Page 186

He gets in his truck. Three go with him.

Eight left. We had eleven this morning.

Cass watches the taillights and says, without turning around, "That's still eight more than Monday."

"You should have gone with him."

"Yeah." She takes her hands off my chest. "Awful call. Been making it since April."

Maren's on the porch.

I don't know how long. Long enough. She's got the quilt around her shoulders and she's standing so still that Sid, who follows nobody, has come up and sat down against her ankle.

Everyone in the yard sees her at once. Eight wolves find something else to look at.

She comes down the steps in her socks. Again. Someone in this house has to buy that woman boots she'll agree to wear.

She stops in front of me. She's looking at me the way she looks at an object she's about to price, and I stand there and let her do it, because I just said something in front of eleven people that I’ve never told her.

"They can make me pack?" She says.

"Not they."

"You?"

"Yes."

"Tonight. It would work."

"It would work."

She nods slowly. Her eyes are dry and very bright and I would rather be back in the yard with Ansel.

"And you weren't going to mention it?"

"I’m not keeping anything from you anymore, Maren. I told you that yesterday and I meant it for the rest of my life." My voice comes out worse than I want it. "It's not a secret. It's something you get to choose."

She's quiet.

Then she says, "Say it again. The part about the title."

"Which part?"

"The part where you said there's one thing you wouldn't survive." She lifts her chin. "Say it to me instead of to them."

Say it say it say it.

"Getting you through tonight by not forcing you into anything" I say. “Everything else I can live through."

The porch light comes on above her by itself.

Neither of us says anything about it but Maren blinks her eyes at me in a flirty kind of way.

We leave at six.

She comes down the stairs in a dark green dress, old and heavy and beaded at the shoulders. It’s something out of her own shop that has been waiting on a rack for a hundred years for the right woman. Her mask is black. She holds it by the ribbon instead of wearing it. I can’t stop looking at her and my brain is like mush.

I've got a knife in my boot and eight wolves in three trucks behind me. But, I couldn’t tell you one useful thing about the next six hours.