Chapter 15
She let Travis in for supper.
They ate the enchiladas at her new kitchen table, which was the only piece of furniture that had come with the house.
It was a little square table painted yellow, with two chairs that did not match.
The border collie lay under it. Travis opened two of the Shiners and told her about a colt he had looked at in Abilene.
She laughed at the right places. The enchiladas were good.
At nine o’clock he stood up and put his hat on.
He stood at her door with his hand on the knob. He did not open it. He was giving her the chance to say something. If she did, he would take his hat back off, and stay.
“Thank you for supper,” she said.
He looked at her a moment. Then he smiled, the big easy smile, and there was only a little bit of something else in it.
“Anytime, Rae,” he said, and went.
She stood at the window and watched his taillights go down the dirt road. Then she went out in the cold and fed Hondo his supper hay. He grumbled at her for being late.
* * *
She lived alone for three weeks.
It was not what she had expected. She had expected to be lonely, and she was, sometimes.
Mostly at night, when the house was so quiet she could hear the refrigerator.
She had expected to feel free. She did, sometimes.
Mostly in the mornings, when she drove herself to Kincaid’s in her own truck with the radio as loud as she wanted it.
What she had not expected was how ordinary it was.
She got up in the dark and fed the colts.
She drove to work. She started colts all morning and came home at noon and ate a sandwich at the yellow table.
She worked Hondo in the afternoon in her own pen.
She went to therapy on Tuesdays and Fridays by herself.
Hope said her grip was up another ten percent, and she could button her own shirt now, all the buttons, with the right hand.
It took a while, but she could do it. In the evenings she read, or talked to Carly on the phone, or sat on the porch in her coat and watched the stars come out over the cotton gin.
It was a good life. It was small and plain and it was all hers. She could see the rest of her life from there, if she wanted it. Twenty years, forty. Colts and coffee and the yellow table. A dog someday. Her name on a gate.
She would be fine. That was the thing she learned in the three weeks. She would be perfectly fine.
On Thanksgiving she went to Carly’s. Carly cooked a turkey in the tiny kitchen over the clinic and burned the rolls.
Clem and Beto came, and Dusty, and Manny with his wife, Yolanda, who brought four pies.
They crowded into Carly’s two rooms, and ate off paper plates on their knees, and argued about football.
Cole did not call. He did not come to the house. He did not send anything, not flowers, not a note, not a single text. She had told him she needed to be somewhere she could stay forever. He was letting her find out if she could.
It was the hardest thing he had ever done for her. She could tell, because she caught herself, twice a day, looking at her phone.
Carly caught her at it the Wednesday before the second Saturday in December. She had come out to float a mare’s teeth and stayed for chili, and she sat at the yellow table and watched Rae turn her phone face down for the third time in an hour.
“Okay,” Carly said. “I’ve been good. I have not said one word about him since you moved out here. I want credit for that.”
“You have credit.”
“So I’m going to say it once.” Carly put her spoon down.
“I’ve thought he was a coward since June.
I still mostly do. But he hauled your colts in here himself and drove off without one word to keep you.
And he hasn’t called you in three weeks.
I’ve seen him at the feed store, and he looks like hell, and he still hasn’t called. ”
“Carly.”
“I’m not telling you to go back. I’d rather you didn’t, if you want the truth.” Carly looked at her across the table. “I’m telling you you’ve looked at that phone four times since I sat down. Make up your mind, or put the phone in a drawer. One or the other. Living in between is going to kill you.”
She picked her spoon back up.
“That’s all,” she said. “Eat your chili.”
* * *
On the second Saturday in December, a little before dawn, she heard the helicopter.
She was in the barn with a flashlight, feeding. The sound came from the west, low and fast. A heavy rhythmic thudding that she felt in her chest before she really heard it. She went out into the pen and looked up.
It went right over the house. It was low enough that she could see the red and white of it against the gray sky, and the county seal on the tail. Its light was going. It was headed east, fast, toward somebody’s worst morning.
She stood in the cold pen with the flake of hay in her hand and watched it go until it was a speck, and then gone.
Twenty minutes from anywhere, Renee had said.
