Chapter Ten #2
He'd brought Evelyn Granger here because she had a week left in Montana and she'd never seen a waterfall. That covered the reason. He could defend it if pressed.
She crouched at the edge of the pool and trailed her fingers through the frigid water, jerking them back with a yelp that made the gelding's ears prick forward.
She cupped her hands and splashed toward the falls, like she intended to splash back, and the absurdity of it—a grown woman from Springfield, Illinois, crouching on a rock in the Montana wilderness having a water fight with a waterfall—pulled him forward off the tree line and into the clearing before he'd decided to move.
"You fixin' to wade on in, or you gonna carry on like a young'un all afternoon?"
She turned and grinned at him with spray on her face, and her bonnet knocked crooked by the wind off the falls. Her cheeks had gone dark red from the cold, the running, whatever engine drove her when her guard dropped.
She stuck her tongue out at him.
Sam Cooper, thirty years old, a man who had tracked killers across three territories and brought them to justice at gunpoint, stood beside a waterfall while a twenty-three-year-old seamstress stuck her tongue out at him.
His chest did a thing that had no name, no precedent, no place in the life he'd built.
He looked at her crouching on the rocks with water on her face and that tongue still poking between her teeth, and for about five full seconds his mind went blank—every thought he'd carried about Wilkes, about bounties, about fencing and barn roofs and the hundred practical concerns that filled his days—gone.
Wiped clean. Replaced by this woman on these rocks with this ridiculous expression on her face.
He turned away because he had to.
"We'd best be headin' back now."
***
Evelyn insisted on the detour to Mrs. Montgomery's place.
Sam agreed because Evelyn insisting on a thing produced roughly the same outcome as the mule deciding to stop—you could argue, you could pull, but the result had already been settled by a force more stubborn than your own—and he did make her leave the pie unfinished.
She'd fashioned a bundle during the ride, dried wildflowers and pine sprigs tied together with a scrap of blue calico torn from her pocket or her sleeve or some hidden reservoir of fabric this woman apparently carried on her person at all times.
He'd given up tracking the movements of her hands, because they produced results from insufficient materials at a rate that defied accounting.
Mrs. Montgomery answered the door already wearing that look, the look of a person who expected to find an empty porch but opened the door anyway. When she spotted Evelyn, the look broke apart.
"Why, Miss Granger! You come back! Well, I'll be—I just—you come back!"
"I told you I would, Mrs. Montgomery. I don't say things I don't mean." Evelyn held out the bundle. "I know I said I’d bring a pie, but someone distracted me before I could make it.”
Sam cleared his throat. “I thought we’d be going home first, so she could finish it.”
“Either way…” Evelyn smacked his arm. “I fashioned this on the ride over to apologize. It ain't much of nothin', but I reckoned your windowsill could do with a bit of color."
The old woman took it in both hands, turning it over, running her thumb along the calico ribbon before holding it up against the gray afternoon light coming through the doorway.
"Oh, don’t you worry ’bout no pie, my girl, I’d rather have flowers and company than pie and no company!" She pressed it against her chest. "You'll stay a spell for tea?"
"We can't tarry today, ma'am. But I'll come by again tomorrow, if you'll have me. Then you’ll have pie and company, that’s a solemn promise!”
"Pie or no pie, I'll have you any day you care to come, Miss Granger. Any day the good Lord sends."
Sam stood behind Evelyn on the porch and kept his mouth shut, because the thing happening between these two women required no contribution from him.
Mrs. Montgomery looked at Evelyn the way Sarah looked at Evelyn—the way a person looked at a thing they'd been missing without knowing they'd been missing it until it showed up on their porch carrying wildflowers tied with calico.
The horses picked their way along the familiar trail, their breath steaming in the dropping temperature, the saddle leather creaking in steady rhythm beneath them.
Sam let the quiet hold because his head had gotten full of things he lacked the vocabulary to sort through, and talking would only make the sorting harder.
When they reached the homestead, Sam unsaddled the horses while Evelyn went inside to start supper, running the curry comb over the mare's coat by lantern light and forking hay into the stalls and breaking ice on the water buckets.
The barn work took twenty minutes, routine and steady, the kind of work that usually cleared his head.
Today, it didn't clear much of anything.
Inside, the house had warmed. Evelyn stood at the cookstove working on beans and cornbread, her coat on its hook by the door, her hair coming loose from its pins the way it did by evening.
She turned when he came through the door, and she had that look.
The unguarded one. The one she'd worn at the waterfall.
The one that meant every wall she kept between herself and the world had come down, at least for the moment.
"Sam."
He stopped by the door with his hand still on the latch.
"Today was the most beautiful day of my life."
She turned back to the stove, stirred the beans, tucked a strand of hair behind her ear.
She went on cooking as though she'd commented on the weather looking fair for tomorrow, as though the sentence she'd just put into the air of his kitchen weighed the same as any other sentence a person might say on an ordinary evening.
Sam closed the door behind him, hung his coat on the peg, and set his hat on the shelf.
The most beautiful day of her life. Twenty-three years on this earth—every day she'd lived through at the orphanage, every day in Springfield, every letter she'd written, every sunrise she'd watched—and the day she'd spent riding through his territory on his horses to his waterfall ranked above all of them.
He sat down at the kitchen table. She brought him coffee. He wrapped his hands around the cup while she moved around the kitchen behind him, stirring and seasoning and humming a tune he didn't recognize under her breath.
Seven days. A week from now she'd be on a train heading east. Seven days, then the kitchen would go quiet, the flour would stop appearing on every surface, the chair across from him at supper would sit empty.
Seven days until this house went back to being the place he passed through between bounties instead of the place he—
He sat there with the lukewarm coffee going cold in his hands, listening to her humming.