4. Her Own Religion
HER OWN RELIGION
SLOANE
The alarm goes at five. I don't hit snooze — never have — just swing my feet to the floor and reach for the clothes I laid out the night before. Shorts. The bra that holds everything where it belongs. A long-sleeve I'll have stripped off and knotted at my waist by the second mile.
I lace the shoes by feel in the dark, double-knotted, broken in but not worn down — I replace them before they ever give me a reason to. Watch on, a glass of water gulped standing at the sink, out the door by five-fifteen.
It isn't discipline. It's need — the way some people can't be a person before coffee. I can't be one before a few miles of empty road and a sky going gray at the edges.
Some mornings the usual loop is enough. Not this one. I came up out of a bad one a little after four — the dream I don't say out loud, the one with the humming in it, the one that has me calling my dad — and a thing like that you don't walk off. You run it off.
So this morning it's the long loop and a mile on top. The extra mile is for the nights like last night — the humming, the dream, the part of me that woke with my hand already on the gun. By the time I'm home it'll have burned off. It always does.
I started the week I came home, ten years ago this spring.
That first month I ran like something was behind me — because for four years inside that fence something always had been, and my body hadn't caught up to the news that I was out.
I ran so I'd never again be the kind of slow that gets a girl caught.
These are the same feet that ran bare and bloody through the sage once, under a shin-length nightgown the compound called modest. I gave them a better job.
Somewhere in the second year it changed on me. It stopped being the thing behind me and became the thing I run toward — the closest thing to church I've kept, and mine alone. It asks nothing of me but that I show up.
Coldwater wakes up around me while I run, and every morning I love it a little for that.
Main Street first, downhill and easy, my breath finding its rhythm.
Rena's got the diner lit; she flips the sign and lifts a hand through the glass without looking, because at this hour there's nobody else it could be.
Mercer Hardware sits dark — my father doesn't open till seven — but the light's on over the back, his coffee already going, an old man who's never once slept past a sunrise he could be useful in.
The water tower catches the first of the sun before anything else in the valley, and goes from gray to gold while I watch.
I lift a hand to Tom Aldridge and his three-legged shepherd, to the Pruitt kid on a paper route three sizes too big for him.
They lift theirs back. Ten years I've been a face on this street at dawn, and there's a safety in that I'll never be able to explain to anyone who didn't have to earn the right to be ordinary.
The road bends past Ed's Auto, and I don't mean to look and I look anyway. There it is in the side lot, nosed to the fence — a big black F-250 under four days of road dust, dead as a stone, waiting on a part out of Casper.
And just like that he's in my head. The cowboy with the tired eyes and the white scar across the back of his hand. Walked into my bar like he already knew where the exits were. Wrapped a hand around the bourbon I poured him and held my eyes instead of lifting it.
I run on. Of course I run on — a man passing through with a dead truck and someplace else to be is not a thing a sensible woman slows down for. I let myself have him the length of the next block, and then I let him go at the corner, the way I'm learning to let things go. By not gripping them.
Past the last houses the town drops away and the whole Wind River Range is just there, snow still high in the gullies, the near peaks going pink at the top.
The road runs dead straight at them for half a mile before it turns, and for that half-mile I have the whole range to run at and the whole sky to do it under, my lungs working and my legs strong beneath me.
That's the part they could never have understood — the ones who taught a girl she belonged to a man. This. Legs that go where I send them. A name nobody gets to take. Three miles of road and a sky the size of God, all of it mine, and free.
I turn at the bend and run home the long way, because I can.
I let myself back in a little after six and throw the locks the way I always do — deadbolt, lock, the dowel down in the slider track. By daylight they're just locks.
The same hands that shook on this bolt at three in the morning set it now without a thought and go put the coffee on. That's the trade I've made with the dark. It gets the small hours. It does not get the rest of my day.
Showered, hair still wet, I walk down to the Daughter to sign for the Mountain Distributing truck, because the Cooper brothers go through half a keg of that amber between them on a Thursday, and I am not the bar that runs dry on a Thursday.
