Chapter 22 Mara — Day 57
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The morning starts wrong.
I'm at the paddock with Vespers, checking the near hind she'd strained the week before, when I hear the ranch truck skid down the drive too fast. Thayer never drives fast. Thayer drives like a man who doesn't want to spook the dust.
I straighten up. Vespers snorts.
“Easy, girl,” I say.
I walk out from under the paddock overhang.
The truck's nose-out toward the front gate, a quarter mile off, and I can just make out Thayer's hat behind the wheel.
He gets out. There's a second figure at the fence — a man in a light jacket, crouched, holding something long against his shoulder.
A lens. My stomach shifts before my head does.
Thayer walks up to him. I can't hear what he says. I don't need to. The man stands, backs off, hands up like he's not looking for trouble. Thayer takes another step. The man turns and jogs to a small silver car parked on the shoulder. He climbs in. He drives.
Thayer stands there with his hands on his hips a long moment before he gets back in the truck.
He comes rolling up to the barn slow, the way he usually drives. He kills the engine and steps out and closes the door with a click, not a slam. He walks over. He takes his hat off.
“Photographer,” he says.
“Photographer of what.”
“He didn't say. He was already shooting when I pulled up.”
“Of the house?”
Thayer looks at me. His eyes are pale under the brim. He puts his hat back on. “Of Beau, I think. Beau was leading Roman out toward the round pen. Long lens like that, you don't come to Presidio County to shoot a house.”
I don't answer for a beat. The morning air is dry and thin and smells like sage and diesel. Vespers thumps her hoof behind me.
“Get his plate?”
“Yeah.” He hands me a folded square of receipt paper. Numbers in pencil. “Rental sticker on the back window. Might be El Paso.”
“You chase him a while?”
“Just to the county road. He was already going by the time I got there.”
“Okay. Thanks, Thayer.”
He watches me a second longer. His mouth opens like it wants to say more, then thinks better of it. “Mara.”
“I heard you.”
“Alright.”
He walks off toward the tack room. I stand at the paddock rail and I don't feel anything yet. That's the part I remember later, when I try to. I don't feel anything yet. I know something's moved. I don't know what.
Vespers puts her nose against my shoulder. She wants a mint. I don't have one.
“Not today, sweet girl.”
She snorts warm air on my sleeve and turns away.
I finish with Vespers and walk to the round pen. Beau's there in his work shirt, sleeves rolled, running Roman on the line in a smooth easy circle. His hair's too long over the collar. The sun's on his forearms and neck. He turns, sees me, and gives me the private smile I have learned to recognize.
“Morning,” he says.
“Morning.”
“You want to run him?”
“No.” I lean on the rail. “Thayer ran a photographer off the front gate.”
His hand doesn't stop on the line. Roman keeps his circle. But something locks under Beau's shirt at the shoulders. I see it and say nothing.
“Photographer of what,” he says.
“He didn't say. Thayer figured he was shooting you.”
Beau looks at Roman. Roman comes down to a walk and stops, head lowered, watching him. Beau clicks his tongue and the horse blows out and steps closer.
He lets a slow breath out. That deliberate exhale I've watched him do before every hard sentence — like he's setting the words on the ground before he picks them up.
“Some kind of feature on West Texas, maybe,” he says. “There's always somebody out of Marfa doing a spread on ranch life.”
“Maybe.”
He looks at me over the rail. His ocean-blue eyes are careful. He's always careful, in a way I've spent two months telling myself was gentle and now I don't know what it is.
“You alright?” he says.
“Yeah.”
“Mara.”
“I'm fine, Beau. Finish with him. I've got books.”
He watches me across the rail. His mouth is soft. His eyes are not.
“Come find me at lunch,” he says.
“Maybe.”
I turn and walk to the house. I don't run and I don't look back. I walk. That's what I've got.
Opal's at the kitchen counter breaking eggs into a bowl. She looks up when the screen door bangs and she reads my face and doesn't say a word. She slides a mug of coffee down the counter to my hand.
“Thanks,” I say.
“Toast?”
“No.”
She nods and goes back to her eggs.
I sit at the table and open the ledger. The numbers are the numbers.
Seventy-seven thousand four hundred and change still stands against the cure.
If the pending hay contract clears, the cash gap drops to forty-three; if Selene can reappraise the ranch, maybe that remainder can be refinanced instead of cured in cash.
I read the same column three times. The numbers do not move.
My hand does not move either. I hold the pencil above the page and I hold and I hold.
