17. You Can Stay #2
Nothing needed checking. The wire held, the trough was full, Rain was sound, and the rest of the horses had settled for the night. Harris rested both forearms on the top rail and smoked while a faint stain of wildfire smoke swallowed the lower stars along the western horizon.
Rain wandered closer.
“Go eat.”
She stopped several yards away and watched him.
“Stubborn old woman.”
One ear turned toward his voice.
A door closed somewhere behind him. Footsteps crossed the yard, disappeared into the grass, then returned against the harder dirt near the fence.
Harris knew who it was before Jay reached the edge of the barn light.
Of course he did.
Jay wore a dark jacket with his hands in the pockets. No camera hung from his shoulder.
That mattered.
He stopped several feet away. “Everything all right?”
“Yup.”
Jay looked along the wire, toward Rain, then across the pasture, as if searching for the practical problem Harris had come outside to solve.
“Fence down?”
“Nope.”
“Rain?”
“Nope.”
Jay studied him. “So this is recreational brooding.”
“Could go inside.”
“I could.”
He joined Harris at the fence, leaving several inches between them, and for once did not fill the silence.
Rain breathed softly beyond the wire. A horse shifted inside the barn, and the fence hummed faintly whenever the wind reached it.
Harris smoked to the filter and crushed the ember against the metal lid beside the post. Without the cigarette, he had nothing to do with his hands.
Jay remained beside him.
“You don’t have to stay,” Harris said.
Jay straightened. “All right.”
He pushed away from the fence.
Only then did Harris hear how the words must have sounded.
“Wasn’t telling you to leave.”
Jay stopped.
Harris kept his eyes on the pasture. Correcting himself felt more exposing than the original sentence had.
“You can stay. If you want, I mean.”
Jay returned to the rail. This time, his sleeve touched Harris’s along the wood.
After a while, Jay nodded toward Rain. “Did Nell come out here with her?”
“Sometimes. She used to find me here before Rain was born.”
“When you were hiding?”
“Wasn’t hiding.”
“Of course not.”
Harris rubbed his thumb across a crack in the top rail, the wood polished around it by years of hands. “When we were kids, she’d come out and talk until I told her whatever was wrong.”
“Effective strategy.”
“Annoying strategy.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
Harris glanced at him. Jay’s expression remained solemn enough that Harris could not accuse him of smiling.
“She always know where to find you?” Jay asked.
“Usually.”
Memories came easily out here. Nell perched on the upper rail because she knew it made him nervous.
Nell stealing his gloves and denying it while wearing them.
Nell sitting beside him after Walt announced some new plan for their lives, shoulder pressed against his as though the two of them had already agreed on a different one.
“She answered questions for me,” Harris said. “When we were little.”
“Because you wouldn’t?”
“Because she figured she knew what I was gonna say.”
“Did she?”
“Yup.”
Jay looked across the pasture. “That must have been maddening.”
“Drove our parents crazy.”
Nell never mistook silence for refusal. She would sit until the answer came, without turning her patience into something Harris owed her for later.
Claire had learned parts of it. Evan understood more than Harris gave him credit for. Della usually pushed through both silence and refusal until he answered.
Nell had simply known.
The field notebook returned with painful clarity.
ASK HARRIS. HE KNOWS.
As if there had never been a version of the world in which Harris was not there to answer her.
“She trusted you,” Jay said. “Not just with the ranch.”
The words could have been an intrusion. Jay offered them quietly and left enough room for Harris to reject them.
“She knew me.”
The words caught against something hard in Harris’s throat.
Jay kept his attention on the pasture.
That helped.
“She was the only person who knew all of it for a long time,” Harris continued.
“She keep it from everyone?”
“Never told a soul.”
“You trusted her.”
“Didn’t get much choice. She figured it out.”
Jay’s mouth moved faintly. “Of course she did.”
Harris almost smiled.
The ache beneath his ribs stayed where it was.
“She would’ve liked you,” he said.
Jay went still. “Because she chose me for the film?”
“Not only that.”
Harris could see it too easily.
Nell would have found him irritating for twenty minutes, then liked the talking, the nerve, and the fact that Harris telling him to mind his own business had never once convinced him to do it.
She would have appreciated the bad jokes more than Harris did and recognized, probably before Harris had, that Jay knew when to push and when to leave something alone.
She would have seen the rest before either of them managed to name it.
“I think I would’ve liked her,” Jay said.
“You would’ve.”
There was no hesitation in the answer.
Rain came close enough to put her pale muzzle above the wire. Harris rubbed the white star on her forehead, and she leaned into his hand.
Jay watched the mare instead of Harris.
After a while, he pushed away from the fence. “I should let you get some sleep.”
Harris’s first instinct was to stop him.
The cabin waited through the cottonwoods, private and dark. He could ask Jay back there. Part of him wanted to.
Yesterday had proved how quickly being alone together could turn into touching, and touching Jay was considerably easier than standing at a fence talking about Nell.
Maybe that was exactly why Harris didn’t ask.
He did not want to turn this into something else simply because something else was easier to carry.
“Walk back with you,” he said.
They crossed the yard together.
“Good night,” Jay said.
“Night.”
Harris remained where the paths divided until the lodge door closed behind him.
Then he returned to the cabin alone.
Nothing inside had changed. The blanket still lay across the couch, the narrow window framing the dark ridge beyond it. But the room did not feel quite the way it had before he left.
Harris sat in the dark.
Jay had followed him to the fence without a camera, without a question Harris was required to answer, and without trying to make what happened there into anything else.
Harris could still feel the warmth of his sleeve against his arm.