9. Ryker
Ryker
I make elk steaks for dinner because I'm running out of ways to avoid sitting across from her at the table. The stool-and-counter arrangement won't hold much longer without becoming a statement about something I'm not ready to state.
The elk comes from the freezer, thawed in cold water, seasoned with salt, black pepper, and dried rosemary from last summer.
Cast iron skillet, high heat, three minutes per side.
I've cooked this cut a hundred times and the process asks nothing of my mind, which is a problem because my mind keeps going back to the same place.
The small of her back under my arm. The warmth of her palms through my shirt.
The six inches I held like a line in the sand.
That was three hours ago. She's on the stool reading Lonesome Dove and I'm at the stove and neither of us has mentioned it.
"It smells incredible," she says. She's watching me over the top of the book. "What is it?"
"Elk backstrap. Took this one in October off the south ridge. Six-point bull, about seven hundred pounds. Biggest animal I've dressed in these mountains."
"You hunt."
"I eat what I hunt. There's a difference, or at least I tell myself there is."
"What's the difference?"
"Sport hunters want the rack. The photo and the taxidermy and the story for the bar. I want the meat. The rack on this one is in the lean-to under a tarp because I haven't figured out what to do with it and throwing it away felt wrong."
"You feel guilty about the antlers."
"I feel guilty about wasting a part of an animal I killed."
"It's a little bit the same."
I look at her. She's almost smiling. It changes her whole face. I turn back to the steaks.
I set the table. Two plates, two forks, two knives, two glasses of water. She makes her way over from the stool slowly, limping but mobile. I don't help her. She sits. I sit. We're across from each other at the heavy wooden table.
She takes the first bite and closes her eyes. The sound she makes is small and private. I look at the fire.
"This is the best thing I've ever eaten," she says. "And I worked in a diner for two years, so I've eaten a lot of things."
"The diner had elk?"
"The diner had a menu that hadn't changed since 1987 and a deep fryer that predated indoor plumbing.
But the cherry pie was real. Made from scratch.
Greta's recipe. She guarded it like a state secret.
I tried to reverse-engineer it once and she caught me measuring the crust and gave me a lecture about culinary espionage that lasted twenty minutes. "
"Culinary espionage."
"Her exact words. She said if she caught me with that measuring cup near her pie tin again, she'd revoke my apron privileges. The pie was sacred."
She's smiling now. A real one that uses her whole face.
"Tell me about the diner," I say.
She talks. I listen.
She tells me about the morning regulars.
Mr. Henderson with his Tuesday cherry pie and five-dollar tip.
A woman named Dolores who came in every Saturday with a crossword puzzle and scrambled eggs and rye toast, and once spent forty-five minutes arguing that the capital of Burkina Faso was Bobo-Dioulasso.
A trucker named Ray who left origami animals on the table instead of tips.
She kept them all in a shoebox under the register.
"A shoebox," I say.
"I keep things in shoeboxes. Important things. My mom's note is in a shoebox. The origami crane Ray made for my birthday is in a shoebox. My whole life fits in about four shoeboxes, which is either very sad or very efficient."
I think about Mason's report. No emergency contacts. Four calls a week, three to the diner. A life that fits in four shoeboxes. I don't say any of it.
"What about you?" she says. She sets her fork down and leans forward. "Where did you come from before all of this? Before the mountains and the cabin and the badge."
"Small town outside of Cedar Falls. My dad was a farrier. Shoed horses for thirty years. Could tell you more about a horse from looking at its feet than most vets could with a full exam."
"Is he still alive?"
"Sadly no. He died of a heart attack. My mother died a few years later."
Her silence fills the cabin.
"Your mom wrote you a letter," she says. Carefully.
"She writes one every month. I answer about every third one, which makes me a terrible son. She sends care packages with chamomile tea and homemade jam and socks she knits herself that are always two sizes too small because she refuses to believe her son wears a size thirteen boot."
"Size thirteen."
"The boots are in the corner if you want to verify."
