Chapter 14 Mara — Day 34
◆
The bull rides quiet.
That's the first blessing of the drive. We paid too much for him, and I know it, but Thayer wanted new blood and Rafe wanted a bull that wouldn't kick his teeth in the first time he tried to move him through a gate, and this one — red, thick through the chest, twenty-two months old, dispositioned like a big dog — he checked both boxes.
Now he's in our trailer with a full net of hay and a rubber mat under his feet, and every few miles I hear him settle his weight and I think, we made it. We got him.
The sun's behind us. West Texas mid-October sunset.
The highway ahead runs long and empty and pink at the shoulders, and the sky in the rearview is the color of ripe peach through gauze.
Beau drives. He's been driving since Wichita Falls.
He wouldn't let me take the wheel after I brought him coffee at the truck stop.
Said my hands were shaking. Said I hadn't slept enough last night.
He was right on both. He didn't make a speech about it.
He closed my door, walked around to his side, and pulled us back onto the road.
I like watching him drive. That's a thing I've admitted to myself somewhere between Marathon and here.
He drives with his left wrist over the top of the wheel, easy, the way men in this country drive when they've done it their whole lives.
His right hand rests on his own knee. Dark-blond hair a little too long over his collar.
Two-day beard. The scar on his left thumb catches the dashboard light when he turns to check the mirrors.
I know what I'm going to do.
I've known since Alpine, when he came out of the feed store carrying my order in both arms like it wasn't heavy, set it in the truck bed, looked at me over the tailgate, and said, quiet, “Ready?” I said, “Ready,” got into his truck, and something in me knew.
We've been on the road nine hours. He's said maybe forty words. So have I. It's not a heavy silence. It's the other kind.
A green sign flashes past — Marfa, 34 miles. We're on the long slow stretch of US-90 that runs across the flat.
“Sundown looks like a bruise,” he says.
I glance in the side mirror. “Pretty bruise.”
“They're all pretty from a distance.”
I don't answer that. It's the kind of line he throws out sometimes, half-joke, half something underneath. I let it stay in the cab a mile.
“Bull all right?” I ask.
“Been quiet since Marathon.”
“Good sign.”
“Good sign,” he agrees.
The road narrows where the fenceline pinches in.
Mesquite runs along the shoulder in a black scribble.
The temperature outside's finally dropped below eighty and I can feel the truck's cooling — the AC easing off, the metal of the door beside my elbow giving up its heat.
My boots are dusty. My braid's coming loose at the nape and I can feel it. I don't fix it.
I look at him again. He's watching the road.
I say, “Beau.”
He glances over. Just the eyes. “Yeah.”
“How much farther?”
He checks the odometer. “Twenty miles, give or take.”
“Okay.”
He waits.
I let another quarter-mile pass. I can smell the trailer through the vent — hay, and a good animal, and diesel. My father would've liked this bull. My father would've liked this drive. My father would've told me to stop overthinking.
I say it plain.
“Beau — come home with me tonight. Not the guest room. My room.”
The words go out into the cab and the cab keeps them. The engine doesn't change note. The bull doesn't shift. Beau doesn't move.
He's silent a mile.
I count it. It's a long mile. Long enough that a lesser woman might've pulled the words back with a laugh. I don't. I sit with them. I sit with him. I let the silence do the work I asked it to do.
At the end of it he says, “Are you sure.”
Not a question. A stone laid down careful.
“No,” I say. “But I'm asking anyway.”
He nods once, like he heard it, and then he does something he's never done. He hits his blinker. He slows. The shoulder is wide here, half gravel and half hardpack, and he eases us over onto it clean, trailer and all, and puts the truck in park, and reaches down and flicks the hazards on.
Click. Click. Click.
The orange lights bounce off the cab in a slow, patient rhythm. I can see them ticking in his eyes.
He shifts in his seat. Turns his body toward me. His knee comes up against the console. His left hand stays on the wheel a second longer, then comes down and rests, palm flat, on his own thigh.
He looks at me full-on.
I've been looked at by a lot of men in my life.
A few of them looked like they wanted things from me.
A couple looked like they wanted things for me.
This is a new one. This is the look of a man who's been carrying something a long way and just set it down and doesn't know what to do with his hands.
“There are things you don't know about me,” he says.
I've been ready for this a while — since he showed up at my kitchen door with a busted duffel and an accent that didn't match his boots and a way of saying my name like it was breakable.