My father's already got the hardware store open down the block, and he comes by while I'm signing for the kegs, the way he comes by most mornings — a coffee from Rena's in each hand, one of them mine, like it's nothing, like he just happened to be carrying a spare.
He doesn't say be careful or watch the road or any of the hundred things that live behind his eyes. He worked out a long time ago that the running is the one thing I do that's only mine, and he gave it to me without ever making me ask for it.
This bar, though — this one we made together. It was a wreck the bank wouldn't look at twice, and we bought it anyway, the two of us, partners on the paper and partners on the ladder.
Tore the rot out side by side. Framed the back wall in one long sawdust afternoon, his end and my end, both our shirts soaked clean through — a man who'd lost his wife and a girl who'd lost herself, building something that would hold weight again.
He calls himself the silent partner and lets the whole town call it mine. But I know exactly who was on the other end of every board.
"Good run?"
"Long loop."
"Showing off." He sets the coffee on the bar and looks around the place the two of us hauled up out of nothing, and lets himself be proud of it where I can see.
"Still can't believe we pulled this off, some mornings," he says.
"Some mornings I can't either."
"Mm." He sips. "Don't let it go to your head."
He finishes the coffee leaning on the bar while I square the delivery against the invoice, because Mountain Distributing shorts me about one case in five and I learned a long time ago to count before I sign.
He doesn't offer to count it for me. He used to, those first years. He stopped when he saw I already was. Then he claps the bar once, tells me he'll see me tonight, and heads back up the block to open the store.
There's a particular peace in a bar before it opens that I've never found anywhere else. The work's all in front of me and none of it's a guess.
Lines flushed, kegs tapped, the amber the Cooper's been waiting on hooked up and pulled till it runs clean.
Limes cut. Wells stocked. The float counted into the drawer twice, because I count everything twice — it isn't distrust, it's the only way I know to hold a thing and be sure I've still got it.
The bar top I'm wiping down I sanded and finished myself, three coats, on my knees, the winter I had no money to pay anyone and too much rage to sit still.
The long crack near the taps I left on purpose.
It reminds me what the place was when it was nothing, and what I am, which is the woman who made it something.
I take my coffee to the back table and do the books.
Same story three years running — the place carries itself, covers my people, covers me, and still sets a little by.
A wreck with pigeons in the rafters and a hole in the floor you could lose a boot through, and now it turns a profit with my name on the paper.
Some mornings I sit with that a minute before I get up.
Half of why they come is the food, which is why I'm back in my own kitchen most afternoons before the floor fills.
Dewey's got the flat-top going and a rack of buns cooling — he bakes his own and trusts nobody else's. Right now he's glaring at a case of tomatoes like it owes him rent.
"Came in soft." He doesn't look up. Sixty-two, hands like oven mitts. Thirty years on a supper-club grill outside Pinedale before it folded, and he saves his whole temper for produce that shows up bruised. "I'm not laying soft tomato on my burger."
"So comp the slice," I tell him. "Nobody's going to notice one soft tomato under all that."
"They drive in from Pinedale for that burger.
" Marisol, at the fryer, not turning around.
Twenty-eight, quick as a struck match, the only soul alive who can needle that man and keep all ten fingers.
She's got a sheet pan of potatoes under the knife — skin on, cut by hand every afternoon, twice-fried, the kind that ruins a person for the bagged stuff for good. "Tell her, Dewey."
"They drive in for the food," Dewey says, "on account of somebody back here gives a damn whether it's any good."
"Green chile's shy today." Marisol slides a spoon at me, deadpan. "Tell him."
I taste it. It is not shy. It would open a man's sinuses from the parking lot.
But Dewey's already drawing breath to defend it and Marisol's already grinning, and this is a fight they run most afternoons and would both lie down and die before they ever finished it. So I set the spoon in the wash and give them the only verdict that's ever true in this kitchen.
"Best in three counties," I say. "Same as yesterday. Same as it'll be tomorrow."
Dewey grunts, which is Dewey talk for thank you. Marisol winks and goes back to her potatoes.