The right one's the one Phantom doesn't ask about.
I'm sitting in the only chair in the front room of my cabin in a pair of jeans I didn't take off when I fell asleep, drinking coffee that's gone cold while I check the overnight reports.
Nothing flagged on the ranch side.
Nothing flagged on the club side.
Something parked on the right monitor that I'll come back to.
I take a slow swallow of the cold coffee, lean back in the chair, and check the time in the corner of the screen.
Five-fifteen.
She's up.
I know because the light over her kitchen sink came on six minutes ago.
I can see it from my front window if I want to look, and I never want to look, but I always do.
I look.
The cabin behind the bunkhouse is about a hundred yards across the gravel from mine, and the light in her kitchen window is the warm yellow kind that says she's already at the counter, already moving, already starting the biscuits she rolls out fresh every morning because she said once on her first week here that frozen biscuits are an insult to a Texas table.
I think about that sentence at least once a day.
I drag my eyes off the window and back to the monitors, push out of the chair, and pull on a clean shirt because there's no reason to walk into her kitchen smelling like the night I had.
The white hat goes on last. It always goes on last.
* * *
The dogs at the kennel know my walk before they hear my voice.
Diesel's the first one on his feet—big old shepherd mix who runs the kennel the way Phantom runs the club, by being the one who doesn't have to raise his voice.
Jagger's right behind him, all leg and tail and noise, a younger blue heeler we picked up off a guy in Llano who couldn't handle him.
Bella's slower to get up but she's the smartest of the three, a brindle cattle dog who watches the world like she's writing a report on it.
"Mornin'," I tell them through the chain link.
Diesel pushes his nose against the gate.
I scratch his ear with two fingers and keep walking.
The sky's that flat purple it gets in the half hour before sunup, the kind of color that doesn't look real if you've never seen the Hill Country before the day starts.
The cedar smells stronger this time of morning.
The dust is settled.
A mockingbird's going off somewhere by the round pen. He'll be at it 'til the sun's up.
I check the bunkhouse porch as I cross the yard.
Empty.
The brothers will start drifting out in the next ten minutes, but for now, the porch is just rocking chairs and a coffee cup somebody forgot on the rail last night.
