The Way He Waits

Kendra Vance stood on the Broken C's mat scraping her boots off longer than she needed to, because the scraping was a thing to do with her hands. There was a hat on a nail beside the kitchen door and forty years of other people's boots worn into the sill.

It was ten past seven in the morning on the twenty-third of April, and the yard behind her was still half dark. Three weeks into calving the whole place smelled like it: wet wool and iodine and cold mud, and under that the ranch-house smell of coffee that had been on since four and eggs somebody had eaten standing up. Marlene Calloway's table was buried in the middle under a spread of paper — a calving book with the columns ruled by hand, a feed invoice, a bank envelope with a Denver return address turned face down, and a mug holding down the corner of all of it. Marlene sat at the end with her reading glasses on their cord and a pencil behind her ear, and she did not get up.

"Shut it fast," Marlene said. "The stove's not winning today."

Kendra shut it fast. The wind came in with her anyway, a little of it, and rolled the top invoice over.

"Coffee's there. Cup's clean, more or less."

"I'm all right."

"Nobody's all right at seven in the morning in April. Sit down."

She sat, on the near side, with her cap still on. She had put the braids up under it at five that morning and she was not going to take it off in this kitchen, which was a small stupid thing and she knew it and she left the cap on anyway. The chair was one of the good hard ones. Through the window over the sink she could see the calving shed with its lights still burning yellow in the gray, and a man crossing the alley door with a bucket, and beyond that the corrals and the pole fence and then nothing but the long gray lift of the ground going up toward the ridge, where the snow line sat about two thousand feet lower than it ought to sit this late.

Boone Calloway came in from the mudroom side past his mother's chair with his sleeves shoved up past his elbows and his forearms wet to the crook, drying them on a towel that had given up on being a towel. He was as tall as she remembered, and grayer around the temple than a man barely into his thirties had any business being, and he nodded at her the way he'd nod at a gate that had opened when he wanted it to.

"Kendra."

"Boone."

"You eat?"

"I'm fine."

"That's not what I asked, but all right." He hung the towel on the oven handle. "Ruth says you've been driving for Halvorsen's outfit hauling gravel since February."

That was the town for you. She had not spoken to Ruth Nakamura since Christmas and Ruth knew what was on her pay stub. "That job ended Friday," Kendra said. "Frost laws. They shut the haul road till the ground firms up."

"Uh huh." He got himself coffee, black, and stood with his back against the counter instead of sitting, which was what he always did. "You know we're short."

"I heard you were short two weeks ago."

"We were short two weeks ago too." A breath out through his nose that on a man with more range would have been a laugh. "Cal quit on us the second night — went to the pipeline like everybody's cousin. Desmond's doing his own work and half of Cal's and he's got shoes to pull besides. We've got a hundred and sixty head to calve yet and better than half of them are on the high pasture."

Here it comes, she thought. Her hands were flat on her knees under the table and she made herself leave them flat.

Because there were questions. There had been questions in this county for two years, and she had rehearsed the answers so many times they had gone smooth and useless, like a river rock: Yes, five semesters. No, I'm not going back. It wasn't the money. She had answered them at the feed store and at the sale barn and once, memorably, at a funeral. She had gotten good at it. What she had gotten good at was a kind of speed — taking the work fast, before anybody could be gentle about it, because gentle was the part she could not stand.

Boone drank his coffee.

"Sixteen an hour and a bed at the line camp if you want it," he said. "Or you drive up and back, but the road's going to get worse before it gets better. You'd start today."

She waited.

He looked at her over the mug, mildly, the way you look at somebody who is standing in a doorway not coming through it. "That's the offer," he said. "Was there another part?"

"You're not going to ask me anything."

"I know how you were raised and I know your grandmother's cattle," Boone said. "Your people have been east of the Bend as long as mine have been on this side of it. Vances put up better hay than we do in a bad year, and everybody in the county knows it and nobody says it. What do you want me to ask?"

Marlene turned a page in the calving book and did not look up. The pencil went behind her ear.

Kendra had come in with a whole speech folded up somewhere behind her sternum and now there was nowhere to put it. It should have felt like mercy. It sat in her like a swallowed stone, because there were only two reasons a man doesn't ask: he doesn't care, or he already knows.

"Sixteen's fine," she said.

"Good." He set the mug down. "Boots and gloves are yours, everything else is the ranch's. Sydney — she's got the other half of this outfit on the deed, and she's mine, and neither one of those is changing — does the payroll on the fifteenth and the last day and she does it right, so don't let anybody tell you different." A pause that had weight to it. "One thing. The high pasture isn't mine this spring."

"What does that mean."

