1. Learning the Geography #3
He unpacked enough to find clean clothes and the charger he had somehow buried beneath three camera batteries.
Dinner was still over an hour away. The protein bar in his backpack had been flattened into something resembling roofing material, but hunger lowered his standards considerably.
He had taken two bites when his phone buzzed with a voice message from Romy.
“Nobody here believes you’re actually in Montana.
Your mother called me because you didn’t answer fast enough, so I told her you were probably working—” Wind rushed across the microphone, followed by the electronic chirp of a crosswalk signal.
Romy must be walking home from the train.
“—which was obviously a tactical error, because now she thinks you’re already in danger.
I suggest you call somebody before both sides of the family mobilize. ”
Jay smiled. Romy was not related to him, but both sides of his family had absorbed her years ago, so completely that nobody bothered with the distinction anymore.
His mother called her when Jay got quiet.
His cousins included her in arguments she had not asked to join.
And Aunt Eleni sent her home with food in quantities more appropriate for a household of six.
Hearing her voice pulled the rest of home in behind it: his mother walking into his old Astoria bedroom without knocking, though he had not lived there in sixteen years.
His father making coffee strong enough to stain ceramic permanently.
Spanish from one room, Greek from another, English shouted over both because volume had become the family’s only shared dialect.
Jay’s family loved him loudly and complained about his travel schedule with equal commitment.
His mother had stopped asking whether he would be home for things and started asking whether she should save him a seat.
Jay always meant to become better at answering and showing up.
Then another shoot came along, and the intention followed him onto the next plane.
When he was in New York, he lived alone in Fort Greene—technically. Romy had a key, Priya had once occupied his couch for three weeks, and various relatives treated the apartment as a package-receiving facility with heating. He traveled too often for solitude to become a habit.
His family had a predictable rhythm whenever he arrived somewhere new.
For the first few days, the group chat filled with questions about flights, roads, food, and whether he had remembered to sleep.
By the second week, the messages usually thinned out—partly because everyone relaxed, partly because Jay became unreliable about answering once a project took hold.
He opened the family chat and sent the update they were waiting for.
Alive. Made it.
Replies began arriving before he could finish the protein bar.
By the time the dinner bell rang, Jay had answered enough of them to prevent an international search effort. He showered off the road dust, pulled his hair into a loose bun, and headed downstairs.
Dinner was loud enough to feel briefly familiar.
Walt sat near one end of the long table, having introduced himself during the scouting walk with a handshake, three questions about drone insurance, and no interest in conversational padding.
Della occupied the other end in theory. In practice, she kept rising to check a serving dish, speak quietly to one of the kitchen staff, or redirect a plate before it reached the wrong end of the table.
Evan and Elise managed the twins between them. Willa ate from three plates and denied involvement in all of them, while June arranged her vegetables according to a principle nobody else was permitted to understand.
Walt asked Priya about the drone permits. Della pressed another helping on Eli despite his increasingly sincere insistence that he was full, and conversation moved easily around the table.
After dinner, Priya reviewed the following day’s schedule with Jay in the conference room while Eli checked batteries at the far end of the table.
“Harris at four thirty?” Priya looked doubtful. “We’ll see.”
“He’ll show.”
“You sound confident.”
“He agreed.”
“So did half the people who’ve ghosted us in three countries.”
“He wants to know what we’re doing too badly not to show.”
Priya studied him a fraction longer than the schedule required.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
She returned to the page. Jay had been on the ranch less than a day. There could not possibly be anything for her to have noticed.
Near midnight, he opened his window before getting into bed. The ranch had disappeared into darkness except for low barn lights and a porch lamp through the cottonwoods south of the lodge.
Harris’s cabin.
A figure sat beneath the light, too far away for detail beyond broad shoulders and one boot propped along the porch rail. Then a small flame appeared as Harris bent toward a cigarette, one hand cupped around it.
Of course he smoked. Someone had clearly assembled the man from every Western image Jay distrusted and then made him inconveniently attractive inside all of them.
The ember moved through the darkness once, then again. Jay drew the curtain and told himself he had only been learning the geography.