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"He didn't." Knox smiled at her, slow, a man discovering money in an old coat. "Good. I'll need something to trade."

"I like him," Lauren told Mason, and went back to her list, and Mason watched his little brother fall for her like the whole county kept doing, one dry sentence at a time.

Knox looked at the wire. He looked at the gloves, her size, sitting on top of the load where anybody could read them. He looked at Mason, and the grin came up out of him slow and wide, sunrise in no hurry.

"Don't let me interrupt the lesson," he said, and touched his hat brim to Lauren, and strolled into the feed store like a man with wonderful news and somewhere to deliver it.

That grin would beat Mason home by three hours. It would be sitting at the supper table, plated and garnished, before he'd cleared her cattle guard, and there wasn't one thing he could call after that departing hat that wouldn't make it worse, because every visible fact was true, the truck and the wire and the gloves in her size.

"He seems fun," Lauren said.

"He's going to be insufferable for the rest of my natural life," Mason said, and she laughed, the unguarded one, out loud on a loading dock in the middle of town, and a rancher he'd known twenty years looked over from the next bay and smiled like a man who'd just won a bet, and Mason quit caring what Knox told anybody.

Supper at the Wainwright place was pot roast, and his father waited until Ainsley had taken her plate off to a phone call and his mother was in the other room before he asked it, easy, over the rim of his glass, the way he asked about rainfall.

"How's it coming with the Merritt girl?"

Mason cut his roast and kept his voice level as a floor. "Water's in. Fences'll hold. Windmill's braced."

"Knox says you two made a picture at the feed store." Clay said it pleased, no needle in it at all, which was worse than any needle. "Buying her gloves now."

"Her hands were getting torn up."

"Course they were." His father pointed the fork at him, friendly, approving. "You're doing fine, son. Better than fine. Pearl's practically got you two married off, the whole county's smiling on it, and a woman doesn't stay easier to talk to than when the county's smiling." He went back to his plate, comfortable, a man whose machine was running on schedule. "You get a read yet on her timeline? Greene's office says she hasn't listed. That's good. Means nobody's numbers are in front of her but the ones that matter."

Out past the window the works ran on into the dark as they had his whole life, the pump house lit, the ponds catching the yard lights, the steady industrial hum that had paid for this table and this roast and every easy year he'd ever had, and for the first time in thirty-one years the sound of it reached him like something with her name in its teeth. He'd grown up inside that hum. He'd never once picked a fight with it. He set his fork down with the bite unfinished.

Now was the minute. It kept presenting itself, regular as a bill. Say it at this table the way you said it in that kitchen, four words and the machine loses one wheel, and Knox's grin dies at supper instead of growing, and whatever's happening down on the seam gets to be yours instead of his.

"She's not in a hurry," Mason said. "Place needs work before it'd show right."

"Attaboy," Clay said, warm as the kitchen. "No rush at all. Rushing's how John does things." He turned the page of the stockman's weekly at his elbow, done, satisfied, a man with his accounts in order. "Good man."

Mason took his plate to the sink and washed it and said nothing at all, which was getting to be the thing he was best at.

CHAPTER SIX

The primer ran out mid-morning, and it took Lauren until the county road to admit the trip to town wasn't about primer.

The yard had gone quiet, was the thing. The water ran, the fence line sang, the windmill stood straight for the first time since the Clinton administration, and there was no reason on God's dry earth for that man to come down the seam road again, which was fine, which was in fact the whole desired outcome of getting one's ranch repaired. She'd been telling herself so for two days, and twice in those two days she'd stopped painting because an engine turned off the county road, and twice it had been somebody else's, and both times she'd gone back to the roller with a fury the wall had done nothing to earn.

So. Town. Primer, and coffee that didn't come out of her grandfather's percolator tasting like 1987, and one hour of sitting in a room with people in it. She was a shopkeeper's daughter and a shopkeeper after that, and she'd forgotten what fourteen days of nobody did to a person who used to hear a bell every four minutes.

Pearl's at eleven was half full, and the bell announced her, and the room did its unhurried turn, and this time a few of them nodded before they went back to their eggs, which she understood by now was practically a parade in her honor.

"Well, look who came in on her own steam." Pearl had the pot in her hand before Lauren reached the counter. "Booth or stool, honey?"

"Booth. I'm hiding from a paint roller."

"Booth by the window, then, where everybody can see you not hiding." Pearl poured coffee she hadn't been asked for, into a mug that arrived from nowhere. "Marge! The Merritt girl's here!"

"I really don't need⁠—"

The kitchen door swung, and Marge came the whole way down with a plate in her hand, and on the plate was a slice of peach pie Lauren had not ordered and was apparently having, and Marge set it down and looked at her a moment, taking stock, flour to the elbows.

"You're not eating enough," Marge said, and went back to her kitchen, and that was the entire visit, and Lauren sat down in the window booth feeling like she'd been hugged by somebody wearing an apron.

She was one bite into the pie when the bell went again, and Pearl lit up like a switchboard at the sight of whoever it was, and steered them straight at Lauren's booth with two fingers and no consultation.