Chapter 9 Bastien — Day 22 #2
Rafe fell asleep against her shoulder six miles out of Alpine.
They drove the rest in quiet.
The road stretched flat and pale. The sun had come the rest of the way up. Bastien felt every hour of the night in the small of his back. He kept the truck at a steady sixty for Rafe's shoulder.
Mara looked out the windshield. She looked at Rafe. She looked at Bastien.
He felt her look.
Fifteen miles from the ranch gate, she reached across the bench without a word.
Her hand came slow. Her father's leather watch caught the light on her own wrist as she moved.
She didn't touch Rafe as she passed him.
She laid her fingers on Bastien's right wrist above the cuff of his sleeve, wrapped them once — a quiet, firm, unmistakable squeeze — and let go.
She turned her face back to the window.
Bastien went very still.
He kept his hands where they were on the wheel.
He kept the truck at sixty. He kept his eyes on the road.
His breath caught shallow, unwilling to disturb what had just happened.
He could feel where her thumb had been for a long time after she moved her hand.
A small pressure, warm. Not asking. Not taking. Only there.
She didn't look at him.
He didn't say a word back.
He couldn't think of a word that wouldn't have been either too small for what she'd done or too large for what he was allowed to do.
The gate came up in the windshield and he turned in and drove the two long ruts up the drive without saying anything.
She got out first. She said, quietly, over her shoulder, “Thank you,” and it was aimed at him and only him and it was a soft, low, direct word he could feel in his ribs.
She woke Rafe by touching his good hand. She helped him down. She walked him inside to the downstairs guest room where Opal had already turned the bed back and stacked pillows and set water and a bell.
Bastien stayed in the truck a minute. He put his forehead against the top of the wheel and held it there, and being alone with what she'd done was worse than being beside her had been.
He listened to the engine tick. He watched a hawk pin itself against the sky over the north pasture and slide off it. He got out.
He was in the tack room at three that afternoon because it was where he could be without being looked at.
He'd walked Vespers, curried her, put her up.
He'd checked Junior's off-side leg for cuts and found none.
He was oiling a second bridle when Rafe appeared in the doorway in a fresh T-shirt, the sling neat against his chest, his color mostly back.
“You should be in bed,” Bastien said.
“I know.”
“So.”
“Opal made me get up to eat. I got up. I ate. Now I'm walking.”
“Walk back.”
“I will.” Rafe leaned in the doorway. He looked past Bastien at the wall where the saddles hung on their tree pegs. He looked longer at one saddle on the second peg. His face changed slowly, the way a face changes when a person understands a thing.
“That's mine,” Rafe said.
“Yeah.”
“That's my saddle.”
“Yeah.”
“The cantle cracked last spring. Then it split all the way through in that storm.”
“I know.”
“I stopped using it after the storm because I thought it was dead.”
“It wasn't dead.”
Rafe walked over. He pressed his good palm on the seat where the split had been.
The leather held. The stitching was neat, the reinforcement bar under the skirt done in the old way with soaked rawhide and slow-drying glue, the way Bastien's grandfather had shown him on a boat repair once when he was eight and had thought the whole world was made of things you could fix.
“Who did this,” Rafe said.
“Doesn't matter.”
“You did this.”
“Might have.”
Rafe was quiet a second.
“Sunday afternoon? You were in here alone.”
“Might have been.”
“You could've said.”
“Didn't need to say.”
Rafe turned around. He was blinking too much and pretending he wasn't. His good hand was still on the saddle. He said, low, “Thanks, Beau.”
“You're welcome.”
“You didn't have to.”
“I wanted to.”
“You didn't have to do the shoulder either.”
“That's not the same.”
“It is. It is the same. Nobody paid you to sit there all night. Mara didn't tell you to. You just did it.”
Bastien wiped his hands on the rag from his back pocket and took his time answering.
“You'd have done it for me,” he said.
“I would,” Rafe said. “But I don't have your — I don't have whatever it is you have.”
“What do I have.”
“You know.”
“I don't.”
“The thing where you don't panic.”
Bastien didn't tell him about the ridge. Didn't tell him about Julien. Didn't tell him he'd earned bleeding-and-shock knowledge in a life he'd walked out of because it had cost him the one brother he had, and the calm on the fence line was only what he had left of it.
“It's just practice,” he said.
“Sure it is.”
“Go lie down, Rafe.”
“Going.”
Rafe made it to the doorway and stopped. He said, without turning, “You gonna come to Cassia's next reading.”
“Not tonight.”
“Yeah. Fair.”
“Rafe.”
“Yeah.”
“I'm glad you're not dead.”
“Me too.”
Rafe went.
Bastien stood in the tack room after Rafe was gone. The oiled bridle in his hand had gone soft and he set it back on its peg. The saddle on the second peg looked no different than it had that morning; only Rafe knew it was different now. That was the point.
He walked out into the barn aisle in the good dust-smelling half-dark, thinking, before he could stop himself, about the small firm circle her fingers had made around his wrist. She'd done it and looked away.
She'd said thank you at the door, low, aimed.
She hadn't asked him for anything else — not the calm, not the number in his phone, not the way he'd stood in the parking lot at dawn with his face turned to the mountains.
He should have said something back in the truck. He'd known it while it was happening.
He walked to the barn doorway and looked across the yard at the main house. The porch was empty. The kitchen light was on. He could see Opal's head moving past the window, and once, the darker top of Mara's braid.
He didn't go up.
He stood in the doorway with the afternoon sun cutting long across the yard, trying in his head the sentence he'd have said if he'd known how.
He tried three. None was the shape of what she'd done.
He stood a long time trying, watching the kitchen window and not watching it, and then he stopped, because trying was a thing that would have to wait for a better hour and a braver man than he was.
He turned back into the barn.
He still hadn't said a word back.