Chapter 4
SOLEIL
The knock came at five forty-five in the morning. I was already awake, which was lucky for both of us.
I knew who was knocking before I got up. Nobody else on this ridge would be knocking at five forty-five. Biscuit had spent the night curled at the foot of my bed, and his ears hadn’t gone up.
I pulled on shorts, didn’t bother to check how I looked in the bathroom mirror, and opened the door.
Treyton stood on the porch with my sketchbook in his hands.
He looked like he hadn't slept. Or like he'd slept and then gotten up at four and done two hours of chores before he'd worked himself up to knocking on my door.
His hair was damp at the temples like he'd just washed his face, and there was sawdust on one of his sleeves.
“You left this in my shop.”
“I did.”
“You left it open.”
“I suppose I did that too.”
He didn't hand it over right away. He stood holding it at chest height with both hands, like a man delivering something he wasn't sure he was supposed to be delivering.
“The mean one looks like me,” he said.
“It is you.”
“I figured.”
He held it out, and I took it. For a long beat, neither of us moved. I was painfully aware of my bare feet, the hole in my T-shirt, and the fact that he was looking at my face instead of anywhere else.
Biscuit came around the doorframe, pushed past my legs, and sat down on Treyton's boot.
“Traitor,” Treyton said. Biscuit thumped his tail.
“He sleeps here now,” I said.
“I noticed.”
“I didn't —”
“I know you didn't. He picked you.” Treyton bent down and scratched behind Biscuit's ears with the same hand that had been holding the sketchbook.
I watched him do it. His hand was big enough to cover both of Biscuit's ears at once and his knuckles were scarred in three places.
I pictured that hand on the spokeshave the other day…
the way he'd held it, the way it had moved on the wood … and I was thinking about it on me. Then I tried to make myself stop thinking about his hand, which was something I’d been thinking a lot over the past five days.
He straightened, and the top of my head reached his collarbone.
I hadn’t registered exactly where the top of my head reached until this moment, with him standing one step above me and me barefoot on the porch in a marathon shirt with a hole in it.
His shoulders blocked the sun coming up behind him, and I had to tip my chin up to look at his face.
I caught him staring at my mouth.
He looked away fast enough that I almost convinced myself I'd imagined it.
“Trail's wet up the south fork,” he said. “I thought you might want to know if you're heading out today. We got snow on the peaks last night.”
“Thanks.”
“Stay off the second switchback. The runoff's worse than yesterday.”
“Got it.”
Having delivered his message, he took two steps backwards. Biscuit stayed on the porch. Treyton glared at him. Biscuit looked back. Treyton sighed — the first real evidence I’d heard that he was capable of feeling anything — and walked away without calling the dog.
I watched him go until he faded into the shadows of the trees, then closed the door. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with the sketchbook and turned to the page he'd seen. The one with the stubborn flower. Scowling. I’d drawn it days ago when I'd been mad at him for being a wall.
Today the flower looked less mean to me.
I waited ten more minutes and had a second cup of coffee. Then I put on actual pants and walked outside to start the SUV.
It was still early but I could have sworn I saw a goat. The animal stood in the middle of the dirt road about forty feet from my cabin. It blinked up at me like I was the one out of place.
“Hi,” I said, not quite sure yet that I wasn’t hallucinating.
The goat took one step toward me.
“Um, what are you doing out here, goat?” I’d spent time up in Vermont, so I’d crossed paths with goats before. They believed in getting through whatever barrier happened to be in their way then shaming whoever had put it there by holding them in deep contempt.
I crouched down slowly, the way I'd crouch down for a strange dog.
The goat took two more steps.
“Hi, friend. Where do you live? Who do you belong to?”
This close, I could see a worn leather collar with a small brass tag. The tag was too far for me to read but the collar meant somebody owned this animal, which meant somebody was probably looking for it.
I held out my hand.
The goat bolted. It didn’t go back the way it had come.
It headed straight toward the meadow. My meadow where I'd spent four of the last five afternoons sketching. The goat was running into my workspace, and I had a pencil behind my ear and wasn’t even wearing a bra and had no good reason to do what I did next.
I ran after it.
I was halfway across the meadow when I heard the truck. Treyton's truck. It was coming up the road slower than usual, the way someone might if they were looking for something. He pulled to the shoulder where my SUV was still parked, killed the engine, and got out.
