11. Grounded #2
“No.”
“Then I’ll stop saying it.”
I see her face, poker straight.
She is completely serious. And completely unbothered. And has gone back to Dulcie as though the conversation had resolved itself, which, from her perspective, it apparently has.
I shake my head.
“You’re remarkable,” I say. I don't entirely mean to say it out loud.
She doesn’t look up. But something in the line of her shoulders changes, a slight shift, quickly corrected.
“You’re jetlagged from Nashville,” she says.
“It’s a twenty-minute drive.”
“Conference room jetlag,” she says. “Different kind.”
I laugh.
A real one. Out on the November afternoon, at a paddock gate, over a joke about conference rooms.
She is still not looking at me, but I can see from here that she is not smiling.
* * *
I stay at the barn longer than I need to.
I help with the afternoon tasks, which I have been doing long enough that I no longer need to be told what they are. Water buckets. Hay nets. The feed room restocked in the order Angel has established, which I now know by heart, which is a fact I choose not to examine too closely.
We work in the comfortable silence that has developed between us over eight weeks. It’s the kind that doesn’t require maintenance, simply the absence of the need to fill space.
At one point, I pick up the wrong supplement container, and she corrects me without looking up.
“That’s Clover’s. Dulcie’s is the blue lid.”
“They look identical.”
“The lids are different colors.”
“Both blue.”
She looks up then, as if someone has just been told something factually incorrect by someone confident of it.
“One is blue,” she says. “One is teal.”
I look at the containers. I look at her.
“Those are the same color.”
“They are not the same color.”
“Angel.”
“Cash.”
She is entirely serious. I am also entirely serious, which means one of us is wrong about a color, and neither of us is going to concede.
“Ivy knows they’re different colors,” she says.
“Ivy has been working with these horses for a year.”
“So have I.”
“You are proving my point.”
She takes the container from my hand, puts it back on the shelf, and hands me the correct one without a word.
I use it.
She goes back to what she was doing.
The matter is closed.
I spend the next ten minutes thinking about the word teal and whether I have ever used it to describe a color, and come up empty.
At some point, Ivy appears in the barn doorway, takes in the scene, me with a water bucket, Angel with the supplement chart, and produces profound neutrality that convinces absolutely no one.
“Hayes is coming for dinner Thursday,” she says, to neither of us in particular. “Angel, you’re invited. Cash, you’re also invited.”
She disappears before either of us can respond.
Angel looks at the doorway Ivy just vacated. Then at me.
“She did that on purpose,” Angel says.
“Definitely,” I say.
“She’s been doing it on purpose for three weeks.”
“I know.”
A pause.
“She’s not subtle,” Angel says.
“No,” I agree. “She’s really not.”
Angel returns to the supplement chart with the focused efficiency of someone choosing not to react.
The thing about Ivy’s dinner invitation is that it is a dinner invitation with Hayes and Ivy, which is not the same as what I am about to propose.
Still, it has opened a door, and I am a man who has spent eight weeks learning from a gray horse that when a door opens, you do not stand in the hall.
* * *
The Last Light
She is locking the barn when I catch her.
Not dramatically. She is pulling the barn door closed with the practiced efficiency of someone who has done it a thousand times, and I am standing approximately where I always stand when I am trying to look like I am not waiting for something.
She looks at me.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says.
“What thing?”
“The thing where you’re standing somewhere with a reason that doesn’t quite hold up.”
I look down at my hands. Then back at her.
“I came to ask you something.”
She waits. No lean forward. No look of interest. Just waiting, with the patience of someone who has all the time in the world and isn't going to make this any easier for me.
Which is fair. I appreciate it about her, and I find it maddening in equal measure.
“Have dinner with me,” I say. “Not Ivy’s dinner. Not a session thing. Just dinner. In Nashville, somewhere you like, Thursday before Ivy’s thing or a different night entirely, I don’t care which.”
It comes out in a run, which is not how I intended it.
She looks at me for a long moment.
The barn light behind her is going. The field is cold and still. Somewhere across it, the farmhouse porch light is already on.
“You rehearsed that,” she says.
“I most certainly did not.”
“That was not a rehearsed speech.”
“No.”
Her expression is measured, suggesting she is deliberating.
Then: “Friday.”
“Friday,” I say.
“There’s a place on Gallatin Pike. Small. Good food. They won’t care who you are.”
“Perfect.”
“Okay.” She says goodbye and heads to her truck.
I watch her headlights cross the dark field.
I have been protecting something here without fully understanding what it is.
I think I understand now.