Chapter 10 Mara — Day 25
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The dust plume comes up the drive before the truck does.
I'm on the porch with a mug I've let go cold, and I know that truck. Anyone west of the Pecos knows that truck. Faded red. Dented door on the driver's side. CALDER FEED & CO. in white letters that need a repaint.
Renata.
My stomach does the thing it's done every time I've seen her handwriting on a feed slip for three years. Not a flip. A drop. Like an elevator missing a floor.
Three years. Three winter births. Three summer haymakings. Three Christmases I didn't send a card. Three birthdays she didn't call.
Last time I saw her was outside Big Bend Café in October. She was walking one way with a to-go cup. I was walking the other with a feed slip in my hand. We looked at each other. We didn't say a word. I walked past like she was a stranger. She let me.
She parks square with the porch step and doesn't get out for a beat. I can see her through the windshield. Same copper-red hair, pulled into the same rough knot. Same set to her jaw. Same eyes on me like a person reading fine print.
Then she opens the door and swings down.
“Mara.”
“Renata.”
She has a paper bag from Cassia's in one hand and her keys in the other. She stops at the bottom step. She doesn't come up.
“I'm not staying if you don't want me to,” she says.
“Then don't stay.”
She nods once, like that was fair.
She doesn't move.
I don't say come in. I don't say sit. I stand at the top of the steps with my cold coffee and let the wind push a strand of hair off my face and hate the way my throat feels.
She sits down on the second step anyway.
“There,” she says, mild. “I'm not in. I'm not up. I'm on the step.”
“Renata.”
“Two minutes.” She sets the paper bag beside her boot. “If you want me gone in two minutes, I go. I just — I couldn't drive past your turn one more time.”
She's driven past the turn plenty of times. So have I, when I've had to get to Alpine. We've been two women avoiding each other's driveways for a thousand and ninety-five days.
I sit down. Not next to her. Two steps above, so the porch rail is between us. It's a stupid, childish thing to do. I do it anyway.
“One minute,” I say.
She almost smiles. Not quite. “That's less than two.”
“I'm generous like that.”
She lets a slow breath out through her nose and looks at the yard instead of at me.
Roman's out in the far paddock. Dancer's having an opinion about something.
From here we can see the whole west pasture going gold in the afternoon light, and the edge of the barn roof, and past the tack room door a man in a blue chambray shirt bent over a length of fence rail.
Beau. That's what I call him. It's still a strange word in my mouth some days, like a coat someone handed me that fit better than it should.
Renata's eyes catch on him for one second and slide back to me. She doesn't ask. I don't offer.
“Okay,” she says. “One minute. I brought you walnut bread from Cassia. She said you liked the walnut. I don't need thanks for it. I'm not here to get anything for it.”
“Renata.”
“Cassia said your name to me on Tuesday,” she says. “In the store. She said, “You should go see Mara.” Just that. Then she rang up my order and didn't look at me. That's a Cassia move.”
“It is.”
“So.”
“So.”
“I was wrong to let it go this long,” she says. “I want to say what I came to say. Then I'll go. And if you never open your door to me again, that's yours to hold.”
I don't answer. My hands are tight around the mug and the mug is cold and my fingers hurt.
“I was right about Ash,” she says.
There it is. The name. It lands on the porch between us like a dropped horseshoe.
“Renata.”
“I was right about him and it cost me you,” she says, “and I'm sorry it did.”
I look at her. She looks at her boots. Her jaw is doing the thing it did in fifth grade when she was trying not to cry in front of a substitute teacher who wasn't worth crying in front of. She was ten. I was ten. I remember it clean, the way you remember one afternoon out of a whole childhood.
“I told you he'd hollow you out,” she says. “I told you he'd smile at your father and pocket the ranch keys. I told you and I told you and you got quieter and quieter and then you married him anyway. And I said something ugly at the courthouse. And I meant it. And I never took it back.”
“You said he was going to sell the north pasture,” I say. Because now that we're doing this, we're doing it. “You said he'd try to sign it out from under Dad while Dad was still in the hospital.”
“Yes.”
“He tried.”
“I know he tried.”
“Dad caught him at it and threw him out and I moved out with him anyway.”
“I know.”
“You said if he ever put a hand on me I was to call you, day or night. I said he never would.”
Her eyes come up to mine. She doesn't ask the question. She lets me choose.
“He never did,” I say. “Not with his hand. That part I was telling the truth about.”
“Okay.”
“Everything else you said, though.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn't come to the wedding.”
“I know I didn't come to the wedding.”
