Page 32 of Thunder

Coffee gone a little past its best but still warm on the burner.

I come around into my own kitchen leaning hard on the counter and find a plate on the stovetop covered over in aluminum foil, and a note propped against the coffee pot in her quick, slanted hand.

I stand there and read it twice.

Nothing's changed.

But you're no good to anybody facedown in a pen, and I know you're planning to work today no matter what I say.

So eat.

All of it.

And STAY OFF that hip or so help me. — P

Nothing's changed.

She wrote that.

Right there at the top, first thing, nothing's changed, and then underneath it she cooked me a full breakfast and covered it so it'd keep warm and left me orders to eat all of it and mind my leg, which is the single most married-sounding note a woman ever left a man she's pretending she isn't with.

I read it a third time, and I catch myself doing something I haven't done in weeks.

I'm grinning like a damn fool in an empty kitchen.

Because here's what she doesn't know she's telling me, my cautious rattlesnake, my girl who thinks she left me a note about breakfast.

A woman who's really walking away doesn't cook.

A woman who's done doesn't stand at your stove before dawn frying eggs she's not going to be there to watch you eat.

She can write nothing's changed at the top of the page all she likes.

Everything under it says the opposite, and she's too honest with her hands to lie the way she lies with her mouth.

I eat all of it.

Every bite.

After all, my woman gave me an order.

I find her a couple of hours later out at the quarantine pens.

I shouldn't be driving the side-by-side one-handed with a travel mug in the other, but the hip won't let me on the bike today, and I'll be damned if I sit in that cabin all morning.

So I roll out slow across the property and there she is, exactly where I figured, up at the far pen with the sick heifer.

Number 68's looking better.

Head up, eating, none of that dull hang to her she had a few days back.

Presley's leaned on the rail watching her eat with the satisfaction of a stockman whose sick one's turning the corner.

She doesn't hear me over the heifer until I've almost rolled up on her, and when she turns and clocks it's me, her whole face does a complicated thing—glad, then guarded, then something caught in between that she can't quite lock down.

"You're supposed to be off that hip," she says, instead of good morning.

"I'm sittin' down." I nod at the side-by-side under me. "This is me takin' it easy."