Chapter 14
Three days later he was at the county road gate, alone, standing in front of the sign that still read TEAGUE CATTLE CO. in letters he’d had painted eight years back, the year Mackenzie’s sponsorship first came through and the name started meaning something past the county line.
He didn’t see me. I’d come out to check the cattle guard, a routine thing, tire pressure and rust and the rattle a loose grate throws when it needs resetting before it costs somebody a truck axle, and I stopped my truck fifty yards off instead of driving on, because a man standing alone in front of his own name that long is not a man you interrupt.
He wasn’t doing anything. Just standing there, hands in his pockets, looking up at eight years of paint like he was trying to remember what the letters had felt like the day he’d had them put up.
The morning was cold enough that his breath showed, a slow, even plume that came and went, came and went, the only motion in the whole scene besides a hawk working a thermal off to the east, the same stretch of sky a different hawk had worked a month back over different ground.
I cut my engine, mostly out of instinct. You go still around anything wild enough that a sound might change its mind about staying put.
He reached up once, touched the bottom edge of the T in TEAGUE like a man pressing a bruise to see if it still hurt, then let his hand drop and stood there a while longer doing nothing at all.
The paint had chipped at that corner, weather and eight winters working at it, and from fifty yards off I couldn’t tell whether he was seeing the chip or seeing straight through it to whatever the letters had meant the day a painter climbed a ladder and made his name into something official, something that traveled past county lines on a horse trailer, something photographed.
A truck passed on the county road behind me, slowed at the sight of his truck parked at the gate, then kept on going, whoever it was deciding the same thing I had: this wasn’t a scene that wanted company.
He shifted his weight once, boots crunching frost-stiff grass, and looked, not at the sign at all but out past it, down the empty stretch of county road running east toward town, the direction any real trouble or any real rescue would come from.
Whatever he saw out there, or didn’t, cost him something.
His shoulders dropped a fraction, the same fraction they’d dropped at the banquet three nights before when Mackenzie’s numbers reached him plain.
I didn’t get out of the truck. Whatever he was working through, standing alone at a gate with his own name over his head, wasn’t mine to walk into. Some reckonings happen better without a witness, maybe especially one who’s owed the front-row seat.
I put the truck in reverse, backed down the road far enough that he wouldn’t hear the engine, and drove home a different way, past the creek crossing instead of the straight route, adding ten minutes to a five-minute errand rather than risk him turning at the sound and finding me there.
I didn’t tell him I’d seen him, and didn’t tell anyone else either, not even Deacon, not even Consuela.
That night I stood at my own kitchen window a long while after the house had gone quiet, coffee gone cold in my hand, looking out at a dark I couldn’t see past the porch light’s reach.
I didn’t have a gate sign of my own to stand in front of.
I had a legal pad with fence numbers on it, and a binder of pedigrees, and eleven miles of wire that had cost me six minutes to decide and cost him a great deal longer to stand under.
Some things you just let a man have. Maybe some things you had to let yourself have too.
? ? ?
Faye called the first week of December, a routine call that turned into something less routine once she heard how many hours I’d logged that week.
“Say that again,” she said. “How many night checks.”
“Four this week. Five last week.” I had the phone wedged against my shoulder, hands busy scrubbing a feed trough, the kind of chore that let a person talk and work at once without either suffering much for it. “It’s calving season, Faye. That’s just the math of it.”
“The math of it is you’re one exhausted mistake away from a real injury, and I say that as someone who’s spent fifteen years pulling calves professionally and knows exactly how a tired body starts cutting corners it wouldn’t cut fresh.
” Her voice had gone into the register I recognized from vet school, the one she used on clients who weren’t taking a warning seriously enough.
“You’ve got a full crew now, Roz. Deacon, Wyatt, Reyes, the others.
Why are you the one doing every hard night check yourself? ”
“Because it’s my herd. My programme. I built it, I know it better than anybody else on that crew, and I’d rather lose sleep than lose an animal because I wasn’t there to catch something going wrong.”
“That’s not an answer. That’s a justification, and there’s a difference.
” She let that sit a second, and I could picture her exactly, leaning back in whatever exam room she was calling from between patients, the same unimpressed patience she’d worn all through vet school whenever I tried to talk my way around a problem instead of through it.
“You built a crew you trust enough to bring four hands across a fence line rather than keep working for the man who used to sign their checks. That’s not nothing, Roz.
That’s you building something people believe in.
But it doesn’t work if you won’t let it actually carry any of the weight. ”
“I hear you.”