"Means I've got the home place and the shed and the meadows and the whole of the paperwork," Boone said, "and I've got a cousin home from Wyoming for the season who's bossing the crew up top. Shifts, gathers, who goes where — that's his. You'll take it from him."

The stove ticked. Out the window the man with the bucket crossed back the other way.

"Which cousin," Kendra said.

"Cade."

It was one syllable and it went through her like cold water down the back of the neck, because the name came with a shape attached to it — a long man standing inside the north door of Prewitt's barn at eleven o'clock at night with a halter over his shoulder, not coming in.

And the terrible part — the part she would think about that night lying in the dark at the line camp with her boots by the stove — was that she did not move at all. Her face went still. It always went still, that was the trouble with it, it went still the way a rabbit goes still, and she had been told once at nineteen that it made her look calm.

"Cade Calloway," she said.

"Bud's boy. He's been at a big outfit down by Kaycee five years, came back in February." Boone said it flat, like a fact about weather. "Don't let the height fool you, we're not that alike. He's slower than me."

"That's not possible."

"It's possible." He picked his hat off the table. "He's in the shed. Go on down and get your name in his book, and if he tells you to do a thing a way you think is stupid, do it his way till you've got a better reason than thinking so."

Marlene spoke without lifting her head. "Kendra. Take a cinnamon roll. There's a pan and only three men left in the county who deserve one."

"I'm all right, Mrs. Calloway."

"You're going to be standing in a shed for nine hours." Marlene finally looked up, over the glasses, mild as a held knife. "Take two."

She took one, because you do not win that, and she carried it out through the mudroom with a paper towel around it and stood for a second on the step with her breath going up white and the whole valley lying there in front of her doing what it did every April — thawing on top and frozen eight inches down, so that everything ran and nothing drained.

Two years, she thought. He's been back since February and I've been forty minutes down the road.

Two years, and not one person in this county had ever said the word Prewitt to her face. Which meant either he had never told anybody what he saw in there, or he had told all of them and they were being kind about it, and she had no way on earth of finding out which without asking, and she would sooner have walked home.

She could quit right here. She could get in the truck and drive out past the mailbox and be poor and unwatched, and that had its own kind of dignity, and she had been living on that dignity so long it had gone thin as a shirt washed a hundred times.

She ate the cinnamon roll in four bites walking down to the shed, and it was very good, and she was angry about it.

The calving shed was warm the way those places are warm — not heated, just full of animals and lamps and steam. The alley lights were strung on a wire, and the near pen had a heifer in it standing over a black calf that was already up and swaying, and the far pen had the head catch, and in the far pen a man was crouched at the back end of a first-calf heifer unhooking a chain from a set of wet yellow-white feet.

The calf was on the straw and breathing, a big awkward wet thing steaming into the cold, and he had his hand flat on its ribs, counting something.

He was long. That was the first thing, and the thing that made it worse, because from behind and at forty feet he was so nearly Boone that her body relaxed for one full second before her eyes caught up. Longer than Boone, and narrower — all rope and forearm, no bulk on him anywhere, sleeves shoved to the elbow the same way, arms slick to the shoulder and steaming. Dark blond hair too long over his collar, and a shaped gray hat on the rail behind him where he'd hung it so it wouldn't get ruined, and when he turned his head she saw the rest of it: the fair skin gone red-brown across the nose and the back of the neck from twenty years of standing out in this, four days of stubble, pale eyes.

He straightened up, and he did it the way he did everything, apparently, which was without hurrying, and looked at her down the alley.

"There we go," he said to the heifer, not to Kendra, and gave the calf's ribs two flat pats. Then, to Kendra: "Careful, the alley's wet by the third pen."

She looked down. The concrete had a slick of afterbirth and straw across it and she had been about to walk right through it in her good boots.

"Thank you," she said.

"Boone send you?"

"Kendra Vance." She said her whole name because that was how you found out. "I'm on for calving. He said the high ground's yours."

Nothing happened in his face at all. Or — that wasn't true. Something went across it and got put away, and it was so quick and so completely finished that she could not have sworn to it in front of anybody, and she knew exactly what it was, because she owned one herself.

"Cade," he said. He wiped his right hand down his jeans twice, considered it, and did not offer it, and she was grateful and insulted at the same time. "I know who you are."

The county was two thousand square miles and about eleven people.

"I imagine you do," Kendra said.

"Heifers are up top, and two dozen of them are close." He bent and got his hat off the rail and put it on, and behind him the calf got its front feet under it and fell over and started figuring it out again. "Get a coat that's warmer than that one. I'll have shifts up on the shop door by noon."

He walked past her, close enough that she got the smell of him — iodine, wet leather, cold — and out into the gray, and she stood there in the steam with her boots on the dry side of the alley and her heart going hard and high, up under her collarbone where she could not get at it.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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