Chapter 1 Mara — Day 1 #2
Opal's in the kitchen when I open the screen door.
She's in her apron, which she's been in since about four thirty this morning, and her sleeves are pushed up to the elbows, and she's up to her wrists in dough.
Rosemary bread. The smell is in the wood of this house at this point.
If I burn the ranch down, that smell will still be here.
“Opal.”
“Girl.”
“This is Beau. Two-week trial. Beau, this is Opal Serrano. She feeds you. You don't sass her, and you don't leave your boots in her kitchen.”
Opal looks up. Her eyes go to his face, and they stay there one beat longer than eyes usually stay. She's known me since I was six years old and my mother left, and she found me under the kitchen table with a jar of pickles I couldn't open. She reads people the way other people read weather.
“Beau,” she says.
“Ma'am.”
“Sit down and I'll pour you coffee.”
“Thank you, ma'am, but I don't want to keep Miss Vale waiting.”
Opal's eyes go from him to me, and back to the dough, and she smiles at the dough like the dough said something funny.
“Suit yourself, honey.”
I take a mug down anyway and pour him a cup. I set it on the corner of the table. I don't say anything about it.
He picks it up. He drinks. He says, “That's good coffee, ma'am,” to Opal, and she waves her flour hand at him like he's being ridiculous.
“Come on,” I say again.
Outside, the sun's cleared the ridge. The world is honey-colored and cold.
I walk him past the barn — I show him Roman and Vespers and Dancer in their stalls without going in, and Junior in the last stall with his ears pinned because Junior's ears are always pinned.
I show him the tack room. I show him where we keep the diesel for the flatbed.
I don't say much. He doesn't ask much. When I point at a thing, he looks at it for one honest second and then looks back at me for the next thing.
The bunkhouse is a low stone building two hundred yards from the main house. Four bunks. A small woodstove we don't run in summer. A washroom that works if you don't ask too much of it.
“Rafe and Orin sleep in there,” I say. “Rafe's twenty-six, cocky, decent hand, respects Thayer, will try you the first day. Orin's nineteen. Says sir and ma'am. Doesn't yet know how to shut up when he's tired. Take whichever bunk they haven't claimed.”
“Yes ma'am.”
I stop at the door. He stops behind me. I can feel him behind me. That's a new sensation. I haven't felt a man behind me on my own porch in longer than I want to say out loud.
I turn around.
“Beau.”
“Ma'am.”
“You'll ride out with Thayer at seven. Bring your gloves. Bring water. If you don't have a hat, tell him and he'll find you one out of the tack room. There's a hat in the tack room that fits most people.”
“Yes ma'am.”
“That's all.”
He nods. He looks at me one more second. Not staring. Just — settling. Like he's putting the shape of my face somewhere he can find it later.
Then he says, “Thank you, Miss Vale,” and he steps past me into the bunkhouse, and he sets his duffel on the last bunk in the row and starts unbuckling it with the kind of care people use when they don't have much.
I walk back to the house.
I walk slower than I need to.
Thayer's by the barn when I pass him. He tips his hat.
“Miss Mara.”
“Thayer.”
He doesn't ask. That's the Thayer thing. He doesn't ask. But he watches my face on the way past, and I can feel him seeing something on it I'd rather not have anyone see.
Opal's punching down her dough when I come back into the kitchen. She doesn't look up.
“He's a nice-looking boy,” she says.
“He's thirty-four if he's a day, Opal. Don't call him a boy.”
“He's a nice-looking man, then.”
“Opal.”
“I'm making bread. I'm not doing anything.”
I go to the shelf. I take down the coffee tin. I take out the envelope. I look at the number one more time, then fold it and put it back. The math is the same math. Eighty-three days.
I sit down at the table.
Roman's still standing at the fence. He knows something's different. Horses always know.
“Opal.”
“Mm.”
“You don't have an opinion, do you.”
“I have several opinions. I'm making bread with them.”
“I hired him for the west-pasture move. That's it.”
“Mm-hm.”
“Thayer said we're a body short.”
“Thayer's usually right about bodies.”
“I'll send him up the road in two weeks if he doesn't hold.”
“That's fair, sugar.”
I sit there. She sits there. She isn't sitting. She's kneading. But she's sitting inside her kneading, the way she does. She's been doing that as long as I've been alive, more or less.
I don't know why I said yes.
That's what won't sit down inside my chest. Thayer said what he said and it was true — we're short a body, we need a body, the head count is the head count.
But I was going to send that man away before Thayer got out of his truck.
I had my mouth ready. Two words: Thank you. Turn on my heel. Screen door. Coffee.
And then he took a step back.
And I opened my mouth to say goodbye and I said two weeks instead.
I know what I saw. Too clean-handed. Too careful. Voice with the wrong shape in it. A man who walked up my flagstones like he'd walked up somebody's flagstones before, but not for a long time. He isn't a drifter. He isn't not-a-drifter, either. He's something I haven't put a word to.
He looked at my father's watch and he didn't say a word about it. Most men would have. Most men would've asked, or leaned in, or made a joke about it being nice, or worse, about it being big on my wrist. He looked at it the way you look at a thing you already recognize.
I don't know what he already recognizes.
I pour a second cup of coffee. My hand's steady this time. That, at least. That's mine.
I drink it standing up at the window.
Outside, the sun's on the barn roof now, and the ridge behind it, and the far pasture where I've got four hundred and thirty head that don't know they're for sale if I can't make the math work. Beau Lorne's in my bunkhouse, unbuckling a duffel with careful fingers. Roman's watching the house.
Eighty-three days.
I said yes to a stranger, and the reason still eludes me. If I'm honest with myself standing here in my own kitchen — and I try to be honest with myself; it's a house rule — it scares me.
More than a little.
I finish the coffee. I wash the cup. I go upstairs to put my boots on, and I don't look at the shelf on the way out.