“Do you? Because I’ve heard that tone from you before, and it usually means you’re agreeing with me in order to get off the phone and go right back to doing the exact thing I just told you not to do.
” She sighed, but there was real worry under the exasperation, the kind that comes from genuine care rather than lecture for its own sake.
“I’m not trying to nag you. I’m trying to keep you from ending up in a clinic with something worse than a bruise, three weeks before the worst of the season even hits.
Promise me you’ll wake somebody up next time instead of doing it alone in the dark. ”
“I promise.”
“I mean it, Roz.”
“I know you do.” I finished scrubbing the trough, set it to dry, and looked out the barn door at a sky already going dark at four in the afternoon, frost starting to crust the standing water in the near paddock, the early dusk of deep winter closing in. “I’ll try.”
“Try harder than try.” She said it gentle, but firm, the last word she left the conversation on before she had to go tend a patient, and I stood in the barn a while after we hung up, turning her warning over, telling myself I’d heed it.
? ? ?
Nate called on Christmas Eve, apologetic, work having swallowed the visit he’d meant to make, and we talked a long while about nothing and everything, the meandering conversation of two people who loved each other across a distance a holiday always seemed to sharpen rather than soften.
“Dad’s coming out tomorrow,” I told him. “Just the two of us, and Consuela, since her own family’s up near Laredo this year. Small, but it’s something.”
“Wish I could be there.”
“I know. Next year.” I sat by the woodstove, a log settling behind the glass and throwing a spray of sparks up the flue, the house quiet around me, a small tree Consuela had insisted on decorated in the corner with ornaments that had been in the family since before I was born, a chipped glass star, a felt Santa my grandmother had sewn by hand sometime in the sixties. “How’s Denver.”
“Cold. Lonely, if I’m honest, though I’d never admit that to anybody but you.
” A pause, while he decided whether to say the harder thing.
“I keep thinking about you out there, in that big house, working through a season like this mostly alone. Makes the version of independence I chose feel a little less impressive than it used to.”
“You built a good life, Nate. Don’t discount it just because it looks different than mine.”
“Maybe.” He didn’t sound convinced, same as before. “Any word from Boone, this time of year? I know the terms you set, working the crew and all. Just wondering if the holiday’s cracked anything open.”
“He sent a card. Didn’t ask for anything back. Just a card, and inside it, one line: ’Wishing you the kind of Christmas you deserve.’ No signature flourish, no attempt to make it bigger than it was.”
“That’s restrained, for him.”
“It is.” I turned the card over in my mind, the plain print of it, the deliberate smallness of the gesture.
“I think that’s sort of the whole story of these last few months, if I’m honest. Restraint.
A man learning, slowly, the difference between reaching for something and just letting it be there, waiting, without grabbing at it. ”
“Sounds like progress.”
“Sounds like something, anyway.” I looked at the tree, the chipped glass star catching the firelight. “Merry Christmas, Nate. Call me on the actual day, if you get a minute between whatever’s keeping you so busy out there.”
“I will. Love you, Roz. Take care of yourself out there. Actual care. Not just Faye’s version of a warning you nod along to and ignore.”
“I’m working on it,” I said, and for once, I mostly meant it.
? ? ?
Christmas Day itself was quiet, just my father, Consuela, and me around a table set for more people than sat at it, a fact none of us named out loud though the empty chairs sat there for all three of us to feel.
“Your mother used to make a production of this day,” my father said, over a ham Consuela had spent the better part of the morning preparing. “Whole house smelling like cinnamon before any of us were properly awake. Presents wrapped so carefully you almost didn’t want to tear the paper.”
“I remember some of that.”
“You were young enough it probably feels more like a feeling than a memory by now.” He cut his ham with the same careful precision he brought to everything, and for a moment I studied him, this man who’d spent eighteen years mostly keeping his grief boxed up and was, this year, letting more of it breathe than he had in a long while.
“I miss her most on days like this. Ordinary days dressed up as special ones. The extraordinary days, somehow, are easier to get through. It’s the ordinary ones, dressed up just enough to remind you of what’s missing, that catch a man off guard. ”
“I think about her too. More this year than most, if I’m honest.”
“Hard years tend to do that. Pull the people we’ve lost closer, even though logic says it ought to work the opposite way.
” He reached over, patted my hand once, an unusual gesture from a man who kept his affection more implied than demonstrated.
“She’d be proud of you, Rosalind. I know I keep saying that, different ways, different days.
Feels worth repeating on a day like today, when the missing runs a little deeper than usual. ”
Consuela, quiet through most of this, raised her glass of sparkling cider. “To Eleanor,” she said, and we all three raised our glasses over a table built for more.