Chapter 14 Mara — Day 34 #2
He looks at me a second longer. His eyes in this light are the color the sky was ten minutes ago on the other side of the truck — dark blue with the last of something warm in it.
I can see the line of his jaw and the two-day beard and the little bit of dust in the hair at his temple, and it hits me the way a good hard thing hits, low and clean.
I want him. That's the plain word for it. Nothing to do with the invitation I already made. Everything to do with the man who warned me his old life might come looking and asked, “Are you sure,” like the question mattered more than the answer.
“Beau,” I say.
“Yeah.”
“I meant what I said.”
“I know you did.”
“I'm going to say it once more anyway. So there's no confusion.”
He waits.
“Come home with me tonight,” I say. “Not the guest room. My room.”
He looks down at our hands. He turns mine over. He touches the line across my palm with one careful fingertip, and then he lifts my hand and puts a kiss on the inside of my wrist, right at the pulse, and it goes through me quiet and enormous like a stone dropped into still water.
“Yes,” he says.
He lets my hand go. Not because he wants to. Because there's a bull in a trailer and it's been the better part of a day and animals come first — he's learned that, on this ranch, in five weeks, better than some men learn it in a lifetime. He opens his door.
I get down out of the cab. My legs are stiff.
The gravel crunches under my boots. The air's cooler than it was ten minutes ago, and the yard smells the way it smells at an October dusk — dust, cut hay, horse, and creosote giving up the day's heat.
I stand with my hand on the truck door and look at the house.
The kitchen window is a yellow square. I can see a shape at the sink that's Opal, and the porch light's on, and the barn's dark except for the one bulb over the alleyway that Rafe left burning the way I've told him a hundred times not to.
I look at Beau across the hood.
He's already at the trailer, unlatching the door easy, one hand on the top rail, checking the bull the way you check a good animal after a long haul — eyes first, feet second, breathing third. He glances up at me.
“He's fine,” he says.
“Bring him around,” I say. “West stall. Junior can take the small side pen for the night.”
“Copy.”
“I'll get the porch.”
“Meet you at the kitchen.”
“Yeah.”
I walk toward the house. Halfway across the yard the wind comes up out of nowhere the way it does out here at last light, and it lifts a piece of hair off my neck where the braid's given up, and I think — clean, plain, the way I think most things — I asked him.
He said yes. There's a bull in the trailer and a man in my life and a kitchen light on and a foreclosure notice in a coffee tin, and none of those facts cancel any of the others out.
Behind me I hear the trailer door open. I hear him talking low to the bull, that quiet voice he uses on frightened animals and on me at three in the morning when I can't sleep and come down for water and find him at the kitchen table with a book he isn't reading.
I hear the bull come down the ramp, slow and heavy and trusting.
I don't look back yet.
I climb the porch steps. The second one still creaks. I put my hand on the screen door and stop.
I can see Opal through the window. She's got a dish towel over one shoulder and her hands in the sink and she's looking out at the barn, not at me — she's watching him.
I watch her watch him. Her face doesn't change.
She dries her hands on the towel, slow. She turns from the sink.
She looks toward the door, and she sees me on the porch, and she gives me a look I've been getting from her since I was six years old.
It's the look that says, well. About time.
I open the door.
“How's the bull?” she says.
“Good bull. Quiet ride.”
“Beau all right?”
I look at her. She looks at me. I don't lie to Opal. I never have. It hasn't ever worked.
“He will be,” I say.
She nods, once. She turns back to the sink. She says, without looking at me, “There's soup on the back burner. And I made bread.”
“Of course you did.”
“Two loaves.”
“Opal.”
“What.”
“Go to bed.”
She snorts. She dries her hands again. She hangs the towel on the oven handle. She walks past me toward the hallway and stops at my shoulder.
“He's a good man, Mara Vale,” she says. Quiet. Just for me.
“I know it.”
“Don't be gentle with your own heart on his behalf.”
“I won't.”
She squeezes my elbow. She goes.
I stand a second in the kitchen. The soup's simmering low.
The bread's on the board under a cloth. Out the window I can see Beau leading the bull across the yard toward the barn, one hand on the halter, the other slack at his side, the two of them moving the way two tired animals move at the end of a long day — patient, mutual, home.
I fill the water bucket from the tap.
I go out to meet him at the barn.
The porch door bangs shut behind me. The night air's cool now, real cool, and the yard smells the way I want it to smell every night for the rest of my life.
He looks up when he sees me coming. He doesn't smile. He doesn't need to. He watches me walk across the yard toward him in the last of the light, bucket in one hand, hair coming down at the back, boots ringing on the caliche.
I stop at the barn door.
He puts his hand out for the bucket. I give it to him. Our fingers meet on the handle.
“Bull first,” I say.
“Then the kitchen,” he says.
“Then the kitchen,” I say back.
He walks on into the barn with the bucket. I stand a second under the barn light and watch him go. Somewhere in me, the door on the spring closes all the way for the first time in four years. Not hard. Not loud. Just — closed. On the good side.
I follow him in.