“Tell me one,” I say.
He takes his time.
Out on the road a semi goes past and rocks us. The bull grunts and settles again. The hazards click. Beau doesn't look at any of it. He looks at me.
“People from my old life are looking for me,” he says. “If they find me, they may come here. I don't think they'd hurt you, but they could bring noise to your gate, and I should have warned you sooner.”
I let the warning settle without rescuing him from it. Not a drifter, then. Not only a grieving brother. A man in hiding, with a past large enough to cast a shadow over my fence. He has given me the edge of the truth and the choice to step back.
I reach across the console.
I take his hand. Left one, the one with the scar on the thumb. His fingers are warm and stiff and they don't close on mine for the first second. Then they do. Slow. Careful. Like he's afraid he'll break something if he grips too hard.
“That's a start,” I say.
Something in his throat moves. He looks down at our hands. He turns them over so mine is on top, and studies my palm — the white line across it where the barbed wire got me at eleven — and then he closes his hand around mine like he means to keep it a while.
“Mara —” he says.
“I'm not taking it back,” I say. “The invitation.”
“I heard you.”
“I want you to hear that part twice.”
A tired, reluctant smile ghosts across his mouth.
“I hear you,” he says. “Twice.”
We sit like that. Truck idling. Hazards clicking. The last of the light going molten in the mirrors. I can hear my own pulse in my ear, calm and hard, the way a hoofbeat sounds when you've been on horseback for hours and can't tell the horse from yourself.
He says, “I should tell you the rest.”
“Not here.”
“No?”
“You just laid a stone down,” I say. “Let it settle. Tell me the rest at my kitchen table. Or in my bed. I'm not fragile about the order.”
This time the smile reaches his eyes.
“All right,” he says. “The kitchen. Then the rest.”
“Deal.”
He doesn't let go of my hand. He reaches with his other one and puts the truck back in drive, one-handed, easy, and eases us off the shoulder and back onto the pavement. The hazards click off. The engine settles. We roll.
He drives left-handed the rest of the way.
His right hand is in mine on the console.
I count road signs to keep from thinking too hard.
The Alpine turnoff long behind us. The mile numbers to Marfa counting down.
Beau doesn't say anything and neither do I, and it's not the working silence of the long road anymore, not the silence of two people sharing a cab.
It's the other kind of silence. The one that's a room you're both standing inside.
I think about my father, briefly. He'd have hated that I'm doing this the day I bought a bull.
He'd have said, wait a week, girl, don't mix the ledgers.
He'd also have said, when it's time, it's time, and don't be a coward about it.
Both things were true about him. I get to pick which one I listen to tonight. I pick the second.
I think about my mother, more briefly. I don't remember much about her leaving. I remember the door.
I think about the man beside me. He has given me one true warning and left the choice in my hands. Whatever waits behind him has reach; whatever is happening here is real. I know enough to be afraid and not enough to turn away.
I don't tell him any of this yet. I hold his hand.
Twelve miles out he says, “Bull's quiet.”
“Good bull,” I say.
“You paid too much.”
“I know it.”
“Worth it, though.”
“Time'll tell.”
He squeezes my fingers. Just once.
At the ten-mile mark I see the first tail of dust from the county road, and then the long low bulk of the mesa that means Vale, and my chest does the thing it always does when I come home from a long haul — a small, stubborn opening, like a door on a spring.
Home. Bad ledger, cracked porch step, foreclosure notice in a coffee tin above the stove and all. Home.
We take the turnoff. The truck bumps down onto the caliche and the trailer follows like a good dog. I can see the barn ahead against the last of the light. Bunkhouse windows lit. Kitchen light on in the main house — Opal, waiting up. Of course she is.
Beau slows for the cattleguard.
“She'll know,” he says.
“She already knows.”
“How much does she know?”
“More than she says. Less than she thinks.”
He almost laughs. Not quite. “That sounds like Opal.”
“It is Opal.”
We roll up to the barn. He kills the engine. The hazards would've quit long ago. It's suddenly very quiet. The bull shifts in the trailer, heavy and content. Somewhere down at the bunkhouse a dog I don't own barks once and stops.
Beau turns to me again. He hasn't let go of my hand.
“Bull first,” he says.
“Bull first.”
“Then the kitchen.”
“Then the kitchen.”