Chapter 35
MAGS
Benny's specials board reads: THE GRUMPY RANCHER. Dark. Strong. Finally Off The Market. THE REDHEAD. Spicy Brown Sugar Latte. She Had Permits. He Had No Idea. Order Both. Obviously.
I know because we drove past it a couple weeks ago, the last load from the apartment in the bed of his truck.
Luke didn't say a single word, which means he saw it and has decided, in his economy of speech, that acknowledging it would only encourage Benny.
He is probably right. Benny doesn't need encouragement.
Benny needs a new hobby and a longer blackboard.
I'm sitting on the cabin porch with my third coffee when he comes out of the barn, and I watch him cross the yard in the October light without pretending I'm doing something else.
The cottonwoods dropped their gold two weeks ago. The aspens along the river are holding on, stubbornly, which I respect. The first hard frost dusted the peaks white last night
I checked the ridge camera feed from the kitchen table at four forty-five, Luke already gone to the barn.
The pack showed up on the eastern ridge at dawn, all six collars pinging clean.
Eleven leading them into the timber above the south pasture like she owns the ground because she does now that the conservation easement is signed and nobody is staging dead calves or cutting fence lines to convince anyone otherwise.
Luke sees me watching from the porch and does not alter his pace by a single step.
I love that about him. I have not told him I love that about him. He probably already knows.
"Fence along the north draw," he says, coming up the steps. He takes the coffee mug out of my hands, drinks, hands it back. "Cal's on it."
"Good morning to you too."
"Morning." He tips his hat brim back and looks at me with the expression that has been doing things to my vagina since June, the one that is not a smile and is also completely a smile.
His eyes move over me the way they do now. A sweep that starts at my face and ends at my midsection and comes back up. I watch him land on what he's looking for and find it, the small firm change under my flannel shirt that wasn't there in September, and something in his jaw does the thing.
"Stop that," I say.
"I'm not doing anything."
"You're doing the jaw thing."
He looks at me. "You want to talk about what my jaw could be doing right now?"
Heat moves up my throat. "We're going to be late."
"We're not going to be late." His mouth curves. "And that's not a no."
He tips my chin up and drags his jaw slow down the side of my neck, the stubble catching, and the cold morning air makes it worse, or better, and I feel it all the way down.
Then he sits on the step below me, his back against the post, and tips his head back to look at the ridge where the first snow is sitting on the granite above the tree line, pale and permanent as a decision.
His hand finds my knee. Rests there. Not asking anything.
This is the part I didn't plan for. Not the danger, not the data, not the case that became the most documented predator corridor study in the Northern Rockies by accident.
Because when someone steals your equipment and threatens your wolves and fires a warning shot six feet from your boots, you document everything, and it turns out that kind of meticulous misery produces a dataset nobody else in the country has.
My methods paper went out to the journal in October. I got a revise-and-resubmit back in twelve days, which my advisor once told me was practically a love letter if you knew how to read it.
I know how to read it.
The Copper River Watershed Study runs three years, federal and university co-funded, anchored here, my name on the grant, my pack, my ridge cameras, my data.
The field station is technically a federal address.
My truck is parked next to Luke's in the drive and my field notes are on his kitchen table.
My boots, both pairs, the work ones and the ones I wore the night of the break-in, are by his door.
Not my door. His. Ours.
I've been at the cabin since September.
His hand is still on my knee. The ridge is quiet. Eleven's collar pings at eight-second intervals on my watch app.
"It's a five-minute walk," he says.
"Claire said eleven."
"It's ten-twenty."
"Mags."
"What?"
He turns his head and looks at me. The way he looked at me on the south pasture the first morning I walked his fence line, before either of us would have admitted what that look meant.
Except now I know and he knows I know. We are sitting in the October light with his hand on my knee and the wolves on the ridge and a baby the size of a lemon who is going to be, according to this man's stated prediction, the most outargued human being in three states.
We are not late.
Claire opens the door before we knock, which means Lucy called from across the yard, which means I have been reliably informed on the dynamics of this family and am no longer surprised by any of them.
"There she is." Claire gets both hands on my face, tips it down, and presses a kiss to my forehead the way she does with all of them, every time, like it's a reflex she developed when they were small and never saw any reason to stop.
