Sophia
It was past nine when I drove down the cul-de-sac. The street was Sunday-night quiet — porches dark or close to it, one window lit at the far end of the row, the rest gone in. I pulled Doris into my own drive, cut the engine, and sat back. The day was still in me. Not heavy. Settled in the seat.
It had started before the sun. The first morning of days off had found me in the saddle before it found me anywhere else.
Liam was already in the barn aisle with Brisket saddled when I came down, working the cinch one hole tighter and checking it with two fingers. He didn’t look up. He pulled a stirrup straight, let it drop, and said it to the latigo more than to me.
“You’re slow.”
“I’m rested. You wouldn’t recognize it. It’s what people look like after sleep.”
We rode out the back of the home pasture with the sun still behind the cottonwoods, the grass wet to the knee and the cold carrying a set of teeth that would be gone by seven, and for the first ten minutes I was nothing but a body on a horse with no one in it bleeding.
Daisy had opinions about the hour, but Daisy had opinions about most things: eight years old, dappled, and convinced down at the cellular level that she was the senior partner in our arrangement.
She took the bit with the sigh of a creature humoring a junior colleague and walked out the gate like the whole idea had been hers.
I did the steering and she did the editorial.
Liam rode loose-reined with one hand on his thigh and his eyes moving — the fence line, the tree line, the gap in the cottonwoods where something had crossed in the night.
Halfway along the east boundary he lifted his chin at a place where the wire had gone slack between two posts.
I nodded. That was the conversation, and it was a good one.
“Four nights,” he said, a while later, to the country in front of him. Not a question.
“Four nights.”
“You sleeping in the day, or just lying down in the dark being a martyr about it?”
“The second one. It’s more spiritually rewarding.”
He made the sound that lived next door to a laugh and paid its rent on time, and something went out of his shoulders that had been sitting up in them since I’d come down to the barn. He didn’t ask where I’d been. He already knew where I’d been. He’d just needed it out loud.
This was the shape of my days off, and had been for eight years — my cabin a short walk from his door, Daisy in the third stall, a kettle and a chair I’d dragged in myself and a drawer of clothes that smelled like outside instead of hospital.
I turned out a stall most mornings I was up here, not because it was mine to turn out but because my hands wanted a job with an end on it.
You can muck a stall and stand back and see it done.
The body does not offer you that at four in the morning with a kid coding under your palms.
We turned for home when the cold lost its teeth. By the time we’d rubbed the horses down and turned them out, Stephy had the kitchen window cranked open and something going in a pan that found us all the way across the yard.
Stephy was at the stove in one of Liam’s shirts and leggings that had given up arguing with the bump weeks ago, pushing eggs around a pan with the spatula held at arm’s length, as though the eggs might make a move on her.
“Don’t,” she said, without turning round, “either of you, say a single word about me cooking. I am bored, the baby is sitting directly on a nerve that runs my entire left leg, and the only thing that takes my mind off it is breakfast. Sit.”
I made the toast, because the toast was the one job in that kitchen nobody fought me for.
Liam poured the coffee. Over the eggs, Stephy told us Clay and Callie’s daughter Maisie’s Sunday-school teacher had phoned the house — specifically, she wanted it on record that Maisie had stood up in class to inform everyone that God kept a horse.
“A horse,” Liam said.
“A white one. Named — and these are Maisie’s words, the teacher quoted them twice to be sure I understood — Sir Gallops.”
“That sounds about right,” I said.
“Clay thinks it’s theology. Callie wants to know where a seven-year-old gets that kind of certainty.”
Then Stephy slid a plate in front of me, lowered herself into the chair opposite with the deliberate care of a woman parking a vehicle whose dimensions she no longer trusted, and said, far too lightly, “So. Did that house across the road from you ever sell?”
I kept my eyes on my eggs. “It sold.”
“And?”
“And a man bought it.”
Liam had already begun to smile into his coffee. He said nothing, which was worse than anything he could have said.
“A man,” Stephy said.
“Mm.”
“Sophia. What man.”
“He’s a neighbor. He’s across the road. I don’t have a — Willow’s done a whole—” I heard myself going down without a parachute and could not locate the cord. “Willow has opinions.”
“Opinions about what,” Stephy said, delighted, leaning in as far as the bump would permit.
“She’s appointed herself as head of my surveillance division.
