Page 44 of Omega’s Fold

“Fine, but the boys stay with me. Wyatt is going to have to come back. The cattle need seeing to, and you sure as hell aren’t going to see to them. But you stay away from him.”

“I owe him an explanation.”

“I don’t think there is anything you can say that will make this okay. You son of a bitch,” she says again.

She looks at me, and shakes her head like she just can’t believe my audacity, then she gets back into the truck and drives away.

It is after five when I hear the truck. It comes in fast and stops hard. I wait for the kitchen door. Instead I hear boots on gravel and then the big barn door on its runner, and then the runner again, closing.

I give him ten minutes. I tell myself it’s ten and it’s probably four.

I pull on boots and cross the yard. The light from the barn doorway throws a long yellow stripe across the gravel. The air smells of cold dust and diesel and, faintly, of him — that scent of his that I have spent a week with my face in. It hits me harder out here in the open than it did in the kitchen this morning. I make myself walk through it.

He’s at the workbench when I step in. He has his back to me. He has a halter in his hands and he is doing something to the buckle. He doesn’t turn around.

“I need to talk to you.”

He sets the halter down. He picks up a hoof pick. He walks past me without a glance, two feet of space between us that he keeps as carefully as a man stepping around a hole, and goes into the gray mare’s stall.

I follow him as far as the door.

“I know you’re angry. You have a right to be angry. But standing there pretending I’m not in the room isn’t going to fix it.”

He picks up the mare’s near foreleg. He cleans the hoof. He sets it down. He moves to the next one.

I watch the back of his head and the set of his shoulders and the deliberate, methodical way he is working through this horse as if I am not six feet from him.

“For God’s sake, Wyatt.”

Nothing.

“Look at me. Just — look at me. One sentence. You can call me whatever you want. I’ll take it. Just open your mouth.”

He moves to the hind leg.

“Fine.” My voice comes out harder than I mean it to. “This is what we’re doing now, is it? The silent treatment. You’re a grown man, Briggs, not a twelve-year-old who got told off at recess. Sulking in a barn. Fuck’s sake.”

His hands go still on the mare’s hock. Just for a second. Then he picks the hoof clean and sets it down and moves to the last leg as though I haven’t spoken.

I stand there until I can hear my own pulse over the horse’s breathing.

“Right,” I say.

I walk out.

The barn light comes on. I can see it from the window, a pale yellow oblong on the yard.

It stays on.

I tell myself he’ll come inside in a minute. I tell myself it’s his barn and his land and he’ll do with them what he likes. I tell myself I wouldn’t want me in my house either.

The light goes off around three a.m. He doesn’t come in.

The phone wakes me. I have slept without meaning to. It’s buzzing on the nightstand, face down, and when I turn it over the screen says Mom.

She has been calling since the night of the pasta. I’ve let it go to voicemail three times. I carry the phone down the hall in my socks so I don’t wake Matthew, down the stairs, out onto the front porch. I pull the door shut behind me and sit on the top step before I answer.

“Mom.”