Her eyes are bright in a way that has nothing to do with the cold.
"Come inside. Nora has been asking for you since eight o'clock. "
"Mags-ee!" Nora hits me at approximately knee height, both arms around my legs, face tipped up. "Wuke, Wuke. Uncle May-mun said a bad word. Mama said Nora. Did you bring the woof puter? Wuke —"
"Not today, bug," I say.
"— Wuke she didn't bring the woof puter —"
Luke looks at me.
"The laptop," Lucy says, now in the kitchen, without turning around.
Luke looks at Mason across the kitchen. Mason, who is holding Viv's hand, spreads his free hand in a gesture of pure innocence. The wedding binder is open on the kitchen table behind him.
"June second," Viv says to me, as greeting. "We're doing June second. Tell me that's good for your calendar."
"That's Luke's birthday," I say.
Silence. Four heads turn toward Mason.
"I knew that," Mason says.
"Mason," Luke says.
"I absolutely knew that. I thought it would be —"
"Mason."
"A nice, symmetrical —"
"Find a different date."
"Viv likes June second."
"Viv," Luke says, "likes my brother, who is going to pick a different date."
Viv is already laughing. She has the laugh of a woman who knew exactly what she was marrying into and chose it with her eyes open. "June ninth," she says. "Final answer. I'll call the venue."
"You already called the venue," Mason says.
"I called them about June second. I'll call them again." She squeezes his hand and takes the binder away from him with the practiced efficiency of a woman who has been managing her own logistics since before Mason McAllister had any opinions about them.
Colt comes through from the back porch with Hank on his arm, and Hank, who is eleven months old and in the stage of wanting to touch every single thing on earth, immediately reaches for my hair. I let him get a fistful. He makes a sound of profound satisfaction.
"He does that to Ellery constantly," Colt says.
"It's the red." Ellery appears from the hallway with her guitar. She sets it against the wall and comes to kiss my cheek. "He thinks it's a toy. I've given up correcting him."
Hank has not released my hair and I am not going anywhere until he decides to.
"He inherited the hair grab from me," Luke says watching this from across the kitchen, which is the most Luke McAllister sentence he has ever spoken, and I want it engraved on something.
Lunch is loud and warm, and everyone talks at once and nobody waits their turn and Nora, who turned three in September, has developed a comprehensive set of opinions about wolves that she delivers directly to me between bites of her roll.
They are largely accurate. I tell her so and she takes this as an invitation to continue.
Lucy catches my eye across the table with the expression of a woman who has been living with this for three years and has only recently made peace with it.
Shane has been at this table his whole life and he is quiet the way Luke and Colt are quiet. Paying attention to everything and volunteering nothing, which makes him Lucy's perfect opposite and somehow her perfect match.
Colt is telling a story about a heifer and the north pasture water line that involves a great deal of hand gesturing and ends with Cal standing in mud to his knees.
I am on my second helping of Claire's roast chicken and mashed potatoes and have not once thought about leaving the table, which two months ago would have been unthinkable.
Luke notices but doesn't say anything. He puts another roll on my plate and goes back to eating, and I let him.
Mason is pretending not to watch Viv. Claire is watching all of it from her end of the table with the expression of a woman who has been given back something she thought she'd lost.
I know that expression. I've been watching her wear it since June. It used to make me feel like an observer, but now it makes me feel like evidence.
Luke's hand finds my knee under the table. His thumb drags once across the inside seam of my jeans.
I do not react. I am a professional.
"Mags-ee," Nora says. "Are the woofs cold?"
"They have fur," I say. "They're warmer than we are."
She thinks about this. "Do they have blankies?"
"They use each other."
This delights her. She turns immediately to Shane. "Daddy, can we use each other for warm?"
"We do already, bug," Shane says. "That's what a family is."
Claire makes a sound that might be the beginning of crying and covers it with her coffee mug.
Ellery reaches over and squeezes her hand without looking.
These women have a whole language that operates underneath the audible conversation, and I have been slowly learning it since July, the way you learn a new field site, not by studying it but by spending enough time in it that the patterns start to land.