She watches him for a second, then she looks at me.
"Where'd you learn that?" I ask.
It's not the question I meant to ask.
She doesn't look away.
"From the fence line."
"How long?"
"Don't flatter yourself, cowboy." But she's smiling. Small.
The crooked one. The same one she gave me all those years ago with a beer in her hand.
"I was bored," she says.
She's lying.
She's lying in the way a woman lies when she wants you to know she's lying, which is the exact opposite of telling the truth, and we both know it.
"See ya at the same time tomorrow, cowboy." She walks out and doesn't look back.
The gate latches behind her with a small bright sound that I'm going to hear in my sleep.
I sit on the bucket for ten minutes after she leaves.
The mustang takes another step toward where she was.
He stops, lowers his head, and smells the dirt where her boot prints are.
I’ve been sitting on this bucket for six weeks.
I haven’t, in six weeks, gotten a wild horse to walk into the center of his own pen and smell anything.
She did it in an hour.
With a paperback and a paper cup of gas station coffee.
I press the heels of my hands against my eyes and don't make a sound.
I stay here longer than I care to admit.
Grace shows up at mid-morning with two mugs.
I don't hear her coming.
That's how locked I am in my own head—I hear everything on this compound, every truck, every horse, every door, and I didn't hear my brother's wife walk up to my own round pen with a baby on her hip.
She's at the rail when I look up.
Waylon's strapped to her front in a baby carrier that says GRACE & WAYLON in stitched letters on the front.
He's asleep. Drool on his chin. One small fist closed around the strap of the carrier.
Grace has two mugs.
She hands one over the rail without asking. Not to be polite. Because she knows I'll take it.
