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"You don't leave a baby in a truck," she says. "Any kind of baby."

Mackie crouches down in front of him. He sniffs her fingers and then licks them.

"What's his name?"

"Doesn't have one yet."

"How long have you had him?"

"Since I came east."

"And you haven't named him."

"I thought they might want to." I nod at the bouncers by the table.

She looks up at me from the floor. "They're four months old, Carson.”

“I don’t make the rules."

The ham is good, and Lis talks through most of it, which is a blessing. Mackie laughs once, out loud, at a story about Earl and the heron at Sabal Point. Hildie falls asleep in her bouncer with her arm thrown up over her head, the way Lis told me on the calls, and I see it for myself for the first time.

After the dishes, Lis takes both babies down the hall for their baths and waves off every offer of help, so Mackie and I end up on the front steps with the pup between us and our breath clouding in the porch light. For a while, neither of us says anything, which is easier than it has been in months.

"Can I ask you something about Hildie?"

"Sure."

"When I went to see her in September, she had one of those clear afternoons. Out of nowhere, she told me she dated a rancher once." She tips her head toward me. "She said he was always late because cows didn't care what plans they'd made. Was that for real, or was she putting herself in a movie again and calling it real life?"

I haven't heard anyone mention him in years.

"Walt Ashby," I say. "He ran cows out past Myakka, about forty minutes from our house in Sarasota. That was back when that country was still more cattle than subdivisions. She started seeing him the summer I turned ten. The first Saturday he came to pick her up, I was sitting on the carport with nothing to do, so he asked if I wanted to ride along."

"And you went?"

"I went every Saturday for six years. He put me on a horse that first day and let me fall off twice before he showed me what I was doing wrong. By twelve, I was working his pens, and by fourteen he was paying me three dollars an hour to clean the stables."

I work the pup's folded ear between my fingers. "He was the first man who ever wanted me around when he didn't have to."

Mackie doesn't answer, but she shifts her foot until it rests against the side of my boot.

"He cowboyed in Wyoming when he was young, and he never quit talking about it. He told me about the grass and the winters and how you could ride all day and never hit a fence. The spring I was seventeen, he wrote the name of an outfit up near Casper on the back of a feed receipt and told me to go see it before I let anybody talk me into a desk."

"What happened with him and Hildie?"

"She ended it that same fall they started dating, so it wasn’t long term. They stayed friendly, and he kept picking me up every Saturday even after they split, but I never knew why she quit him."

Mackie is quiet for a moment, turning that over.

"Forty minutes out of town," she says slowly. "Did he want her to move out there?"

I start to tell her no, and then I stop, because I remember a small velvet box sitting on Hildie's kitchen table for one whole week the fall I started fifth grade. I remember that I'd finally landed a teacher who didn't make me read out loud. And I remember Hildie asking me over supper, casually, whether I liked my new school enough to stay in it.

"You know," I say, and my voice comes out rough. "Now that I'm sitting here thinking about it, I bet he did, and she didn't want to uproot me."

A chill rolls through me. Mackie leans until her shoulder rests against mine, and she keeps it there.

"She picked you," she says quietly.