3. Scarlett
— ? —
Scarlett
Sunday is supposed to be quiet.
Most of the crew is off, scattered to town, church, or home or wherever they go when they aren’t working Beck Cooper’s land. Josie is with her grandmother. Roselle requested her, and I was too tired to fight about it, and anyway it gives me time to think.
Not that thinking is helping.
Beck came home Friday night, late, after I was already in bed. Saturday he was in meetings all day, locked in his office with lawyers and accountants, and when he finally emerged, he kissed my forehead and said he was exhausted and fell asleep on his side of the bed without touching me.
So Sunday I go to the barn. Because the barn is mine. Because when I’m standing in a pen full of animals that need me, I can pretend that everything else is fine.
Except the barn has other ideas.
I’m elbow-deep in mud when I hear the pipe burst. One of the old galvanized ones in the feed room, corroded to hell and gone, and suddenly there’s water everywhere, flooding out across the concrete floor toward the grain storage.
“Ruiz!” I yell, and thank God Mr. Ruiz came in to check on a mare that’s close to foaling, because otherwise I’d have been alone and the whole feed room would have been underwater.
We work for an hour. Him with the shut-off valve, me with the shop vac, both of us covered in mud and God knows what else. By the time we get it under control, I look like I’ve been wrestling pigs.
Beck never comes. Beck is a hundred miles away or locked in his office or wherever Beck is when I need him, which is apparently everywhere but here.
I’m hosing off my boots when I hear the truck.
Old Chevy, dually, the kind the hands drive. I look up expecting to see one of the crew coming back for something they forgot, but it isn’t a hand.
It’s Tripp Mercer.
Tripp is complicated. He’s older than Beck by almost ten years. Worked for Beck’s father back when this ranch was still being built. Now he’s something between foreman and friend, the kind of man Beck trusts with things he doesn’t trust to anyone else.
He’s also the only person on this ranch who has ever looked at me like I’m more than Beck Cooper’s wife.
“Mrs. Cooper.” He touches his hat the way old-school cowboys do. “Heard there was some excitement.”
“Water pipe. We got it.”
“I saw.” He comes around the truck, and I notice the dirt on his boots, the sweat stains on his shirt. He’s been working, even on his day off. That’s Tripp. “Mr. Ruiz said you were out here by yourself for the first twenty minutes.”
“Beck’s busy.”
Tripp doesn’t say anything to that. Just looks at me with those steady brown eyes and says nothing.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, more to fill the silence than anything.
“Running supplies to the shop.” He jerks his thumb toward the bed of the truck, and I see lumber stacked back there. Good wood, the kind we use for construction. “Got another load going west tomorrow.”
“West?”
“Salt Fork.” He says it easily, like it’s nothing. Like it isn’t the word that’s been eating a hole in my stomach for days. “The new barn.”
I turn the hose off and set it down very carefully.
Everyone knows about the Salt Fork barn except me.
“What new barn?”
Tripp pulls his phone from his pocket. Taps the screen a few times and holds it out to me.
Architectural drawings of a barn, the one I designed three years ago for Lone Elm, the one Beck said was too ambitious, the one I was told to shelve and forget about.
My rejected barn is being built far away from me.
And there, in the corner of the drawing, very small but unmistakable:
S. Velasquez.
My maiden name. My design and work.
I look up at Tripp.
“I thought you knew about the new barn,” he says, and his voice is careful in a way that tells me he’s already figured out I didn’t. “I thought that’s why you weren’t going out there. Because you didn’t want to watch it get built.”
“Where did these come from?”
“Beck gave them to me. Said to start cutting the trusses and the doors here, in your shop, and load them on our trucks headed west.” He pauses. “I assumed he’d talked to you about it.”
He hasn’t said a word. My design, my lumber, my crew, all of it being sent away to build a barn I’ll never see. For Camille, who came back from Wyoming and stepped into a life that should have been mine.
“Does Camille know?” I ask. “That I designed it?”
Tripp shifts his weight. “I don’t think so. Beck just told her it was something he’d been working on. A surprise for the new operation.”
A surprise. He’s passing it off as something he’s been working on. A gift for another woman.
“Does anyone else know?” I ask. “That these are my designs?”
Tripp meets my eyes. “I do now.”
I take the phone from his hand. Look at the drawings one more time. At my name in the corner, the name I signed three years ago when I still believed this barn would be mine.
Then I hand it back.
“Don’t tell anyone,” I say.
“Ma’am?”
“Don’t tell anyone you showed me. Don’t tell Beck you talked to me about Salt Fork.” I pick up the hose and start coiling it, because I need something to do with my hands. “I want to see how long it takes him to tell me himself.”
Tripp is quiet for a long moment. Then he says, “That’s a dangerous game, Mrs. Cooper.”
“I know.”
“If you know, and you don’t say anything, and he finds out you knew…”
“Then I’ll know exactly what kind of man I married.” I hang the hose on its hook and turn to face him. “Because right now, I don’t. Right now I’m starting to think I never did.”
Tripp looks at me with something like respect.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “that barn is beautiful. I’ve been building things my whole life, and that’s the prettiest design I’ve ever seen.”
“Thank you.”
“And for what else it’s worth…” He pauses, like he’s weighing whether to say the next part.
“Beck talks about that colt like he raised it himself. Like he was the one who spent eight months in the round pen. Like he was the one who called the buyers and worked the sales and did every damn thing that made that horse worth seventy-four thousand dollars.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He looks at me, and there’s something hard in his eyes now. “I’ve been watching him take credit for your work for two years, and this is the first time I’ve seen you look like you noticed.”
I don’t have an answer for that.
Tripp touches his hat again. “I’ll keep my mouth shut. But Mrs. Cooper. Scarlett.” He uses my name like it means something, like I’m a person and not just someone’s wife. “Whatever you’re waiting for him to tell you, you deserve to hear it. Don’t wait too long.”
He gets in his truck and drives away, and I stand in the barn yard with mud on my boots.
I think about Camille, who grew up across the road from him, who was like a sister, who disappeared for years and came back just in time to step into a cottage our housekeeper decorated for her.
Had she loved him? Had he loved her? Is that why she left when we got together, why she stayed gone, why she came back the moment she heard there was something for her to come back to?
I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore.
So I go back to work. I check on the mare that’s close to foaling. I clean the feed room, order a new pipe and do all the things that need doing.
I don’t say a word. Not about Salt Fork or Camille.
I just wait. And I watch.
And I try to remember the last time Beck looked at me, really looked, and saw the woman he married instead of the asset he acquired.