I put the glass down and sit at my kitchen table, praying that’ll help calm my nerves, or anger, or whatever the fuck this is.
The afternoon passes the way time passes when two people are forty feet apart and not speaking.
I make a sandwich I don't eat.
I do dishes I didn't dirty.
I open my laptop and stare at my schedule for the next three weeks—Abilene Friday, OKC the week after, Fort Worth the week after that—and I don't read any of it.
I close the laptop. I sit in my bed and look at the ceiling. I get up. I sit at the kitchen table again. I look at my hands.
He doesn't move from his spot on the porch.
I check on him once through the window above the sink.
Hat back on. Boots flat on the second step. Forearms on his knees. The set of his shoulders is the same as it was at the roundpen the morning I told him I'd been watching him from the fence line.
The man doesn't fidget.
Around four-thirty Grace texts me:
Heard there's a man on your porch. You need an escape plan or you good?
I look at the text for a long time.
I write back:
I'm good.
She writes back:
That's what I thought. Bring him to dinner.
I don't answer.
I sit at my table until the light changes on the kitchen floor.
The angle of the sun through my back window goes from straight overhead to sideways and the orange-gold light starts coming in across the boards.
It means it's almost six and Marlena will be putting rolls in the oven and Pops will be home from the south fence, and I have to make a choice.
I can stay in this cabin.
I can sit at this table and not move and let the night come.
I can let Spur sit on my porch all night the way he sat in a Hampton chair all night in Amarillo, and tomorrow morning we will both be ruined in the same way and we won’t have decided anything.
Or.
I stand up. I walk to my front door. Open it.
He doesn't turn around.
"Spur."
"Yeah."
"Get up."