Since August.” I gave up and reached for my coffee, because if I was going to do this, I was not going to do it un-caffeinated.
“She gave me a full briefing Saturday. From the wicker chair. She had arrival times. She had a motorcycle count — she said, and I’m quoting, ‘they come in shifts, Sophia.’ She has a working theory that they’ve all stepped out of a magazine called Sexiest Man Alive, which I’m fairly sure isn’t a real publication, and when I raised that, she said if it isn’t, it should be. ”
Liam had stopped pretending to drink his coffee.
“And then,” I said, because apparently I had decided to drive this all the way into the lake, “she gave me a closing assessment of the new owner’s shoulders. Which I’m not going to repeat at my brother’s breakfast table. With the eggs right there.”
“Repeat it,” Stephy breathed.
“No.”
“Sophia.”
“She compared them to a man she knew in 1972 named Noah, and that’s all I can tell you, because honestly I am far too embarrassed to repeat the rest of it.
” The color was all the way up my neck now and I hated it, hated that they could tell I was getting flustered.
“That woman is cruder and funnier than I am physically able to be at this table. I don’t have the range. I’d need a license.”
“You’re pink,” Stephy informed me, joyful. “Liam, look at her, she’s gone pink.”
“I see it,” Liam said, grave as a judge, the bottom half of his face safe behind his mug.
“I’m not pink. I’m warm. It’s the stove.”
“The stove’s off,” Stephy said sweetly, and ate a piece of my toast.
I did the only thing that has ever reliably worked on Stephy, which was to point at the thing she was pretending wasn’t there.
“How are the feet?”
She groaned like I’d said something indecent. “Don’t. If you offer, I’ll cry, and then you’ll feel obligated, and then I’ll have won, and we’ll both have to live with knowing it.”
“Put them up.”
“Sophia—”
“Stephanie. Up.”
She put them up. I turned her chair, took one swollen foot into my lap, and pressed both thumbs slow into the arch — and the sound she made started out as a laugh and arrived somewhere else entirely. Her head went back against the chair. Her eyes went bright and wet.
“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that’s — Liam, I’m leaving you. I’m leaving you for your sister.”
“Understood,” Liam said.
“She has the hands of a healer, and you have the hands of a man who handcuffs people for a living.”
“Also understood.”
I worked the arch until the tension let go of her ankle and the wet went out of her eyes, and I’d just taken up the second foot when Liam stood, drained his coffee, and came around the table.
He put his hand on the back of Stephy’s neck and kissed the top of her head.
Then he put his hand on the top of mine and kissed that too, the way he’d been doing it since I was twelve and didn’t reach his ribs.
“I’m going to go somewhere that isn’t here,” he said, with a tip of his head at the feet, at the two of us, at the whole soft operation his kitchen had become. “You two have your — whatever this is.”
“Girl stuff,” Stephy said, eyes shut.
“Terrifying,” Liam said as he went out the back. We heard him whistling halfway across the yard before the screen had finished swinging shut.
Sunday dinner at Owen and Louisa’s was the only law on the ranch we agreed on without putting it to a vote.
You came. If you were ambulatory and within sixty miles, you came; if you weren’t ambulatory, Lou brought you a plate.
I had missed twice in all the years I’d been around, and both times she’d known the reason before I’d thought of the excuse.
She met me at the back porch with both hands going for my face.
Aunt Lou stood five-foot-three on her best day and had the wingspan and the temperament of a woman who’d raised seven children — five of her own and two who weren’t, and had never once let the second number sit smaller in her mouth than the first. Her hands smelled of flour and onion.
They cupped my jaw and held it the way you hold a thing you have long since decided is yours.
“Look at me, baby.”
I looked at her.
She looked. Long enough that I felt the heat come up under her palms; then she patted my cheek once and let me go. “Get in here. There’s a child who’s been asking for you since Friday.”
The kitchen was already at full broil. Maggie at the counter doing something complicated to corn, Jack stealing it off the board the moment it was done; Hunter on the phone with one boot up on a chair; Clay and Wyatt out the back arguing about a fence post the way they’d been arguing about fence posts since before I came to live here, Callie in the doorway refereeing without conviction.
Jessica had Stephy and Ivy bracketed at the end of the table, Stephy six and a half months pregnant, Ivy a couple of weeks behind her, comparing swollen ankles like trophies.
Two dogs underfoot. The radio going over the top of all of it.