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Halfway across, giddy and brave and rewritten down to the signature, I turned around.

He was standing where I'd left him, hat brim and shoulders against the stars, the biggest man in Montana holding his post at the edge of my bridge, and I called back across the dark water, sweet and clear and aimed:

"Goodnight, Daddy."

And I got to watch it. The whole mountain of him — the stillness that held down heifers, the chest that had been a wall between me and everything — I watched Boone Calloway forget, completely and visibly and for several long seconds, how to breathe.

Chapter 9

Boone

The ice had gone off the creek sometime in the night, and by Sunday noon the water was running in its summer voice — quick and bright over the stones, cold enough to stop a heart — and Josie Marsh sat between my knees on my grandmother's quilt with her boots off and her bare feet hovering an inch above the shallows, daring herself.

"It's not that cold," she said to the water, in the tone of a woman negotiating with livestock.

"It was ice on Thursday."

"Thursday was a different creek." Her toes dipped, touched, retreated. She made a sound like a kettle starting and tucked both feet up under her, and I felt the whole small operation of it against my chest, where she was leaned back into me like I was furniture, which was the finest thing anybody had ever used me for. My chin had found the top of her head somewhere in the last half hour and stayed. Her hair smelled like my soap now.

Biscuit lay in the new grass with her chin on her paws and her eyes on the sandwich basket. The first true warmth of spring had come down the valley that morning like something delivered — the range still white-shouldered behind us, but the bank gone soft and green at the water line, and the sun with actual weight in it — and the three of us had taken it the way stock takes it, straight out into the middle of it, faces turned up.

Day ten. I'd been keeping count without meaning to.

Ten days of three meals. Not eight days out of ten, not most days, not except when a heifer went down — ten out of ten, breakfast and dinner and supper, and I could see the change in her. She didn't know it was visible. That was the part I kept to myself, because a woman doesn't want a man doing before-and-after studies on her cheekbones — but the hollows under them had been filling in by degrees, a little more every few days, like a pasture coming back after a hard year, and there was color in her now that hadn't been there when she climbed out of that stuck truck. She'd caught me looking once, over Tuesday's supper, and asked what, and I'd said nothing, and she'd narrowed her eyes at me in the way she'd learned was safe to do, and I had thought, with a satisfaction deeper than anything a good calf crop ever gave me: I did that. We did that. The paper on her nightstand and the plates I filled did that.

On day four, she'd barked a knuckle on a gate hinge.

I hadn't seen it happen. That was the whole point of what came after — I was down the far end with the close-up cows, and she could have hidden it the way she'd hidden a kick and God knew what else her whole life, and instead she'd come the length of the barn and planted herself in front of me and held her hand out, palm down, like a woman presenting evidence to a court she wasn't sure of. "Same-day reporting," she'd said. Ears going pink, chin up that half inch, ferocious as anything five feet tall has ever been. "It's dumb. It's the dumbest one. That's why I'm reporting it."

I had taken the hand in both of mine and looked at the knuckle like it was a breech presentation. Cleaned it, wrapped it, told her good girl in the voice that made the lights come on in her, and she'd stood there in the aisle glowing and mortified and proud of herself, and I'd had to go move some hay after, because a man needs something heavy in his hands when his chest is doing what mine was doing. It was a scraped knuckle. It was nothing. It was the bravest thing I'd watched a person do in five years, and I include the night I watched a waitress beg me into silence with her husband's blood on her collar.

Then there was bedtime.

Nine o'clock on her off-nights, written in her own hand, enforced in mine — and enforcement, as it turned out, mostly meant the big chair. She'd come across the footbridge after supper with her coloring book and her crayons worn to stubs, and fold herself into my chair by the fire while I ran feed orders at the table, and somewhere between eight-thirty and nine the crayon would slow, and stop, and the book would tip, and I'd look up from my figures to find her gone under — small and slack and open-mouthed against the armrest, her braid coming apart, her breath gone long and even as a sleeping foal's.

Twice now I'd carried her home.

Both times the same: the book set aside with her page marked, her boots gathered in one hand, and then the lifting — and she weighed nothing, that was the fact of it, she weighed about what a week-old calf weighs, and both times she had done the thing that rearranged me. She hadn't woken. She'd turned in against my chest in her sleep, fist finding my shirt, and settled — this woman who had flinched at my footsteps four weeks ago, sleeping like the dead in the arms of the biggest hands in Montana, trusting them through the door and across the yard and over the footbridge with the creek talking under us and the stars coming down, Biscuit pacing alongside the whole way with her head up, supervising the transfer like a border collie moving one very valuable ewe. I'd laid her into her bed and gotten the quilt over her and put Clover where her hand would find it, and both times I'd stood there a minute in the dark, not watching, just — accounting. And then gone home across the bridge feeling like a man who'd been handed something he'd better not drop.

She was Littler now, by degrees. That was the word for it, her word, off our paper, and it had been compounding like interest all ten days. Clover lived openly on my mantel between visits now — she'd left the rabbit there on day six, casual as anything, terrified, watching my face while she did it, and I'd moved the lamp over four inches to give it the warm spot and said nothing, and that had settled that. And there was a new sound in the world. Ten days old. The first time Biscuit herded her toward the supper table — actually herded her, head low, working her toward the food like a reluctant heifer — Josie had giggled, a bright helpless spill of a sound I'd have bet money she didn't know she still had, and Biscuit had looked back at me over her shoulder like we were colleagues, and I had stood at my own stove wanting to live inside that sound the way you want to live inside June.

Which was the trouble. Because sitting there on the bank with her spine against my sternum and her hair under my chin, I caught my mind going where it had no business going. It was planning. Next summer — this same bank, the water warmer, teach her the deep pool below the bridge. The summer after that. It had her in a chair on my porch in some October I hadn't earned, and I hauled the thought up short the way you haul a colt off a bad slope.

She was here for the season. Doc's wrist would heal. Calving would end. The paper on her nightstand had rules in it, and every rule had an exit, and I'd built the exits myself and sworn they were free. A man doesn't budget for next summer on a seasonal arrangement. Wanting past June was a debt, and I knew better than to take on debt against ground I didn't hold.

I tightened my arms around her anyway.

"Mm," she said, pleased, and settled deeper, and the creek went on talking, and I sat there holding what I couldn't keep and keeping it.

She'd made us a picnic. A real one — assembled in secret in her cabin and carried over in the basket like contraband, and when she folded back the dish towel on top I sat on my grandmother's quilt and looked at sandwiches cut into triangles and had to take a minute.

Triangles. Crusts on, because she'd asked me once, offhand, fishing, whether I was a crusts man, and I'd said crusts were the best part, and I saw the little click behind her eyes — and here it was ten days later, entered into the record. Ham and mustard cut corner to corner by somebody's careful hand, for me, and there were hard-boiled eggs and a thermos of the good coffee and apples quartered so the pieces fit a small mouth, and I sat there with my hat off holding a triangle of sandwich like it was communion, because it was the first time in longer than I wanted to count that anybody had fussed over me.

"They're just sandwiches," she said, watching my face, going pink.

"They're not," I said, and ate one in two bites, and watched the pink turn to the full sunrise, and that was grace said as far as I was concerned.

The sun kept its weight all through the eating, and afterward she got brave about the creek again. Stood up off the quilt, rolled her jeans to the knee with the grim ceremony of a woman preparing for surgery, and waded in — actually in, both feet, shin-deep in snowmelt — and stood there for one glorious second with her arms out and her face triumphant, and then the cold arrived in her the way it does, on a delay, all at once.