Chapter 6 Mara — Day 12 #2
My fingers close around the enamel and the heat goes into my palm and up my wrist and my hand steadies against the weight of it.
He watches me take it. He watches to make sure I've got it before he lets go.
Then he stands and moves three feet down the step and sits, forearms on his knees, looking out at the yard where the SUV was and isn't.
He still doesn't say anything.
I hold the cup in both hands. I put my nose over the steam. It smells like Opal's coffee — dark and burnt-sweet and stronger than any coffee ought to be — and my chest loosens a notch. I take a sip. It scalds my tongue in the good way. My hands stop shaking.
We sit like that for maybe a minute. The wind lifts the tail of my braid. Somewhere in the barn Roman stomps once and settles. A hawk goes over so high I only see it because its shadow crosses the yard.
“That your first offer?” Beau asks. His voice is low.
“First from him.”
“There'll be more.”
“I know.”
He nods. Doesn't look at me. Looks out.
“He set a card,” he says.
“I saw.”
“Want me to leave it?”
“Leave it.”
“All right.”
Another quiet. The coffee cup is hot against my palm and I let it be hot. The scar on my left palm — the barbed-wire one from when I was eleven and stupid — pulls a little when I flex my fingers around the enamel. I flex them anyway. It's a thing to do.
“You handled him,” Beau says, after a while. Still not looking at me. “For what it's worth.”
“Didn't feel like handling.”
“Looked like it from the barn.”
“I was shaking before he was in the car.”
“After he was in the car.”
I glance at him. He's watching the drive. His profile's very still. Dark-blond hair a little too long, curling at the collar of his work shirt. Sun on the side of his neck where the shirt's open. A man built like a fence post that's had good years and hard weather both.
“You saw,” I say. It isn't a question.
“I saw.”
“How much of it.”
“All of it.”
I don't know what to do with that. I take another sip of coffee. My throat works.
“I stand behind what I did in the yard,” I say. “The shaking's just — the shaking.”
“The shaking's the body telling the truth after the mouth's done talking,” he says. “Nothing wrong with that.”
He says it plain. Not gentle in a way that makes me want to slap him. Plain. Like he knows.
The wind moves.
“He'll come back,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“With a bigger number.”
“Probably.”
“And I'll say the same thing.”
“I know.”
He doesn't ask why. Doesn't ask what my plan is instead.
Doesn't say what a man's supposed to say — you sure?
you thought about it? two million's a lot of money, ma'am, you don't want to be hasty.
He sits three feet down the porch step and looks at the drive with me, and drinks nothing, because he didn't bring a cup for himself.
I look at his hands where they hang between his knees. Big hands. Working hands. The nail on his left thumb comes up at a funny angle and there's an old flat scar along the pad. His fingers are steady.
Mine are steady now too. I notice it, and my chest gives another notch.
“Beau,” I say. “Thank you for the coffee.”
“You'd have made it yourself in a minute.”
“I would've. But you brought it.”
He turns his head then and looks at me. Ocean-blue eyes. Fine lines at the corners from squinting into Texas sun. There's a thing behind his face he doesn't say. He doesn't say it. He looks at me, one long steady look, and then nods once and looks back out at the drive.
“I'll be in the barn,” he says. “Dancer's stall latch is working loose.”
“Thayer see it?”
“Not yet. I'll get it.”
“All right.”
He doesn't get up. He sits. Three feet down the step.
I don't tell him to.
The card's on the porch rail behind us. I can feel it the way you can feel a mosquito on the back of your neck without seeing it.
Dante Rivas. Presidio County Development.
Any hour. Any hour at all. The smooth stone he set on it was one I've walked past ten thousand times. Now it's holding down his name.
Two point one million dollars.
I take another sip of coffee. The heat goes down my throat and settles in my stomach and pushes out.
My teeth aren't going to knock. My hands aren't going to shake.
My father died in that barn and my grandfather cleared that pasture and my great-grandmother buried three babies in that dirt, and it isn't for sale.
I say the words to myself the way I said them to Rivas, just to hear them.
It's not for sale.
Beau hears me. He doesn't turn his head. But something in the line of his shoulder shifts a quarter inch — the smallest possible sign he heard, and that he thinks I'm right.
We sit like that until my cup is half empty and the wind changes direction and Opal comes out on the porch behind us with a dishtowel in her hand and says, “Was that a car?”
“That was a car, Opal.”
“Not one of ours.”
“Not one of ours.”
She looks at the card on the rail. She looks at the stone on the card. She looks at me on the step and at Beau three feet down from me. Opal has a face that doesn't miss much. She's had that face all my life, and I know every crease of it.
“You want me to burn that?” she says.
“Leave it.”
“Leaving it and burning it are different things, Mara.”
“Leave it, Opal. I want to know his name for when he comes back.”
She grunts. It isn't a happy grunt. But it's the grunt of a woman who raised a girl to know her own mind and can't complain when the girl uses it.
“Coffee?” she says to Beau.
“Miss Vale beat you to the pot,” he says, tilting his chin at the cup in my hands.
Opal snorts. “Miss Vale. Listen to him. Beau, she's been Mara since the day she stopped wearing pigtails.”
“Ma'am,” Beau says, gravely.
Opal laughs — one short, pleased bark — and goes back inside.
The screen door bangs.
Beau's still sitting three feet from me. He hasn't looked at me again. He isn't going to. He's the kind of man who gives you the look once and then lets you sit inside it as long as you need to.
I finish the coffee.
I set the empty cup down between us on the step, halfway. If he wants it, it's there. If he doesn't, it isn't in my way. He looks at it. He looks at the drive. His hand moves. He picks up the cup by its handle with two fingers and holds it against his knee.
“I'll wash it,” he says.
“Opal'll wash it.”
“I'll wash it.”
“All right.”
Somewhere down toward the county road a truck goes by — one of ours, actually, Rafe coming back from Alpine with the lick tubs, the flatbed dust cloud rising and falling in the distance.
He'll be in the yard in five minutes. Orin will come out of the bunkhouse in his damp good shirt.
Thayer will ride in off the south fence sometime before noon.
The day will unroll the way ranch days unroll, and I'll have to stand up off this step and go do the next thing, and the next thing after that.
But not yet.
For another half a minute we sit — me on the top step with my hands empty and steady, and Beau three feet down with the enameled cup at his knee and his eyes on the drive — and I don't tell him to leave.