I waved at him from forty feet out, in the meadow, with the goat now standing in a patch of long grass and looking at me like I owed it an explanation.
Treyton walked across the meadow and stopped next to me. “That's one of Gibson's.”
“Gibson who?”
“Doesn’t matter. All you need to know is that Gibson has too many goats.”
The goat didn’t seem to agree. It lifted its head and let out a cross between a baa and a blah.
“His sister runs a soap business,” Treyton said. “Started with three goats. I don’t even know how many she has now, but it’s got to be at least two dozen.”
“That's a lot of goats.”
“Sure is.” He took two steps toward the goat. The goat seemed to weigh its options before bolting again. It ran twenty feet, stopped, looked back.
Treyton shrugged.
“It’s acting like it wants to be caught,” I said.
“It wants to be carried. This one thinks it’s a princess and thinks it deserves the royal treatment. I’m going to have to carry her back.”
“You can't —”
“I can.”
“Treyton, she's not —”
“Soleil. Just watch.”
He walked toward the goat. The goat stood perfectly still, watching him the way a cat tracks a person it has decided to allow into a room. Treyton bent down. He got one arm under her belly. Then he stood up with her, and the goat went limp.
Completely, unambiguously, supremely limp. Like she had been waiting all morning for someone to do this. Her head rested on his shoulder. Her front legs hung against his chest. Her back legs hung against his hip. Treyton looked at me, deadpan, with a goat draped across his torso like a shawl.
“She rides,” he said.
“Apparently she rides.”
“This is Penny. She's the worst one. Gibson loves her.”
“Hi, Penny.”
Penny did not respond to her name. Penny was, by all available evidence, asleep.
Treyton started walking back across the meadow with me following behind him. We passed my SUV, then his truck. He kept walking.
“You're walking her back?”
“It's only a quarter mile. She never goes very far, and she’s not that heavy.” He looked at me sideways. His mouth did something at the corner that, on a man who'd ever heard of smiling, might have been a smile.
And his jaw, today, was doing the thing.
I was trying not to notice his jaw doing the thing.
I was also trying not to notice that he was carrying a thirty-pound goat in front of me like the goat weighed nothing and that I had spent five minutes earlier this morning watching him scratch a dog's ears with a hand that I had thought about more times than I had thought about almost anything else in my professional life.
I followed him down the road. Penny snored.
Gibson Hart's place was a quarter mile past Treyton's drive, down a gravel road that looked like it had been graded sometime during the previous administration.
The fence at the property line was solid.
The pasture was clean. There was a hand-painted sign at the gate that said Don't Let The Goats Out, which was painted in a way that suggested the sign-painter had known, on some level, that the sign would fail.
Gibson came out of the barn before we made it to the gate.
He was tall — almost Treyton's height — and sun-bleached, with hair that was halfway between blond and brown and the lower half of his face covered in a well-kept beard.
He had on a t-shirt, jeans, and boots, and he walked with a kind of loose-limbed ease that I recognized from somewhere I couldn't place.
He saw Treyton, then the goat. Then he saw me and grinned.
“Berg. You brought me a present. And a friend.”
“Penny was on the south road again.”
“Penny is on the south road every day. Penny is on the south road because of the south road. Penny has dreams.” Gibson reached for the goat.
Treyton handed her over. Penny opened one eye, registered the change of personnel, and went back to sleep on Gibson's shoulder.
Gibson scratched her ears. “Penny. You princess.”
“Soleil,” I said, because Treyton wasn't going to introduce me. “Soleil Graham.”
“Gibson Hart. You're the artist.”
“That’s me.” Gibson Hart… the name stirred up a memory. I blinked up at the good-looking man who looked a lot more like a cowboy now than the infamous rock star whose music had defined my college years.
Before I had the chance to fangirl, Gibson shot me one of his trademark smiles. “He mentioned you.”
Wait… Treyton had mentioned me? To Gibson? Heat swept up my neck and covered my face.
“I didn't,” Treyton said.
“He mentioned you once. Which is once more than he mentions most things. Come inside. I have coffee.”
“It's not even nine,” Treyton said.
“It's after eight. That's coffee territory.”
I looked at Treyton. Treyton was obviously calculating whether to refuse, which was a calculation I'd been watching him run on himself for five days, and which I now had the advantage of being able to predict.
“Coffee,” I said.