their hands, passing the can across the corner of the table.
He had eaten alone in this room more times than he could count.
The cabin had never required anything of him beyond wood, a match, and the good sense to leave before the weather closed.
Tonight every board seemed to know there were two people in it.
The beans were hot enough. He wrapped the can in a rag and brought it over. The spoon turned up where it always did, beneath the oats in the crate, and they shared that too.
When the beans were gone, Mandy set the spoon in the empty can and tucked her hands under her arms.
“You’re cold.”
“My hands are coming back.”
“That hurts.”
“You knew that and took me up there anyway.”
“I told you to keep them moving.”
“You did.” She looked at him over the table. “You told me a lot of things today, and every one of them was right.”
He reached into the inside pocket of his coat and took out the flask. The steel had gone gray at the corners from years against his ribs. He unscrewed the cap and held it out.
“For your hands.”
She drank. Her eyes watered. She handed it back without coughing.
“That isn’t bourbon.”
“No.”
“What is it?”
“Rye. A man in Salida makes it.”
“And you hide it in your coat.”
“I buy it by the case and tell no one.”
“Why?”
“Then the county would want it.”
“You own a whole case.”
“I intend to keep owning it.”
Her mouth moved at one corner. He drank and capped the flask.
“Don’t finish it,” he said. “You’ll be useless at five.”
“I’m always useless at five. By five-ten I’m functional.”
“You’ve been misrepresenting yourself.”
“That’s rich coming from you.”
The words landed without force. She had not aimed them hard. They were true anyway.
He set the flask on the table. The small chain hung over the edge.
The room warmed around them. Meltwater darkened the shoulders of their coats by the door. Mandy’s hat steamed faintly from the chair back. His own gloves lay beside hers, the leather close enough to touch.
He had told her he would sit up until the room warmed. The room was warm now.
He got up and banked the fire. Two larger pieces, laid carefully. Damper down a quarter. Stove door shut on a steady orange.
Behind him, the bed ropes creaked.
His hand remained on the stove latch a moment longer.
The last time he had slept in that bed had been the winter after Caroline.
He had ridden up in February with no cattle to check and no fence needing repair.
Three nights under the Pendleton, listening to cold find every seam in the cabin, because the house below still held the shape of a woman who had known his accounts better than she had known him.
He had come down on the fourth morning and never slept there again.
Mandy had moved to the wall side. The Pendleton lay folded lengthwise between them, the boundary they had agreed on while both of them understood it was theater.
She lay on her side with her head on one arm, watching him.
He took off his boots and lay down on the outside edge. The narrow mattress complained under his weight. He folded his hands over his chest and looked at the ceiling boards.
“Andrew.”
“Yes.”
“Are you planning to lie there all night like a body awaiting identification?”
“That was close to the arrangement.”
“The arrangement was a bed. You’re treating it as a sentence.”
He turned his head.
Firelight moved over her face. The storm pressed snow against the window and released it. Her hair had come loose from the knot under her hat during the ride. A pale strand crossed her cheek.
“I’m going to say something,” she said. “You’re going to listen all the way through.”
“All right.”
“What happened in the truck was not an accident.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t the champagne.”
“I know that too.”
“It wasn’t the dress, though the dress did excellent work.”
His mouth moved before he could stop it.
She saw. “There you are.”
“Mandy.”
“I wanted you before tonight. Before the lodge. Before Greg Halloran nearly announced your tax bracket beside a Charlie Russell print.”
Andrew went still.
She watched it happen and did not soften what came next.
“You did the same thing in the truck. You touched me until I couldn’t remember my own name, then I said Stillwater Land and Cattle and you left the cab without moving an inch.”
“I was still there.”
“Your body was.”
The fire shifted in the stove.
She put her hand on the Pendleton between them. “I don’t care how much the name is worth.”
“You don’t know how much it is.”
“That’s true.”
He looked at her.
