A beat later the porch light came on.
She hadn’t once seen me see her.
And standing there looking at a dark window where a light had just come on, I understood it plainly — the way I understand steel, and engines, and the weight of a man a half-second before he moves — that somewhere in the last day I’d crossed clean over into needing her.
5
Sophia
It was past nine when I drove down the cul-de-sac. The street was Sunday-night quiet — porches dark or close to it, one window lit at the far end of the row, the rest gone in. I pulled Doris into my own drive, cut the engine, and sat back. The day was still in me. Not heavy. Settled in the seat.
It had started before the sun. The first morning of days off had found me in the saddle before it found me anywhere else.
Liam was already in the barn aisle with Brisket saddled when I came down, working the cinch one hole tighter and checking it with two fingers. He didn’t look up. He pulled a stirrup straight, let it drop, and said it to the latigo more than to me.
“You’re slow.”
“I’m rested. You wouldn’t recognize it. It’s what people look like after sleep.”
We rode out the back of the home pasture with the sun still behind the cottonwoods, the grass wet to the knee and the cold carrying a set of teeth that would be gone by seven, and for the first ten minutes I was nothing but a body on a horse with no one in it bleeding.
Daisy had opinions about the hour, but Daisy had opinions about most things: eight years old, dappled, and convinced down at the cellular level that she was the senior partner in our arrangement. She took the bit with the sigh of a creature humoring a junior colleague and walked out the gate like the whole idea had been hers. I did the steering and she did the editorial.
Liam rode loose-reined with one hand on his thigh and his eyes moving — the fence line, the tree line, the gap in the cottonwoods where something had crossed in the night. Halfway along the east boundary he lifted his chin at a place where the wire had gone slack between two posts. I nodded. That was the conversation, and it was a good one.
“Four nights,” he said, a while later, to the country in front of him. Not a question.
“Four nights.”
“You sleeping in the day, or just lying down in the dark being a martyr about it?”
“The second one. It’s more spiritually rewarding.”
He made the sound that lived next door to a laugh and paid its rent on time, and something went out of his shoulders that had been sitting up in them since I’d come down to the barn. He didn’t ask where I’d been. He already knew where I’d been. He’d just needed it out loud.
This was the shape of my days off, and had been for eight years — my cabin a short walk from his door, Daisy in the third stall, a kettle and a chair I’d dragged in myself and a drawer of clothes that smelled like outside instead of hospital. I turned out a stall most mornings I was up here, not because it was mine to turn out but because my hands wanted a job with an end on it. You can muck a stall and stand back and see it done. The body does not offer you that at four in the morning with a kid coding under your palms.
We turned for home when the cold lost its teeth. By the time we’d rubbed the horses down and turned them out, Stephy had the kitchen window cranked open and something going in a pan that found us all the way across the yard.
Stephy was at the stove in one of Liam’s shirts and leggings that had given up arguing with the bump weeks ago, pushing eggs around a pan with the spatula held at arm’s length, as though the eggs might make a move on her.
“Don’t,” she said, without turning round, “either of you, say a single word about me cooking. I am bored, the baby is sitting directly on a nerve that runs my entire left leg, and the only thing that takes my mind off it is breakfast. Sit.”
I made the toast, because the toast was the one job in that kitchen nobody fought me for. Liam poured the coffee. Over the eggs, Stephy told us Clay and Callie’s daughter Maisie’s Sunday-school teacher had phoned the house — specifically, she wanted it on record that Maisie had stood up in class to inform everyone that God kept a horse.
“A horse,” Liam said.
“A white one. Named — and these are Maisie’s words, the teacher quoted them twice to be sure I understood — Sir Gallops.”
“That sounds about right,” I said.
“Clay thinks it’s theology. Callie wants to know where a seven-year-old gets that kind of certainty.”
Then Stephy slid a plate in front of me, lowered herself into the chair opposite with the deliberate care of a woman parking a vehicle whose dimensions she no longer trusted, and said, far too lightly, “So. Did that house across the road from you ever sell?”
I kept my eyes on my eggs. “It sold.”
“And?”
