Chapter 1 #2
“I know what time it is.” I turned the key.
Headlights swung across the row of trucks, across the barn, across the porch, where Boone stood talking fast to a circle of neighbors who very badly wanted to be somewhere else.
One of them, Cal Whitfield again, hat already on his head, was already walking away mid-sentence, which told me plenty about how that particular conversation was going.
“I want to know where Doug Ferris keeps his fence crew this time of year.”
Consuela looked at me and didn’t say anything. Somewhere behind us the band hit a wrong note and recovered.
“You’re going to fence it,” she said. Half question, half already knowing the answer.
“I’m going to fence it.” I put the truck in gear. “I’m not leaving, Consuela. I’m not going anywhere at all. He’s going to have to look at exactly where the line sits, every day, from his own porch.”
“That’s a big thing to decide standing in a parking row at ten at night.”
“I’ve been deciding it since the fork hit the plate.” I checked the mirror out of habit, more than need. Nothing behind us but dark and the shapes of other people’s trucks. “I’ve had about six minutes to think it through, and six minutes was enough.”
She was quiet while I pulled out of the row. “You want me to follow you home,” she said. “Make sure you get there.”
“I’ll get there.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I almost smiled. Almost. “Follow me home, then, if it’ll let you sleep.”
“Good,” she said, and shut the passenger door, and walked back toward her own truck without another word, settled, no ceremony to any of it.
I drove home in the dark with the windows down, forty minutes of dirt road and cattle guards, Consuela’s truck holding steady behind me the whole way.
The radio stayed off. I never once turned it on, not out of any decision, just because my hand never reached for the dial, too busy doing the other arithmetic: fence footage, crew-days, the number Doug Ferris would need to hear before he’d move me to the front of a three-week waiting list. By the time the house came into view, porch light left burning from that morning, I’d already picked out the fence line in my head, section by section, the way I’d once picked out a bull’s whole pedigree from a single look at his hindquarters.
Post by post. Clean to the creek and back around.
? ? ?
I called Faye Okafor a little after midnight, because I couldn’t think of anybody else to call at that hour who wouldn’t either cry with me or start plotting Boone’s murder before I’d finished the first sentence, and I needed neither of those things yet.
We’d gone through vet school together, the two of us, sharing a rental with a leaking roof and a landlord who never once answered a phone, and she’d gone on to build a large-animal practice two counties over while I’d come home to run cattle instead, and somewhere in the fifteen years since, she’d become the one person I called when a thing was too big to say out loud to somebody who’d have to keep living next door to the consequences.
“It’s midnight,” she said, by way of hello, not annoyed, just establishing the facts. “This better be a breech birth.”
“Boone said, into a live microphone, in front of four hundred people, that he married the land and not me.”
The line went quiet, Faye doing arithmetic on how bad a thing was before she let herself react to it. “Say that again.”
I said it again. It sounded worse the second time, somehow, plainer, all the adrenaline gone out of it and just the words left standing there on their own.
“I’m getting in my truck,” Faye said.
“Don’t. I mean it. I’m fine, I’m home, Consuela followed me the whole way.”
“You called me at midnight to tell me you’re fine.”
“I called you at midnight because I needed to say it to somebody who wasn’t going to either fall apart or start planning a felony.
” I sat at the kitchen table in the dark, the legal pad still blank in front of me, the plat map not yet pulled from the drawer.
“I need you to just let me say it plain, once, and not fix it.”
“Okay.” A chair creaked on her end, the sound of a person deciding to listen instead of talk. “Say it plain, then.”
So I did. The toast, the porch, the fork hitting the plate, Consuela’s hand flat on my back, the pie I didn’t remember taking. Faye didn’t interrupt once, which from a woman who interrupted everybody, myself included, at every stage of vet school, counted for something.
“What are you going to do,” she asked, once I’d run out of the story to tell.
“Fence it. My half from his. Straight down the middle.”
“Rosalind Larkin.” She said my whole name the way she’d said it the day I told her I was marrying a rancher instead of finishing my residency track, half delight, half disbelief that I’d go through with something that big.
“That’s either the sanest thing I’ve ever heard or the most insane, and I genuinely cannot tell which yet. ”
“Neither can I.”
“Good. That means you’re thinking clearly. The people who can tell right away are usually wrong.” She was quiet a second. “You want me to come out this weekend? Not to fix anything. Just to sit on your porch and drink your bad coffee and not talk about any of it if you don’t want to.”
“Maybe not this weekend. Fence crew starts Thursday. I’m going to be underwater.”
“Then the weekend after.” Not a question. Faye rarely asked questions once she’d decided something was happening. “I’m coming, Roz. You don’t get to talk me out of it twice.”
I turned the legal pad over so I wouldn’t have to look at the numbers a minute longer. “Faye. Was I wrong to say yes to him, eleven years ago? You’ve never once told me what you actually thought.”
A pause, longer than the first one. “No,” she said finally.
“He was a decent man for a long stretch before he wasn’t, and decent men slipping isn’t the same thing as decent men lying the whole way through.
Doesn’t mean he gets a pass tonight. Just means the eleven years weren’t fake, whatever else is true now. ”
“That helps. More than I expected it to.”
“Good. Now go lie down, even if you don’t sleep. Lying still beats nothing.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“Don’t ’yes ma’am’ me, Larkin. I outrank you on exactly nothing.”
That got the ghost of a laugh out of me, the first one since the fork hit the plate.
I let her have that one. Some things weren’t worth the argument, and a friend showing up with bad coffee and no agenda ranked low on my list of problems that week.
? ? ?
I woke before dawn, though I couldn’t rightly call it waking, since I’d never gotten to sleep, just drifted in and out of a shallow doze on top of the covers, still in the slip I’d worn under the blue dress, boots kicked off near the bedroom door sometime after midnight without my registering taking them off.
The blue dress itself hung on the closet door where I’d left it, and I lay in the gray predawn light looking at it a long while, the blue Boone had once told me matched something in the sky just before a good rain, a compliment he’d paid me on our third date, back before either of us had any idea what the next eleven years would ask.
I got up eventually, took the dress down, and instead of hanging it back in the closet with the rest of my things, folded it once, careful, and set it in the bottom of a drawer I didn’t often open, not thrown away, not displayed either, just put somewhere it wouldn’t have to be looked at every morning while I figured out what, if anything, it still meant to me.
The house held the quiet that comes after a night like that one, not peaceful, just spent, wrung out, waiting to see what the next day asked of it.
I made coffee I didn’t want, more ritual than desire, and stood at the kitchen window watching the sky go from gray to the first pale suggestion of gold over the barn roof, the same ordinary sunrise the ranch had seen ten thousand times, unbothered by what had happened on a porch forty minutes’ drive away the night before.
I thought about calling my father right then, before he’d have been awake himself, and decided against it.
The conversation would go better once he’d had his own night to sit with the news, same as I was sitting with it now, alone, in a kitchen that had been mine and Boone’s both and was now, as of a live microphone and a slice of pecan pie left uneaten, just mine again.
I finished the coffee, rinsed the cup, and went to check the horses before sunup. Some mornings the next ordinary thing was the only prayer I had.