Page 119

“For work.”

“For work,” he agreed.

We went outside.

Chapter 9

Cash

Two weeks ago, she wouldn’t sit down. She’d eaten standing at the counter the first three days, plate in one hand, phone in the other, chewing between emails. I’d watched her do it and not said a word because saying a word would have been the thing I did instead of the thing I was, and I hadn’t figured out the difference yet.

Now she sat. She ate. She didn’t answer emails at the same time. She even seemed to enjoy it.

And her phone went off at nine. I’d stopped reminding her by the third night. She did it herself now — a glance at her watch, a small exhale through her nose, and the screen went dark. She set it facedown on the shelf by the door, the same shelf where she kept her clipboard and the pen I wasn’t allowed to use, and she didn’t pick it up again until morning.

The first night she’d done it, she’d stood at the shelf for a full ten seconds with her hand on the phone. I’d been at the stove, my back to her, and I’d heard the ten seconds in the absence of sound — no footsteps, no pen, no page turning. Just a woman standing in a room with her hand on the thing she was putting down.

Then her hand lifted. She went to bed. I washed the pan.

By the fifth night, she set the phone down the way she set down a wrench. Tool used. Tool stored. Next task.

I didn’t know what her inbox looked like in the morning. I didn’t ask. The agreement said no reading her messages, and I hadn’t, and I wouldn’t.

In between bedtime and meals, we mostly worked. The arena took shape in pieces.

We’d staked the rough outline with T-posts and binder twine, and the dimensions that had lived on her graph paper now existed in dirt and string. A hundred and eighty feet long, ninety wide. The bucking chutes would go at the north end, where the ground was firmest. The catch pens at the south, where the drainage seep ran toward the creek.

I was on the north end, digging a post hole for the temporary chute anchor, when she walked the perimeter with her clipboard.

She stood beside me. Close enough that I could hear her pen. Close enough that when the wind shifted, I could smell whatever shampoo she’d brought from Denver, something faintly floral that had no business being in a hayfield and didn’t care.

She’d started doing this. Standing close. She didn’t seem to notice she was doing it, which meant she’d stopped monitoring the distance, which meant the distance had stopped being a calculation and become a habit.

I noticed. I noticed every time.

She’d crouch to check a stake. Her hair would fall forward. She’d push it behind her ear — always the right ear, always the same gesture, the backs of her fingers against the strand — and I’d be holding a post hole digger and thinking about the curve of her ear, which was not a useful thought for fence work.

“The anchor needs to be deeper,” she said, without looking up.

“I know.”

“You’re at fourteen inches. The spec is eighteen.”

“I can read a spec, Ms. Nair.”

“Then read it faster, Mr. Calloway. Ty Bannerman’s bulls are going to test every inch of that anchor, and I’m not explaining to a stock contractor why his chute collapsed.”

She stood. Brushed the dirt off her knees. Walked to the next stake.

I dug the hole to eighteen inches and then two more for good measure, because she was right and because arguing with her about depth would have meant talking longer, which would have meant standing closer, which would have meant more of that shampoo in a wind that wasn’t cooperating.

We’d kissed four times since the agreement.

The first was the night we signed. Not a real kiss — a press of her mouth against the corner of mine when she passed me at the door, quick enough that I might have imagined it, except my skin remembered it for an hour afterward and I lay on my mattress tracing the spot with my thumb like a man who’d lost something small in the dark.

The second was two days later. She’d been reading at the table, I’d come in from the barn, and she’d looked up and said “Hi” in a voice I hadn’t heard before — low, unguarded, the single syllable stripped of every professional layer she wore during working hours. I’d kissed her forehead. She’d closed her eyes. I’d stood there with my mouth against her skin and my hand on the back of the chair and counted to five and let go.

The third was her doing. She’d been explaining the vendor contract revisions — three pages of red ink, a clause about liability I hadn’t understood until she’d translated it into plain English — and she’d stopped mid-sentence, looked at me with an expression I couldn’t read, and kissed me. On the mouth. Brief, firm, deliberate. Then she’d picked up the pen and continued the sentence she’d been in the middle of, and I’d sat down because my knees had opinions about what had just happened.