Somewhere east of here, somebody was lying on the ground waiting. Somebody’s wife, maybe. Somebody’s hand. And it was going to get there in twenty minutes because a man had stood in a barn office on a Sunday morning, where she would never see him, and given away the only thing that was his.
She put the hay in the corner for Hondo. She went in the house and stood at the yellow table with her coat still on.
Then she went into the bedroom and opened the drawer of the bedside table.
The ring was there, and beside it the envelope from the lawyer with the smoker’s voice.
The papers inside it had never been signed.
She put the ring in her coat pocket and buttoned the pocket.
She carried the envelope into the front room, opened the door of the little woodstove, and fed it in on top of last night’s coals.
She stood there until it caught and curled and went black.
Then she got her keys.
* * *
She drove to Kincaid’s first.
Travis was in the barn, doctoring a colt with a cut on its leg. He looked up when she came in, and saw her face. He set the medicine down on the shelf.
“Morning,” he said.
“Morning.”
She stood in the aisle. She had thought about how to say it the whole drive. In the end she said it plainly.
“You asked me something on your porch in August,” she said. “And you asked it again, without saying it, on my porch three weeks ago. I owe you an answer.”
Travis did not move.
“No,” Rae said. “Not now, and not later. I’m sorry.” She took a breath. “It’s not the paper. I’m still married on paper, but that’s not why. It’s that I’m still married in the rest of it too. I tried not to be. I found out I am.”
He looked at the floor of the barn aisle for a moment. When he looked up, he was smiling. It was a sad smile, and a real one.
“I figured,” he said. “I think I figured on the porch in August. But I’m glad I asked.
I’d rather have asked.” He took his hat off and turned it once in his hands.
“I’ll tell you something I’m not proud of.
When I hung your name on that gate in August, it wasn’t all about your work.
Some of it was about giving you a reason to stay on my side of the road.
” He put the hat back on. “Most of it was the work. But not all.”
Rae almost laughed. “I’d noticed.”
“Yeah. I figured you did.” He shrugged. “The job doesn’t change. Your sign stays on the gate. As long as you want it.”
“Thank you,” she said. It came out rough.
“Go on,” Travis said gently. “Wherever you’re going. The colts’ll keep till Monday.”
At the barn door she stopped and turned around. He had already picked the medicine back up and gone back to the colt. He was working carefully, with his back to her.
She had known he would be kind. She had not known it would cost her something too. It did. It was a real loss, and she let herself feel it all the way out to the truck.
* * *
She drove to the Ashby place the long way.
She came in the back gate on the north side, the one the hands never used.
She drove across the frozen pasture on the caliche road, with the heater going and the radio off.
The sky was pale and clear, and the grass was silver with frost. She drove down into the draw at the bottom of the far pasture.
She stopped the truck by the north tank.
She sat in the truck a minute with the engine running. Then she turned it off and got out.
It was cold. Her breath smoked. The windmill was turning slow, squeaking on every pass, and the water in the trough had a skin of ice at the edges. The steel float box on the side of the tank was frosted white.
There would be no snakes in it now. They were deep in the ground for the winter, in dens a long way down, asleep. She walked over to the float box anyway and stood beside it.
She put her right hand on the lid. The steel was so cold it burned. She could feel it with three of her fingers. The other two felt nothing at all.
She lifted the lid.
Inside was the float arm, and the valve, and a little drift of dead leaves in the corner. Nothing else. The water gurgled in the pipe.
She stood there, looking at the empty box.
Then she shut the lid, gently, and went back to the truck.
* * *
She drove up to headquarters from the north, past the machine shed and the hangar and the pad.
The pad was empty. The helicopter was still out on its call.
She drove past the bunkhouse. Clem was on the porch with his coffee, and he saw the white truck and stood up slowly, and did not wave.
She drove up the hill to the main house and parked in the yard where Cole used to sit in the truck with the phone to his ear.
Russ was crossing the yard in his old barn coat with a bucket of scratch for Sharon’s hens. He stopped when he saw her get out of the white truck. Neither of them moved.
“The aircraft went out before daylight,” he said. “Wreck on the Abilene highway. Wade had it off the pad in four minutes. I stood on the porch and timed it.” He looked down at the bucket. “Four minutes.”