3. Mandy
Mandy
She woke with her hands curled beneath her chin.
They hurt.
That was the first thing the new life told her about itself, before the cold and the unfamiliar room.
Her fingers throbbed from climbing the ditch, gripping the truck, and catching herself in the snow.
Ten fingers that had never left a mark on anything had done enough in one night to demand payment.
Then the rest of her body reported in.
Shoulders. Ribs. Feet.
The house held no sounds she knew. No traffic. No expensive climate system working behind the walls. Just a tick in the rafters and, far away, an animal complaining about something.
She looked at the ceiling instead of her life.
Bare beams. A water stain shaped roughly like Oklahoma. A bare bulb with a pull chain. The wool blanket smelled of cedar and dust, clean from a closet instead of a laundry.
Her toes, inside Andrew’s gray socks, were the only warm part of her.
His socks.
He had pulled them over her feet after soaking them in water he tested twice with his hand. His mother’s rule, he had called it, then looked as though he wished the words back.
Mandy had slept ten hours in a stranger’s spare room under his dead mother’s rule while a canceled wedding still carried her name.
The window had begun to gray.
She reached for her phone before remembering.
Nothing waited on the nightstand.
She had left the phone face-down on a gas-station counter because it had felt like a leash. In the dark, that choice had seemed brave.
Morning made it look different.
She did not know what story Harlan had released. She did not know whether Preston had called the police or his own people. She had cut the only wire that might warn her.
She would not know they had found her until they arrived.
Boots moved through the house.
Water ran. A cabinet opened. A mug touched a counter.
The smell of coffee filled the house, dark and burnt at the edges. Her stomach turned over.
If she stayed in bed another five minutes, she would lose her nerve.
Mandy sat up. Everything objected.
She stood anyway.
The ruined slip hung over a chair, gray at the hem and torn at one shoulder. Last night she had found long underwear and a flannel shirt in the dresser. Neither fit, but both covered her.
Her rose wedding nails looked absurd against the worn flannel.
She went toward the coffee.
The hallway held no photographs, art, or furniture. A runner covered the center boards.
The kitchen was the warmest room in the house.
A wood stove ticked in the corner. A scrubbed table stood beneath the window. Open shelves held plain crockery and a row of mismatched mugs: a feed-store giveaway, one with a chip, another with a logo worn almost away.
Andrew stood at the counter with his back to her.
“There’s a clock in here somewhere,” he said. “Quarter past five. Work starts at five.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I’m telling you now.”
He turned.
His eyes moved over the flannel, long underwear, and socks. Whatever he concluded stayed with him.
“There’s coffee.”
Mandy crossed to the hooks and took down a squat brown mug with a chipped rim. She filled it before she noticed Andrew had gone still.
She looked at the mug.
The glaze had worn pale on one side beneath years of the same thumb.
“This is yours.”
“They’re all mine.”
He took down a white mug gone the color of weak tea and filled it.
“Sit before you fall.”
She sat.
The coffee was scalding, bitter, and strong enough to strip paint. She drank without making a face.
Andrew leaned against the counter.
The silence stretched.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll do it.”
“Do what?”
He was going to make her say it.
“The deal. The fence, the car, the gather. Room and board against the damage. You keep my business to yourself. I work six weeks.”
“You can leave any morning.”
“I know.”
“You owe me nothing after you leave.”
“I know.”
“If the repair costs more than the six weeks, that’s my problem.”
She studied him.
“That is a very strange way to take advantage of someone.”
“I’m not taking advantage of you.”
“No. You’re trying to talk me out of helping you.”
“You’ll quit by Friday.”
“You said that last night.”
“I meant it.”
“Then it costs you nothing to be wrong. If I quit, you’ve fed me for a few days and get to enjoy being right. If I don’t, you’ve got another hand through the gather.”
His mouth almost changed.
She wanted to see it finish.
“You’ll need clothes,” he said.
“I noticed.”
“There’s a woman who comes by. She’ll sort you out.”
“Who?”
“Mary Jo.”
The name was the first proof that other people existed here.
“You’re not staying in the bunkhouse,” he continued. “Six men. One bathroom. Card game’s been running since August. You’d last a day, and not how you think.”
There was no leer in it.
“So you’re here. Same room. Lock works.”
Mandy looked at him.
“You checked it?”
“Last night.”
The answer stopped whatever sharp thing she had been about to say.
