Chapter 17 Mara — Day 43 #2
I don't lift. My hand doesn't move. I keep my eyes on the auctioneer's face because if I look at Rivas I'll say something, and if I look at Beau my face will do something I don't want the appraiser's clerk to see.
“Two-forty going once,” the auctioneer says. “To Mr. Rivas at two-forty. Going twice.”
Nothing.
“Sold. Two-forty thousand. Number thirty-one, Mr. Rivas and counsel. Come see me at the table for paperwork, sir. Congratulations.”
The hay broker claps once, then stops, unsure whether that's what you do here. The rancher two rows back doesn't clap. The appraiser's clerk turns a page in her sudoku.
I stand. I don't hurry. I don't slouch. I take my paddle to the card table and hand it to the girl with the clipboard and I say thank you and I sign out. Vale, Mara. 27. Withdrew at 232.
Beau's behind me. He doesn't touch me. He knows better.
I walk out through the double doors and across the sidewalk and up onto the courthouse steps because my truck's on the far side of the square and I need the walk.
I make it as far as the second step and stop, because my legs have gone hollow, and my hands, if I lifted them, would shake, and the courthouse stone under my boots feels colder through the sole than it has any right to feel in October.
I don't lift my hands. I stand with my thumbs tucked into my belt loops and my back to the square and I count breaths the way my father taught me when a horse spooked under me — one in, two out, three in, four out — the small tick of a pulse under my jaw counting me down.
I wait for my face to be a face I can carry across a public square without anybody reading it as a headline.
“Mara,” Beau says.
“Don't.”
“Mara.”
He catches my hand. Not hard. He wraps his fingers around mine and lifts a little, like he's taking a weight from me so I can straighten up.
“I'm sorry,” he says.
I look at him. He looks awful. His eyes are the kind of blue that goes darker when he's ashamed of something. His jaw is set. His thumb is on the inside of my wrist, right where the pulse is, and my pulse is going like a rabbit under a hawk.
“Not your fight,” I say.
“It will be.”
The sentence has nowhere to land. I leave it between us.
He doesn't say it like a man making a speech.
He says it flat, the way he'd tell me the barn door needs a new hinge.
He says it like a fact he already knew about himself and was waiting to say out loud, and I can hear my own pulse in the pad of his thumb, and it takes me a second longer than it should to remember I'm supposed to be angry.
Across the square, by the dance hall, a black car has pulled up at the curb.
Rivas is on the sidewalk with his lawyer, shaking a hand I don't recognize.
He looks up and finds me on the courthouse steps like he's been keeping a compass on me the whole time.
He smiles. It's a small, courtly, pleased smile.
He touches two fingers to the brim of a hat he isn't wearing.
Then he turns back to his lawyer and gets in the car, and the car pulls away, slow, so the whole square can watch it go.
I let out the breath I've been holding since the auctioneer said sold.
“Mara.”
“I'm fine.”
“You're white.”
“I said I'm fine, Beau.”
He lets go of my hand. He doesn't step back. He stays close enough that if I tipped forward he'd catch me, and far enough that no one on the square would call it more than a friend on a step.
“What do you need.”
“To go home.”
“Okay.”
“I need to think about what I say to Selene before she hears the number from somebody else.”
“Okay.”
“And I need you not to talk on the drive.”
“Okay.”
We walk down the courthouse steps and across the town square. The wind picks up. Someone's rope halter bangs against the tailgate of a trailer parked in front of the feed store. A boy on a bike goes by with a paper bag. The world's exactly the same size it was an hour ago. I don't feel it that way.
Beau opens the passenger door of the F-150 for me. He doesn't make a thing of it. He walks around and gets in the driver's side and puts the key in and doesn't start the truck. He sits with both hands on the wheel and looks out at the square where Rivas's car was.
“Mara.”
“You said okay to not talking.”
“One thing.”
“One thing.”
“He didn't beat you. He outspent you. Those are different.”
“Not to the bank.”
“To me they are.”
I close my eyes. I don't answer. My hand's still warm where his was.
I don't know what he almost did in that hallway.
I don't know what he could have done, if I'd said yes.
He offered like a man who had something to offer, and I told him no because a man who works on my ranch for board and eighty dollars a day has nothing to offer against Dante Rivas, and I said it out loud, and he didn't argue.
He didn't argue.
He didn't argue, and his face went to a place I don't have a map for, and he said okay and came back inside and sat next to me and watched me lose. He didn't sulk. He didn't posture. He didn't try again. That should be a relief and it isn't.
The truck starts. Beau pulls away from the curb, careful, the way he drives everything, like the truck is borrowed and he means to give it back.
The town square slides past the window — the courthouse, the dance hall, the feed store, the little diner where Cassia and I used to eat pie when we were seventeen and thought pie would be the answer to everything.
The road out to the ranch runs straight and pale and long.
I keep my hand on my knee where he can't reach it. I keep my eyes on the horizon. I keep my face the way I want it.
But I think about the hallway. I think about the poster for the chili cook-off, and the fire extinguisher, and the scuffed linoleum, and the way he stood there and said let me try like a man who meant it.
Like a man who could have done it. Like a man who had already counted the cost and had, for a second, been ready to pay it.
I think about how his face went when I said what I said about his salary and his truck. Not shamed. That's what a poor man's face does. His went somewhere else. His went — quieter. Like I'd asked him to keep a door shut he'd almost forgotten was his to open.
And I think — for the first time, small and quiet and unwelcome — I think.
What could he possibly have done.