He doesn’t talk much, which I’ve come to understand is not shyness or discomfort. He’s looking. Really looking, the way he looked at the wood stock the first time he came to the workshop, like he’s taking inventory. I don’t mind being watched like that. Not by him.
“How much land?” he asks at some point.
“Forty acres. My grandmother’s grandmother bought the original parcel. It’s been added to a couple of times since.” I gesture east. “The creek marks the property line on that side. The ridge on the other.”
“Has it always been women?”
I consider. “Mostly. There were husbands, but they were… adjacent. The land stayed with the women.”
He nods at that as if it makes sense to him. Like he’s filed it somewhere.
The turkeys come out of the treeline near the east fence without warning.
There are four of them, big, dignified in their ridiculousness, absurd in the way wild turkeys are absurd, all wattle and indignation. They emerge from the brush and proceed across the path with the absolute conviction of creatures who have never once questioned their right to be wherever they are. The lead bird makes a sound. Less a gobble than a declaration.
Kragen stops walking.
Not a small stop. A full-body, both-feet-planted stop, the way you stop when the alarm fires before the brain has caught up. He’s half a step behind me and suddenly he’s very still in a way that has nothing to do with his StillWater nature and everything to do with the fact that four turkeys just materialized from the brush at knee height and he did not hear them coming, which should not be possible for a male who turned toward my driveway thirty seconds before my neighbor’s truck appeared at the end of it.
“They’re turkeys,” I say.
“I know what they are.” He hasn’t moved.
The lead turkey regards him with one eye. Makes the sound again. Then it advances with the steady confidence of a creature entirely certain it can take him in a fight.
“It’s looking at me,” Kragen says.
“They do that.”
“Why is it coming closer?”
“Curiosity, probably. They’re not going to do anything.”
The turkey takes another step. Kragen takes one back. The turkey tilts its head. I put my hand over my mouth.
“Don’t,” he says.
I am already laughing. I don’t mean to and I can’t help it. The image of this male, who has to duck through my workshop door, who moves through the world like he was built for more of it than exists, retreating incrementally from a fifteen-pound bird with a perplexed expression on his face. I laugh like I haven’t laughed at anything in a while. Properly, from somewhere real.
“The hearing,” I manage. “What happened to your keen orc sense of hearing?”
“I was distracted,” he says with great dignity.
“By what?”
A beat. “The light on the ridge.”
I laugh harder. The turkeys, collectively unimpressed, move on across the path and disappear into the brush on the other side with the same absolute unhurried conviction with which they arrived. The whole incident takes maybe forty-five seconds.
When I look back at Kragen, he’s watching them go with an expression working its way from undignified to something else. Then it arrives.
He laughs, low and a little rueful, directed at himself rather than the turkeys. Not the easy social laugh he uses with strangers. An actual one.
I look at him in the full morning light and see him as though it’s the first time. Amber eyes creased at the corners, the laugh in them, those dimples. I didn’t know he had dimples; this is new information. And the sun catching the blue-black of his hair and the way his tusks catch the light, which I have been trying not to think about since approximately his second visit. He looks, standing in my pasture laughing at himself over a turkey, like the most handsome thing I have seen in a very long time.
I glance away before he catches me looking.
“In my defense,” he says, “they are enormous.”