“I check everything,” he added. “Don’t make it mean anything.”
She looked into the wrong mug.
He had checked the lock after she fell asleep. This hard, tired man who did not want her here had made sure she could keep him out.
“Fine,” she said. “It means the lock works.”
“That’s what it means.”
He picked up his hat.
Mandy glanced around the kitchen. The old stove. The worn table. Resoled boots by the door. The truck outside that had seen better years.
“I won’t cost you much,” she said. “I don’t eat a lot. I can work. You won’t have to carry me.”
Andrew’s hand stopped on the brim of his hat.
“I don’t need your opinion on what I can afford.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“You don’t know what I can afford.”
His voice stayed quiet.
Mandy searched backward through her own words.
She had offered to be cheap. Easy. A problem small enough for him to manage. Where she came from, that counted as consideration.
“For what it’s worth,” she said, “I wasn’t pitying you. I was saying I don’t want to be handled. I’ve had enough of that.”
His shoulders eased by a degree.
“Finish your coffee. You’ve got four minutes.”
She drank.
Light gathered in the window. Snow covered the yard and the lower slopes beyond it. The mountains remained dark.
For one second, another kitchen came back to her. Smaller. Gray light. Coffee she was not allowed to drink. Her grandmother telling her the morning did not wait for a girl’s opinion.
Bandera.
The last place anyone had wanted Mandy’s hands for what they could do.
She had loved it there.
She had forgotten that.
“What’s the work?” she asked.
Andrew looked at her.
“Stalls," he said. "There are twelve. They haven't been done in two days. Muck them out, fresh straw after. Water the troughs. Horse in the end stall bites, so mind your hands.”
His eyes dropped to her wedding nails.
“Manure fork’s by the door. Green wheelbarrow. The other one has a flat.”
“Twelve stalls.”
“Twelve.”
Her heart kicked.
Terror or joy. She could not tell which.
She finished the coffee and stood. Her feet screamed inside the socks.
“Green wheelbarrow. Fork by the door. Don’t lose a hand.”
“Coat’s on the peg. Mine. Wear it anyway.”
He opened the door. Cold entered around his boots.
“And the socks are yours. Black boots by the wall. Two pairs underneath.”
He had one foot outside when Mandy stopped him.
“The car. When are you hauling it?”
“Walt’ll take the flatbed up today and drag it down.”
“Then what?”
“Old hay barn.”
“Not the shop?”
“Shop’s for machinery that earns its keep.”
He glanced back.
“Why?”
“No reason. I wondered how it works.”
He watched her.
“Unless somebody comes asking. Will they?”
“No.”
Too fast.
“All right.”
He did not believe her. He also did not ask again.
The door closed behind him.
Mandy stood with the wrong mug cooling in her hands.
The car.
A car like that did not only have a key fob. It had a service button on the mirror. Roadside assistance. Location tracking. The feature Preston’s cousin used when he forgot where the valet had parked.
Her stomach dropped.
She had abandoned the phone so nobody could trace it and climbed into a car designed to announce where it stopped.
For however many hours the battery remained alive, the car might have sat at the foot of the pass as a point on somebody’s screen.
She pictured Harlan in his study. Preston beside him. A calm voice giving them a road, a county, coordinates.
Here.
Here is where the car stopped.
She did not know whether anyone had reported it.
She did not know whether the car had answered.
The uncertainty spread through her more thoroughly than the cold had.
Andrew had promised nobody would come looking on his land. She had taken the words to bed with her.
The promise might already be useless.
Outside, a barn door rolled open. The horse in the end stall gave the same long complaint she had heard before dawn.
Twelve stalls.
A horse that bit.
A car that might have told them where she was.
For one moment, she wanted to run again.
But there was nowhere to run that did not begin with Andrew’s road, Andrew’s truck, or twenty-two miles of snow.
And she had already made one decision this morning.
She put down the mug.
There was nothing she could do about the car now. There was work she could do.
Mandy took Andrew’s coat from the peg. It swallowed her shoulders and hung almost to her knees. She pushed her feet into the black boots with two pairs of socks beneath them.
At the door, she looked back at the brown mug on the table.
His mug.
She had taken it without looking. He had let her keep it without a word.
Mandy opened the door.
The cold struck her face. The mountains had begun to show beyond the barn, black against the first thin light.
Since the altar, nothing had been this simple.
Twelve stalls.
She went to beat the daylight to them.