CHAPTER 7
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Third morning I had woken before the alarm I did not set.
The porch boards were already warm at half past six in the morning.
I came out in yesterday's jeans and the T-shirt I had slept in, hair loose because I had forgotten to put it up and my mouth tasted of nothing yet, and the light through the eastern haze was the color of a peach cut too early.
Somewhere down-valley a truck started and did not come this way.
The ridge behind the cabin was a black line against a pink one.
Cool at this hour, but I already knew what cool meant here. It meant the day was coming for us fast.
Through the open great-room door: Luke on the couch.
Coffee cup at his knee. From the empty half of the French press on the counter I could tell he had been up two hours, minimum.
He did not turn when the porch board under my heel gave a small dry pop.
He knew I was there. He had known I was there before I was.
(the body learns a schedule faster than the memo does.)
I paused at the entry with my hand on the jamb and did not go to him. His profile in the first-light half-shadow belonged to a man who expected every hour to carry a threat. It was not comforting. It was a marker.
“There's coffee,” he said.
“I saw.”
I am becoming a person who says I saw. That is a Montana person. That is fast.
He turned his head then, only far enough to catch me at the edge of his vision, and the corner of his mouth was not quite a smile. A concession. He went back to whatever he was watching out the west window that I could not see from here.
I took my coffee. Instant, because I did not trust the French press yet without watching him make it three more times. I took it out to the top step and sat and looked down the switchback toward a valley I had known for eight days and was not going to stop watching until I did.
By a quarter past eight I had the oats going.
Marta's raspberry jam was in a small pale-yellow jar on the counter, and it was astonishing that anything made of a fruit I had eaten a hundred times could taste like a thing I had never had.
There was a spoon in it that had been in it since Day 5.
I sat at the pine table across from Luke, and he had poured himself a second cup from the French press without asking whether I wanted any, because he had offered at dawn and my answer had gone on the record.
“You'd have to run a right-of-way survey,” I said, “to make that fence legal if we ever wanted to fight over the strip.”
Luke set his mug down.
Half-smile. Full stop.
“A right-of-way survey.”
“I mean an easement instrument. I said it wrong.”
“You said right-of-way survey.”
Beat.
“Are you going to do this every time.”
“Every time.”
I laughed. It came up out of my chest without asking, which was not my usual rhythm in a kitchen, eight days into knowing him, and I caught myself reaching for the No.
2 pencil that lives in my hair when I am at my desk in Denver, except I was not at my desk in Denver and there was no pencil, and my hand came down against the back of my neck and my neck was warmer than it should have been at a quarter past eight in the morning.
He watched this. He did not comment.
He got up to put his mug in the sink, and on the way past he set his palm flat on the pine table next to my bowl for a half-second, not on me, next to me, and then he was at the sink and running water and the moment was done before I had decided what to do with it.
It was the closest we had come to a touch since the courthouse steps.
(I said I said it wrong. He heard me and made me hear it and did not correct me. He teased. That is a different currency than any I have carried into this house.)
By ten-thirty, I was upstairs finishing the migration.
The estate-lawyer letter came out of my back pocket for the last time.
I had been carrying it there since Day 1, and my pocket had molded around it: a soft rectangle where the denim had learned.
I folded it once more along its old creases and slid it into the paperback of Angle of Repose on the nightstand, behind the silver bookmark.
My firm had given me that bookmark when they promoted me.
A small silver oval on a leather cord, the firm's logo faintly stamped on one face. I did not fold pages down. The paperback closed over the letter like a mouth that had been fed.
Warren's other letter, the one Marta had held for four years and given me over dinner at the main house, I folded once and set behind my passport in the top dresser drawer.
Two drawers his, four drawers mine, by an agreement neither of us called an agreement.
The top drawer was where he kept a small wooden box I had not opened.
The second was socks, folded like small animals.
Below that: mine. I had not opened his drawers and I did not need to.
I was learning how a room can be shared without being audited.
Above the dresser, on a plain pine shelf between a chipped enamel water cup and the base of a green-shaded reading lamp, one framed photograph.
