MY ROOM WAS ON THEsecond floor, corner end of the hall, east-facing window. I’d noted that when I’d arrived Thursday. Good for mornings. Whoever had assigned rooms had been paying attention, or I’d gotten lucky. Either way, I appreciated it.
Down the hall, behind Stoney and Bobbie-Jean’s door, I could hear them going at it. Not the bad kind. More like two people who are both right about different things and know it and the argument is mostly exercise. I caught a word or two about a direction. A word about which side of the arbor. “That is not how you come in from the south, Stoney, I’ve told you three times” — and then a few words from Stoney I couldn’t catch, and Bobbie-Jean laughing.
I had a feeling about tomorrow. The shape of a thing I hadn’t been told and hadn’t asked after.
I set it aside. It wasn’t mine to know yet.
I turned out the lamp. Cracked the east window two inches. Lay down on top of the covers in my jeans and boots, which I do when a day isn’t quite done with me.
THE THING ABOUT A WOMANwho packs silk for a working ranch is that she either doesn’t know what she’s packing for, or she knows exactly and intends to handle whatever comes at her in silk. Jules was in the first category. But the handling part still applied.
She’d gotten off that van this afternoon with her camera bag and her contingency plans and she’d stood on the gravel whileJudge Judy screamed at her in two languages, and she’d done what she always did: deployed her client-voice. Calm, assured, slightly sunny register. Straight at a macaw.
You cannot out-professionalize a macaw. That is not a thing that can be done. The macaw has nothing to lose and screaming is free. Jules had held her ground and used her best professional warmth on an animal that considers that particular warmth a personal challenge, and I’d stood at the fence post and laughed until my chest hurt, and I wasn’t sorry about any of it.
I put my arm across my eyes.
The flush. I kept coming back to it.
The wine glass. The moment I’d reached across with the bottle and her fingers had been on the stem, mine grazing hers for half a second, and the color had come up her throat before she’d decided anything about it. She’d known I’d seen it. There’d been one count where we both knew and neither of us said anything, and then she’d given her plate the kind of focus she gave her camera, and I’d thought: there you are.
Fair skin is honest. It doesn’t consult anyone and it doesn’t negotiate. Chanel No. 5 and that client-voice weren’t going to get her out of that one. She’d spent the whole dinner being controlled and warm, wearing ease that cost her more than the real thing, and her skin had been having a different conversation entirely, in real time, without asking her.
I’d noticed one other thing. Her hair had been straight when she’d gotten off the van, blown smooth with real effort that morning. By dinner it had gone wavy at her temples. The humidity getting in. She’d stopped fighting it at some point in the afternoon, just let it do what it wanted. She hadn’t seemed to notice. That was the part I kept coming back to — the moment she’d stopped managing something and just let it go.
She’d had a clear view of me all evening too. I figured we were about even.
The dimples were their own problem.
She didn’t deploy them. They showed up when a laugh got past her before she’d caught it, meaning she was actually amused rather than putting it on. I know what putting it on looks like. This wasn’t it. She’d been halfway through the Persian-cat story — the Hermès carrier and the forty-five-minute standoff and the cat eventually settling on her knee like a manager extending a probationary period rather than committing to a decision — and she’d laughed at herself before she’d finished it, real and unmanaged, and those dimples had come in—the ones she couldn’t send away—and her face had opened up and gone genuine, and I’d gone quiet and paid attention.
That’s the one. The one under all the rest.
I stared at the ceiling.
I was in a significant amount of trouble and I wasn’t going to make it worse by being dramatic about it in the dark. Something had switched in me since three this afternoon and I knew which direction I was facing. She was leaving Sunday. That was a logistics problem. Logistics were solvable.
I thought about Pancake for a while, as I do in the quiet. His first winter at my place, coming to the fence rail every morning in the cold, not trusting me, not trusting much of anything, just showing up because showing up was the only way he knew to work through it. Eventually he’d decided I wasn’t a problem he needed to solve, and he’d come to see what I wanted.
That took him about a year. I wasn’t comparing this to a horse. I was just noting that patience looks a certain way when it’s working.
Across the property, in a canvas tent with a questionable zipper, Jules Tully was almost certainly lying awake running tomorrow’s list. The Persian on Tuesday. Mrs. Whitestone from a thousand miles north, unable to fire her.
I hoped she wasn’t sleeping either.
It was a warm thought and I let it sit. Good, I thought. Then I went to sleep.
I WOKE IN THE FULLdark. Lay there for forty seconds deciding I was going back to sleep. Stopped deciding that.
Jeans. Chambray shirt. Work boots. Left the hat on the chair. Too dark for it to matter. Out through the back of the house without turning on a light.
The night air had come down to a reasonable fifty-five degrees, breeze out of the east. I put my face into it for a second, got my bearings, and crossed the yard.
I MADE IT TEN FEETout the back door before I walked into Brisket.
He was standing dead center in the path in the dark, ears at half-mast, facing nothing in particular with considerable conviction. Just there, at one in the morning, with no apparent agenda. I went around him. He tracked me with one eye the way he’d tracked everything since yesterday afternoon — with the flat, settled expression of an animal who had formed no strong opinions and intended to maintain that position.
I gave him that.
