Olive smiled at me as she scattered flour across the table and tossed down a ball of dough. I chopped my apple and brushed the pieces into a cornflower blue bowl. In the shade before a statuesque post oak, Thad split the wood Poppy carried over while Asa and Stot discussed plans for the barn. Asa adjusted the brim of his bowler hat, and Stot gripped a sheet of ledger paper, their design etched on it. Olive followed my gaze to the men. “They’re two peas in a pod, huh?” she said.
My eyebrows flung skyward. No one would ever say those two were alike. Stot with his powerful strides. His wayward black hair and sharp cheekbones. Asa, on the other hand, was steady as a brook, predictable as Stot was stormy. And yet there was an earnestness, a sense of being firmly rooted, as if they’d both lost the world, only to find it again.
A woodpecker dove from the sugar maple and drummed against their home. Olive shooed him away and clicked her knife through the dough, cutting defined shapes. It was peculiar, Olive likening Stot to her husband, as she’d cautioned me away from a friendship with Stot. Now she glanced at Stot with affection.
“When’d you start softening toward Stot?” I asked, scraping a pile of cuttings into a bowl.
“Suppose about the time I knew him as Stot.” Olive cocked her head and laid the dough over sugared apples. Sophia stood, carried her basket of linens inside, and Olive continued: “Once, when Thad spent the better part of two days cutting wood, then hauling the lumber and some quail off to Cross Station for sale, Stot ran into him along the way, and then stood by him as Thad sold the lumber. Nobody dared barter with an outlaw beside him—Thad made eighty cents. A fair amount, I’d think.” Olive pinched the dough on her pie, sharpening a star shape. “Stot just started standing by us, I suppose. He’s like that stallion of his—sleek and striking and fierce but altogether different once tamed.”
“Stot is definitively not tamed.”
“No?” Her mouth twisted into a smirk. “Not yet?”
“Gawd.” My face flushed. “Not ever.”
“Mmm.”
Warmth pressed up my neck. I focused on clicking my blade through the apples. I should be frightened of him but—I just wasn’t. Perhaps the darkness in me took comfort in the darkness in him. I shoved each tale of the Lawman aside, reasoned that there must be some explanation.
Their sheepdog Old Watch knocked the back of my knees, and I bent to pet him. Across the field, Stot caught my gaze. He adjusted the angle of his broadbrim, and I thought of all the times I’d watched Pa adjust his hat the same way. Memories of bygone farm gatherings flickered past: plunging into the creek from a high bough, a last warm summer’s day; Lark fumbling a pumpkin, insides splattering the crops, us laughing uproariously; my ma singing,There’s a wideness in God’s mercy, like the wideness of the sea,her aria slipping between the oat grasses; Pa gesturing to fox tracks in groundcover; looping a gun belt cross my hips, Magnolia studying the sketches in a botany tome; too many remembrances to parse, each nuance varied and the same. I didn’t know when I’d stopped enjoying the moments of my life, when each day felt like a trial.
“I also admire that notion with his brother’s widow.” Olive set her pie in the outdoor oven, then wrought her hands in her apron, wiping off dust and dough.
“What’s that now?”
She gathered bowls and rags, tidying up. “Surely you’ve discussed that?”
“That his twin died?” I washed my hands and grabbed a few apples.
Olive cracked open a log cabin patchwork quilt and settled on the ground with a bowl of pecans for an apple crumble, her brows tugged together. Her palm smoothed a ripple between a grass-green floral square and a navy-checked rectangle.
“Oh, honey.” She sighed, the lines beside her mouth drawn. “He should have told you. His twin left a widow and four daughters. Stot’s moving them down come spring, marrying the widow, caring for the children.”
My hands clenched, fingernails cutting into the flesh of the apples. “No,” I said. A weight sank in my stomach, myself suddenly woozy and adrift. “I didn’t know.”
“I do like the man.” Olive split a nut and brushed some residue from a shell, tension knotted across her shoulders. “But he’s a wanted outlawandbetrothed.”
I joined Olive on the quilt, gripping the ridge of my pleated ivory collar. I pulled the halves of a nut apart, the heft fragile and airless, like worn leather. It shouldn’t hurt to hear such a thing. I hadn’t lost anything. I didn’t even know Stot, truly. He’d seemed untethered like me, and yet—he had a sweetheart back home. Supposed that was the portrait of the woman, the slip of lace. I tipped my palm, sifting the crumbles into the bucket.
Olive picked up a wayward fleck of pecan from the quilt. “You respect plain speaking?”
“Please.”
“You don’t seem to operate with boundaries, alike the rest of the world.” Olive crunched nuts over apples and butter. “I don’t know what happened in your past, and it don’t matter, not to me. I’m just saying: I wonder how firmly you’ll keep to your own rules.”
I stood and poured well water from a pitcher into a jar. “What rules?”
She cracked a brittle laugh. “Exactly.” She stood, pie dish balanced on her palm. “Just make sure you slather up those walls of yours between him too.” Her gaze moved to Stot, his sleeves rolled up, tanned forearms slick with sweat. “Lord have mercy, he’s handsome. But not for you.”
I gnawed my lip, nodded. Course he wasn’t for me.
“Any red-blooded woman would need boundaries with him,” Olive added.
I coughed on my gulp of water.
“Ah, now.” She wrinkled her nose and placed the cobbler in the oven. “Don’t waste the water.”
Stot strode over then, his gaze raking across my posture.