"I believe you. They look like small boats."
I'm smiling. I can feel it on my face.
The conversation drifts. She asks about the mountains and I tell her about winter above the tree line, about the way sound carries in extreme cold, about the morning I saw a mountain lion on the ridge and we watched each other for three full minutes without moving.
She asks about the military and I give her the outline.
Enlisted at eighteen. Selection at twenty.
Helmand, Kandahar. She doesn't push when I stop.
Then she says, "Can I tell you something I've never told anyone?"
The room changes.
"Yeah."
She looks at her hands in her lap, fingers laced tight.
"I want to own a greenhouse." She says it fast. "Not a big one.
Not a commercial operation. A small one, with a workshop attached, where I could grow things and sell them.
Herbs, mostly. Culinary herbs, medicinal herbs.
Maybe seedlings in the spring. I've been reading about it for years.
I have notebooks full of layouts and planting schedules and species lists.
I had notebooks. They're in the apartment. If the apartment is still there."
She hasn't looked up. Her thumbs move against each other in small circles. She's handed me the most private thing she owns. The dream she never said out loud because saying it out loud makes it real and real things can be taken away.
"My mother grew herbs," I say. It comes out of a drawer I forgot I had.
"She had a garden behind the house. Basil, thyme, rosemary, mint.
The rosemary bush was so old it had turned into a small tree.
She used to cut sprigs and put them in mason jars on every windowsill.
The whole house smelled like rosemary. I grew some on the sill here last summer.
It didn't survive the frost, but for about four months the cabin smelled like her kitchen. "
Zoe looks up. Her eyes are full.
"Rosemary is perennial," she says. Her voice is thick but steady. "It shouldn't have died. Did you keep it near the window?"
"On the sill."
"That's the problem. The glass gets too cold at night and the root system freezes even if the room is warm.
You need to move it back from the window by about eight inches and put a layer of perlite in the bottom of the pot for insulation.
The plant doesn't know it's inside. It only knows the temperature at the root line.
" She says it with quiet authority. The shift from vulnerability to competence happens so naturally I don't think she notices. But I notice.
"You'd be good at it," I say. "You'd be really good at it, Zoe. The greenhouse. The herbs. All of it. You should do it."
Her face does something I haven't seen before. The look of a person who has been carrying something heavy for a very long time and has just been told that the heavy thing is not ridiculous.
"You mean that," she says.
"I don't say things I don't mean. Ask Mason. It's one of my least charming qualities."
She laughs, softly. And then she reaches across the table and puts her hand on mine. “Can I tell you something else?”
“Always,” I whisper.
She pauses briefly before saying, “I have a flash drive. I downloaded everything from Tyler’s computer. Honestly, I’m not even sure what I’ve found and if it can help. It mainly looked like financial records I couldn’t understand.”
I blow out a deep breath. “How?”
“I had to go to the bathroom. Tyler and another man were fighting. It all happened so fast.”
“Where’s the drive now?”
She pulls her hand back for a moment and reaches into the pocket of her jeans. She pulls out a small USB drive and slides it across the table toward me.
I grab the USB. “Thank you for trusting me.”
She replaces her hand atop mine, and I should pull my hand back. The list of reasons is long. Professional conduct. Fourteen women whose cases depend on mine staying clean.
I don't pull back.
I turn my hand over under hers, palm up, and let her fingers settle into the spaces between mine. We sit like that. The fire burns. The elk goes cold on the plates. The wind howls. My hand stays where it is.
"I should do the dishes," she says after a while. She doesn't move her hand.
"I'll do them."
"We could do them together."
"We could."
Neither of us moves. The word we hangs in the warm air between us.
Eventually we do the dishes. Side by side at the sink. She washes. I dry. Our elbows touch on every third plate and neither of us adjusts the spacing.
After she goes to bed I sit at the table alone. The sketchbook is in the drawer and I leave it there. I've drawn her hand once already. I don't need to draw it again.
I can still feel it.