“Mara,” Opal says.
I look up.
“You're not writing anything.”
“I know.”
She sets the whisk down. She wipes her hands on her apron. She's had her hair up in the same twist for forty years and there's not one thing about Opal Serrano that surprises easy.
“Something happen?”
“I don't know yet.”
She looks at me a long time. Then she goes back to her eggs.
The day goes. That's the part I don't know what to do with, when I sit here later.
The day just goes. I write invoices. I feed Junior a bruised apple.
I drive out to the north pasture and count heifers because I said I would.
Beau works with Rafe on the pump housing.
Orin cleans tack. Thayer doesn't say another word about the man at the gate.
I don't tell Beau anything more. I don't ask him anything more.
At noon he comes in for the sandwich Opal's left him on the counter. I'm in the office off the mudroom with the door half-open. I hear the water at the sink. I hear him wash his hands. I hear him take the plate and I hear him put it down again without eating.
“Mara,” he says through the doorway.
“Working,” I say.
“Alright.”
He picks the plate up. He goes.
At four the wind picks up out of the west. At five the light goes gold.
At five-forty I hear the feed truck.
I know Renata's truck the way I know my own. The engine's got a rough clutch-out on second gear and it always has. I hear her downshift at the cattle guard and my ribs go tight, because Renata doesn't come out to the ranch on a Tuesday at supper for no reason.
I'm on the porch when she rounds the last bend. She parks at the pump. She gets out. She's got her jean jacket on and her braid over one shoulder and her mouth's set in a hard flat line and she's carrying, in her right hand, a magazine folded once down the middle.
She comes up the porch steps. She looks at me. She doesn't smile.
“Kitchen,” she says.
I open the screen door for her. She goes past me. Opal's at the stove. Thayer's at the sink washing his hands. Opal turns and sees Renata's face and doesn't say her name.
Renata sets the magazine on the kitchen table. Face down. She sets her palm on top of it a second like she's holding it there. Then she takes her palm off.
“Mara,” she says. That's all she says.
I walk to the table. Opal's stopped stirring. Thayer's stopped the tap. The kitchen's a very small room, and it's very quiet, and I take one breath in and one breath out and I flip the magazine over.
It's a tabloid. Glossy. Toronto in the masthead.
And there on the front is Beau—my Beau—climbing out of the blue F-150 at our gate on Sunday, duffel in one hand while I cross the yard toward him.
The long lens has caught my palm an inch from his cheek.
The angle is from the county road. Whoever took it was there before the man Thayer chased away this morning.
The headline's huge and black and stupid the way tabloid headlines are stupid.
BASTIEN LORNE, HEIR TO $2.4B LORNE ASCEND, IN HIDING WITH TEXAS RANCHER.
Underneath, in a strip: EXCLUSIVE — first photos in ten weeks.
I read it. I read it once. I read the name. Bastien Lorne. Not Beau. Bastien. And I read the number. Two point four billion. And I read the phrase in hiding with. Like I'm something a man hides in.
There's a smaller line in white print at the bottom of the cover. Julien Lorne's grieving heir surfaces on Presidio County cattle ranch. I read that too. Julien is a name I've never heard him say. Not once. In fifty-seven days he's told me about a brother who died and he's never said the name.
I don't cry.
I don't throw it.
I look at Renata. Her mouth's working like she's holding down a hundred words she's not going to say.
“When did this hit,” I say. My voice sounds like my voice.
“Cassia saw it online before breakfast. The cover photo is from Sunday; the Texas print edition hit the Alpine drugstore at noon. I drove in and bought the last two copies.”
“You brought them both.”
“One for you. One for the fire.”
Opal's taken her hand off the wooden spoon and put it on the counter to hold herself up. Thayer's got his back to us at the sink. He doesn't turn around. That's a thing Thayer knows how to do. Not turn around.
“Alright,” I say.
I leave the magazine on the table. I walk to the screen door. I push it open. I walk out onto the porch.
The porch is west-facing. The sun's where I left it a half hour ago, only lower.
I walk to the rail and I put my two hands flat on the top of it and I hold on.
My father built this rail. He built it with his own hands out of two-by-fours in 1994.
It's soft in the middle where the weather has worked it. I hold on and I stand there.
I stand there a full minute.
I don't count. I know it's a full minute because a minute's what it takes for a small sound in me to go from a loud sound to a very quiet one, and I wait for the quiet one, and when it comes I straighten up.
Behind me the screen door opens.