“You didn't come to Dad's funeral.”
Her head jerks up. “I came to your dad's funeral.”
“You stood at the back.”
“I stood at the back because Ash was there. If I'd stood next to you he'd have made a scene. You'd have had to manage it. It wasn't the day to manage him.”
I have to breathe through my nose for a second, because that's exactly the thing I haven't let myself think about the funeral for four years. That Ash made everything, always, about Ash. Even the day my father was in the ground.
“Okay,” I say. It comes out rough.
“I'm not handing you a bill,” she says quickly. “I'm not saying, see, look at me, I did a nice thing. I'm saying I was there and you didn't know I was there. I should've written you a note that week. I didn't. It got easier not to, and then it got hard, and then it got years.”
I set the mug down on the step beside me. It clicks against the wood.
“He's gone,” I say.
“I know he's gone.”
“He was gone before you and I stopped talking. I just didn't tell anyone yet.”
“I know.”
We sit. A hawk wheels once over the west pasture and pulls up sharp. Renata puts her hands flat on her knees.
“I don't need you to say I was right, Mara. I need you to know I know what it cost.”
The silence goes long. I can hear my pulse in my ears. I can hear Dancer's hoof on the trough. I can hear, faintly, Beau saying something low to Rafe by the barn — not the words, just the tone. That careful, quiet tone he has.
Renata doesn't push. She sits with her hands on her knees and lets the silence be what it is.
I sit with it too. I let it be as heavy as it is.
The sun ticks a fraction lower. The board under my boot creaks when I shift my weight.
Then I stand up.
“Come in,” I say. “I'll put the coffee on.”
She lets out a breath I don't think she knew she was holding.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
I open the door. The hinge does its small familiar complaint, and I hear it the way you hear a sound go new for a second when you're bringing someone through it.
The kitchen smells like Opal's rosemary bread from breakfast — she baked a loaf and left half on the board because she claims she's teaching Orin to slice straight and he's a menace with a bread knife.
I put the kettle on the stove because the drip machine is finicky and I want to move my hands.
Renata sets Cassia's paper bag on the counter and doesn't ask where anything is.
She knows where everything is. She used to be in and out of this kitchen every week.
She goes to the window over the sink.
“He's still out there,” she says.
I don't have to ask who.
“He hasn't come in.”
“He won't,” I say. “He's read the yard.”
She looks at me sideways. “Is that a thing he does?”
“He does it a lot.”
She looks out the window a second longer.
“Good,” she says. Just that.
Then she turns from the window and sits down at the table.
I pour us both black and neither of us reaches for the sugar. I set the sliced walnut bread between us on a plate anyway because my hands want a job. Renata pulls off a piece and eats the crust first, the way she always did, like it's the best part.
“So,” she says.
“So.”
Then we talk.
“Tell me about Dad,” she says.
“Renata.”
“Not the funeral part. The good part. I haven't gotten to say his name to you in three years and I miss him too.”
So I tell her. About the summer he taught me to weld a hinge and burned his own eyebrow half off and wouldn't take his hat off in town for a month.
About the night he sat up with a sick foal and I brought him coffee at three in the morning and he was singing under his breath, some old Willie song, low, to keep the foal calm.
About the way he'd pat the top of the doorframe on his way out of a room, every room, like he was checking the house was still there.
“He did that here,” she says. “I always thought he was checking for spiders.”
“He was checking the house was still there.”
“That's worse and also better.”
“I know.”
She laughs. It's wet at the edges. She takes a long sip of coffee.
“He taught us to two-step in this kitchen,” she says. “You remember?”
“I remember.”
“You were terrible.”
“I was eleven.”
“You're still terrible, Mara Vale.”
“I haven't been to a dance in six years.”
“That's a shame and a crime.”
“You remember the summer we tried to build a raft?” she says.
“Do not.”
“On the tank behind the north gate.”
“Renata.”
“Out of two pallets and a pile of empty bleach jugs.”
“That raft killed a duck.”
“That raft did not kill a duck.”
“That raft rolled over on a duck.”
“The duck was fine.”
“The duck was not fine, Renata.”
She's laughing again. I'm laughing again. I'd forgotten what her laugh does when it gets away from her, all the way loose, no shape to it.
She tells me about the store. She's expanded the tack section. She's carrying that Australian saddle brand Dad hated on principle. She says she thinks of him every time she rings one up.
“He'd tell me I was funding the wrong hemisphere,” she says.
“He'd say exactly that.”
“With that face.”
“With that face.”