Page 25 of Kid Gloves

"Fourth of July. Nobody asked them. It just... had their names on it." He opens my door, which he does like it's load-bearing, and pauses with his hand on the frame. "For the record, you get used to it. And for the record—" his voice drops out of federal, briefly, catastrophically—"I'd rather be gossiped about with you than audited with anybody."

I stand there on the running board. "That's the most romantic thing you've ever said."

"I know," he says, grim, like a man who's heard himself. "It's a problem."

Back in the booth, Loretta refilling on sight, Callie slides in with clinic coffee and mercy. Her entire told-you-so, in full: she looks at me, looks at the laminated card in my pocket, and lets one eyebrow rise like bread.

"Not one word," I say.

"I billed Wade for the midnight call," she says serenely. "Line item says 'consultation, brindle female, plus supervision of two idiots.' He paid it without comment. That's all the words I need."

The cold wind comes in with the sheriff, the way cold does — through a door that was already open, while everyone's laughing.

Dooley takes his usual stool at the counter, orders his usual, and works the room on his way like always, unhurried, a man who's been not-alarming this county for twenty years. I've watched him do it a hundred mornings: a word about somebody's fence washout, a nod at the domino table, condolences dosed out gentle as eye drops. The county sets its watch by how slow he moves. Which is why the back of my neck knows before the front of my brain does, because today, on his way to the eggs, Sheriff Dooley is moving slower than usual, and the slow is aimed at our booth. When he reaches our booth he touches his hat brim to me, and I clock it a half-second late: he doesn't do small talk at Wade. He does information.

"Marshal's preliminary came back on the Boone fire," he says, deadpan as a forecast. "Inconclusive. Pending lab work." A beat, level as a bubble in a spirit gauge. "They sent samples to the state. North wall."

The diner keeps its noise. The booth loses its temperature.

"Timeline on the lab?" Wade asks, and his voice has gone to the register from the search briefing, the one with handles on it.

"Weeks. State lab's backed up two months." Dooley's eyes come to me, unreadable and not unkind. "Nothing for you to do, Miss Boone. Adjusters may want a follow-up interview, that's routine. Ray's been shepherding your claim along — man's been calling my office twice a week keeping it warm. Good friend to have."

He touches his hat again and takes his stool, and orders his eggs, and that's it, that's the whole visitation, thirty seconds of procedure in a room full of pie.

Inconclusive. Pending lab work. Samples from the north wall.

I know things about my own barn's north wall that I've been keeping in the same mental drawer as a navy-blue envelope. The smell that wasn't wood smoke, filed under later. Wade's pen slowing on the word wiring, filed under later. Buyers who watch fire reports, market conditions, we encourage a prompt response — filed, filed, filed. The drawer's getting full. Drawers do this thing when they're full, where they stop closing clean, and you have to lean on them, and I am suddenly, in a warm diner with cherry pie in front of me, leaning with everything I've got.

Tell him. He's right there. He gave you the reins in a memo. He bought your fence wire like a secret. He ran into your fire before the trucks came. Say: the north wall smelled wrong, and three days later Dallas money offered me a paid-off life, and the timing's been sitting in my kitchen ever since like a stray I won't feed but won't chase off either. Say it in front of the pie and the retirees. Let him make it a checklist. Watch it get small.

But here's the arithmetic I do instead, the old reliable Boone math: it's inconclusive. Pending. The lab will come back wiring, because it's always wiring, and then I'll have shown him the letter for nothing, and the man whose family flinches at the name Halloran will look at me sitting on their offer for five weeks (five weeks of Sunday dinners and memos and last night) and some fine print in his face will move, and I'll have taught him the first thing my family ever taught me about myself: that when the money showed up, Delaney thought about it.

Because I did. That's the rot at the bottom of the drawer. I thought about it.

"Hey." Wade's watching me, coffee down, the whole federal face open like I'm the only unlocked gate on the property. "Where'd you go?"

"Nowhere. Math." I smile with most of my face. His eyes flick — just barely, just once — the way they flicked at my north wall at three in the morning, observation, no conclusion, and he lets it go, and I hate that he lets it go, and I'd hate it more if he didn't. "Eat your half. Sub-clause four is void, apparently."

Outside, at the truck, he stops me with two fingers on my sleeve, and the street noise keeps going around us like water around a post.

"The lab work." He says it carefully, a man setting a box down between us without opening it. "Whatever it comes back — it comes back to both of us. Your barn's on my fence line and your program's in my contract. You don't wait on that news alone in a guest house. That's not a memo. That's—" the pause costs him visibly—"that's me asking."

Five weeks ago I'd have heard managing. This morning, with his hand still warm through my sleeve and a laminated menu card in my pocket, I hear the other thing, the thing Dean's dictionary would translate: I want to stand where you stand when it lands.

"Okay," I say. And I mean it, I do mean it, and the envelope in my junk drawer means it too, all nine hundred pounds of it, and the difference between okay and everything is exactly one navy-blue rectangle I'm still not brave enough to put on the table between us.

Halfway home he reaches over and holds my hand like it's procedure. Neither of us logs it.

Home — the guest house, I mean. The word keeps doing that, swapping itself in while I'm not supervising — I do the last puppy check at ten, and the brindle female, fully recovered and insufferable about it, brings me the hamburger toy like a subpoena. The litter is eighty-two days old. Thirty-seven days until they certify or don't, until the barn's rebuilt or isn't, until the lab in Austin tells me what my north wall already whispered. Everything in my life is pending. It's a wonder I can stand up under all this jurisdiction.

Then I stand at the kitchen counter a long time, junk drawer shut, hip against it, leaning.

Through the window Wade's crossing the yard with the last-round flashlight, and I watch him stop at pasture three and stand there a solid minute in the dark, presumably in negotiations, and then walk on with Brisket following him at heel — at heel, the criminal, like she's certified — all the way to his porch, where she folds up on her spot under the light he's given up pretending he doesn't leave on for her.

"It's casual," I tell her through the glass.

Brisket, from the exact geometric center of a porch that has surrendered to her completely, does not dignify that.