“I’m not pretending ignorance makes me noble,” she said. “I know enough. The room told me you are not the man I thought you were on the first morning.”
His chest tightened.
“The broke part,” she said. “Only the broke part.”
He let out a breath.
“You’re still the man who warmed my feet slowly because hot water would hurt them.
You’re the man who checked my lock and tried to make it mean nothing.
You’re the man who put me on the bad flank today because you trusted me to hold it.
” Her fingers pressed into the wool. “The room didn’t tell me any of that. I learned it here.”
He could have told her then. The figure. The land. The companies held behind Stillwater’s plain name. The money moved by people she had never seen in offices she did not know existed.
The words rose and stopped behind his teeth.
Mandy saw that too.
“I’m not asking for the ledger tonight,” she said. “I’m asking you to stop looking at me and seeing a woman who hasn’t been in this room for twenty years.”
“Caroline.”
“Yes.” She did not hesitate over the name. “Caroline.”
“You don’t know what she did.”
“You told me enough.”
“No.” He looked back at the ceiling. “I told you she existed.”
Mandy waited.
He had carried the rest for two decades because the telling had always seemed indistinguishable from handing someone a knife and indicating the soft place.
The cabin held no one else.
“She knew the number before she knew me,” he said. “I learned that afterward.”
Mandy stayed quiet.
“I told her what I owned because she was my wife and I believed a man told his wife the thing he had built. A year later I found a file in the office. Every parcel. Every account. Every lawyer. What she expected to receive if she left under different circumstances.”
The old room came back with its dust and winter light, the thumb drive warm from the machine.
“She had been building the file while I was building the life.”
Mandy’s hand remained on the blanket.
“I asked her to leave,” he said. “Paid what it took to keep the leaving quiet. After that, I stopped letting the number into the room.”
“And stopped letting anyone else in with it.”
“Yes.”
She was silent long enough that he finally turned his head.
Her expression held no pity. He had expected pity more than anger. The absence of it unsettled him.
“I’m sorry she did that to you,” she said. “I am not going to spend my life answering for it.”
He felt the truth of that low in his body.
“You don’t get to put me through an examination she failed before I arrived,” she continued. “You don’t get to decide I want the money and wait for me to prove you right. If you believe I’m lying, say it. If you don’t, quit punishing me for a woman who is gone.”
“I don’t believe you’re lying.”
“Then what do you believe?”
He looked at the Pendleton between them.
“That I can be wrong again.”
Her face changed. The anger did not disappear, but something warmer moved beneath it.
“Yes,” she said. “You can.”
He almost laughed at the bluntness.
“So can I,” she said. “That’s what happens when two people make choices. There is no contract that removes the possibility.”
“I have contracts that do exactly that.”
“Of course you do.”
“They work.”
“Do they keep your bed warm?”
“No.”
“Do they laugh when you hate your truck?”
“No.”
“Do they ride the bad flank?”
He looked at her.
“No.”
She gripped the Pendleton and pulled it down toward their feet.
The wool scraped over the quilt and fell in a heap at the end of the bed.
Andrew watched it go.
“That blanket didn’t do anything wrong,” he said.
“It was becoming smug.”
She moved closer, stopping before she touched him.
“I’m not asking you to lose control,” she said. “We did that already.”
The memory of the truck rose between them: green silk, the horn, her laughter breaking over his shoulder.
“What are you asking?”
“Choose me while you have it.”
His hands unfolded from his chest.
She gave him room to refuse. That was the unbearable part. She wanted him and left the choice where it belonged.
He turned onto his side.
Her breath caught, small enough that she might have denied it.
Andrew lifted one hand and put it against her face. Warm skin. The faint roughness along her cheek where the wind had worked on it all afternoon.
“Last night,” he said, “I wanted you before I thought.”
“I noticed.”
“Tonight I have thought too much.”
“I noticed that too.”
He brushed the strand of hair from her cheek.
“I still want you.”
“Good.”
She came the last few inches and kissed him.