Chapter 4 #2
Treyton's jaw did the thing for the third time today and he followed us into the barn.
Gibson's barn was the cleanest barn I’d ever been inside.
The floor was swept. The hay was stacked.
There were hand-painted signs above each goat's stall with names — Penny, Bramble, June, Iris, Tilly — and a small chalkboard listing what each one was eating that week.
The barn also had, against one wall, a fully working espresso setup.
“My sister sent the espresso machine,” Gibson said, putting Penny in her stall. Penny immediately tried to climb the gate. “She thinks I drink too much instant. She's right.”
“What does your sister do?” I asked.
“Soap. She has a little business right here in town. The goats are for the milk. Goat milk soap. Lavender, calendula, cedarwood — Treyton makes the cedar boxes she ships them in, which is why we’re friends and not just neighbors.”
I looked at Treyton, happily surprised that the man was capable of friendship. Treyton was studying a goat like it had just become the most interesting animal in the world.
“He doesn't sign the boxes,” Gibson said. “She asked him to, but he won't. She also can't tell me why he carves a tiny pine sprig into the inside corner of each one, but I have my theories.”
“I don't carve anything,” Treyton said.
“You absolutely carve.”
“I do not carve into the boxes.”
“You carve into the boxes, Berg, and one of these days I'm going to take a picture and send it to your mother.” Gibson glanced over at me and grinned. “He always acts like this when I mention his foster mom. Whole body locks up. It's how I know what to use as leverage.”
“His foster mom,” I said.
“Yeah, Mama Mae. She lives in Texas. I got to visit once. She has a kitchen the size of a barn and a way with hospitality that puts folks around here to shame.”
“Gibson,” Treyton warned.
“I'm being respectful.”
“You're being talkative.”
“That's because I have coffee and a guest and I like both of those things.” Gibson pulled three matching mugs off a shelf. “Soleil, how do you take it?”
“With cream and sugar, please.”
“A woman of taste. Berg takes his bitter, just like him.”
Gibson shot me one of his trademark grins as Treyton sat down on an overturned crate.
He didn't argue. He actually didn't say anything for the next twenty minutes while Gibson and I talked about his sister's soap, about Vermont, and about Piper the forget-me-not.
He also tried to answer my questions about whether goats had emotions.
He thought they did and Treyton, who finally decided to join the conversation, said it depended on what we were calling an emotion.
The whole time, Treyton watched me. He didn’t stare.
Not the way I'd been watched at bars when I used to go out for girl’s nights with my friends.
He looked at me the way a man studies something he's trying to memorize before it disappears.
That was the kind of look a woman could get used to, but I wasn't going to let myself get used to it.
When Gibson stepped outside to get something from the truck, Treyton said, “Don't tell Mae we had coffee together. She'll text my mother.”
I looked at him. Mae meant Mae at the café. My mother meant Mama Mae in Broken Bend. Two Maes. One ridge. And apparently, they had an ongoing conversation between them about the man who lived on it.
He had people… the kind of people who cared about him, who would text each other if they heard he’d been drinking coffee with someone. He hadn't told me any of this in five whole days of supply drops, following trails, during the workshop visit, or spending time in the meadow.
He'd told me now.
“I won't say a word,” I said.
“Appreciate it. I’d hate for them to get the wrong idea.”
Before that comment had time to settle, Gibson came back with a small wooden box. “Took you long enough to finish the boxes. I told my sister six weeks. It took you seven.”
“They're good boxes.”
“They're great boxes, but you're a pain in the ass. Soleil, can I send you home with a bar of soap?”
“I would love that.” I looked at Treyton. He was studying his coffee cup like it was the most interesting thing he’d ever seen.
I left with a bar of cedarwood-lavender soap in one of Treyton’s hand-carved boxes, a head full of goat names, and the knowledge that Treyton had a mother who would get excited about him drinking coffee with a woman.
The walk back to the road was quiet. Treyton stayed by my side, walking closest to the ditch, without seeming to think about it.
I noticed. I wasn't sure he had. I was thinking about it. I was thinking about all of it.
When we got to the road ,he stopped at his truck, and I stopped at my SUV and neither of us said anything for a beat.
“Thanks,” I said. “For —”
“Penny.”
“Right, Penny.”
“Yeah.” He got in his truck and drove off.
I headed back to the cabin and sat at the kitchen table for an hour and a half.
I couldn’t focus on drawing a flower. Instead, I drew his hands.
The scar on his knuckle. The way his arms had held the goat.
The way he’d presented my sketchbook this morning, chest height, like a delivery he wasn't sure he was supposed to make.
I closed the sketchbook. I opened it again. I added one more line to the scar.