I lifted it because I was moving the water cup two inches to the left to make room for the paperback once I had finished it, and because I wanted to see what was under it.
Two boys.
Eight and ten, maybe. Fishing camp. Big Maine sky.
Swim trunks and blue lips. The older one had an arm around the younger one's shoulders and was looking down at him with an expression I had to look at twice to name, and then I decided, no, I would not name it, not today.
The younger one was laughing at something outside the frame.
The older one was looking at the younger one the way one looks at trouble one has decided in advance to love.
I set the photograph back exactly where it had stood. The clean rectangle in the dust recorded the decision he had made when he chose that shelf.
(later. Whatever this is, later.)
Coming back down the stairs I let my hand trail on the pine banister, and I passed the great-room shelf, and there, spine out among a row of paperback westerns and one Peterson field guide to birds: the Loeb hardback of Meditations.
Marcus Aurelius. Greek on the left, English on the right.
I knew the edition because a professor of mine at CU-Denver had a whole wall of them and made us buy the Odes.
The book remained on the shelf.
Today was not the day for that.
He was at the woodstove with a rag and a can of stove polish, and when I came past he said, “Sink's yours if you need it,” without looking up, and I went into the kitchen and poured a glass of water because I wanted to see the tap.
At one-fifteen, the kitchen tap caught my attention.
I turned the faucet at the sink for a glass and the stream wobbled. A slack half-second in the pour, a hiccup, a caught breath, then steady again. It ran clear. It ran cold. It ran.
I had never in my life had reason to notice a tap.
Shit.
“Your water,” I called out to the porch.
He was not on the porch anymore. He was already behind me before I had finished the second word, close enough that the air shifted before the man did. He did not touch me. He stood at my right shoulder and watched the stream. I did not turn the faucet off. He did not tell me to.
“Well pressure,” he said.
“It's dropping?”
“Not yet. Not much. Watch it.”
The well has an opinion about the summer.
(and I am learning to hear opinions from things I have never bothered to listen to.)
He reached around me and shut the tap. His arm did not touch my arm. His forearm went across my line of sight, walnut skin against the pale enamel of the sink, and I did not think about the temperature of him. I decided not to think about the temperature of him.
“Long shower today,” he said. “Short one tomorrow.”
“Understood.”
He went back out.
I was careful in the cabin bathroom for the rest of the day. I turned the tap when I needed it and I turned it off when I did not. A mountain teaches you many small motions, and I was beginning to understand that this is what a summer is for.
Four in the afternoon. I took Angle of Repose and the silver bookmark and my second glass of water onto the west porch, and I sat in the rocking chair that squeaks on the fifth rock, and I opened the book to page 214 because that was where the bookmark told me I had left off.
Fifteen feet off the porch, Luke had taken his shirt off and was splitting ponderosa with a maul.
I was not going to describe this. I was reading.
The paragraph on page 214 was about a woman in 1876 who was bored by her husband's engineering diagrams and had begun to draw the men on the survey crew in her sketchbook without telling him.
Stegner was not making her likable. She was doing it because there was a mine engineer named Oliver who did not deserve any of it, and she was trying to invent a self who did.
I looked up.
Luke's back was to me. There was a starburst-puckered scar on his right shoulder blade the size of my palm, white on tan, and the long flat muscles under it moved when the maul came down.
The maul came down. The wood split. He kicked the two halves apart with the outside of his boot and picked the next round up off the block one-handed. He did this again. He did this again.
I looked down at the book.
I read a paragraph.
My eyes went back to him.
Down at the book. I read a paragraph.
Up.
Hell.
I set the book down. I forgot to fold the bookmark inside.
I remembered to fold the bookmark inside because I did not want to lose the page.
I closed the book over the bookmark, and I turned my face into the wind and pretended I had been watching the ridge, which was the direction he was not, which fooled no one, particularly not me.
The wind smelled like hot resin and hay and the far-southern dust of a fire that was not our fire yet. He did not turn to look at me. The maul came down.
(I looked. I looked. I am going to have to make a peace with the fact that I looked.)