Page 24

“If I climbed this,” she says, without turning around, “what would you do?”

“Follow you.”

“How far?”

“Ten feet back. All the way to the county road, if that’s where you went.”

“And then?”

I look at her hand on the rail. At the back of her neck, damp with sweat under the loose hair. At the road.

“Then I’d bring you back,” I say.

She stands there with her hand on the gate. The wind moves the brush. Somewhere a dove calls, over and over, the same three notes.

I don’t know what I’ll do if she climbs it. I know what I said. I know I meant it. I know that some part of me is holding still and hoping she tries, just so I can find out what it feels like to catch her, and I let that part stand there with the rest of me and don’t pretend it isn’t mine.

She takes her hand off the rail.

She turns around and walks straight at me, and stops close enough that I have to look down to see her face. She’s flushed from the heat. Her eyes have gone dark.

“You’d have to touch me,” she says. “To bring me back.”

“Yes.”

“And the rule.”

“I know the rule.”

She holds my eyes for three more seconds. Then she walks past me, close, not touching, back toward the building, and waits at her door for me to lock it.

My hands don’t stop shaking for an hour.

* * *

The afternoon is long and hot. I put the new fitting on the cold side of the shower with her standing in the bathroom door again, and this time she doesn’t say anything at all, and neither do I, and saying nothing is worse than the steam. I haul water. I walk the fence line and find nothing. I sit in the shed and watch the cow and don’t look at the window, and then I look at the window.

At ten, I hear her cross the room and sit down against the door.

I go and sit on my side.

Neither of us says anything. There’s an inch and a half of pine between my shoulder blades and hers. I can hear her breathing. I count it without meaning to.

“Tell me something that isn’t about this,” she says.

I think about it.

“When I was twelve, a neighbor paid me to break a pony nobody else could get near,” I say. “I went at it for two weeks. Rope, halter, a lot of yelling. I got bit, kicked, and dragged across a pasture. On the fifteenth day I was so tired I just sat down in the dirt in the middle of the pen and quit. She walked over and put her nose in my hair.”

On the other side of the door, she laughs. A real one, short and surprised.

“What was her name?”

“Biscuit.”

“You broke a horse named Biscuit.”

“She broke me,” I say. “I just didn’t know it for about twenty-six years.”