Page 49
She was happy. Stupidly, bodily, top-to-bottom happy, the kind of happy she hadn't felt in so long she'd half-decided the machinery for it had rusted shut for good.
She put her face in the pillow that smelled like him and grinned into it like a teenager.
And then, because she was who she was, the other thing came in right behind it, quiet, the way the cold comes in under a door. She lay in the warm wreck of the bed and let herself feel the whole shining size of how good it had been, his mouth, his hands, her name in that wrecked voice over and over, the weight of him after with her ear on his heart, and underneath all of it, faint and patient, the thing she was not going to look at directly this early in the morning: that she had just given herself, all the way, the whole reckless sum of herself, to a man who'd sat at her own table and told her in plain words that there was a wall at the end of every road they'd walk. No marriage. No more children. Nothing past this.
You knew that going in, she told herself, and got up, because the alternative was lying there arguing with a man who wasn't even in the room. You're a grown woman. You decided. You don't get to be surprised by the terms you agreed to.
She showered. She made the bed. She did not let herself reread the morning like a girl with a diary. She went to work, because she had a job, and the job was the thing she'd come all this way to be good at, and a woman could build an entire functioning self out of being good at the job. She'd done it before.
The ranch was quiet without the kids in it.
Helen had taken them to her place in town for the night, Lara had heard about the church-hall movie roughly nine times from Levi before they left, in escalating detail, and wasn't due to bring them back until after lunch, and the house felt strange and roomy for it, the particular hush of a place running on adults only. Lara let herself into the office, started the coffee, and got to work on the month's reconciliations like a person whose whole life was reconciliations, which, until about three months ago, it had been.
Around ten she heard a truck, and boots, and the screen door, and her whole traitor body turned toward the sound before she'd told it to.
But it was just the day, the ordinary loud lived-in day of the place, Chase coming through for coffee and a biscuit, telling her she looked well-rested for a Monday with a face so straight she almost let it pass, then stealing a second biscuit on his way back out before she could decide whether he'd meant anything by it; Mack's voice in the yard saying something to a hand about the north tank; the dogs losing their minds at a delivery and then forgiving it. She'd stopped being a stranger in it somewhere in the last weeks. People said her name now like it had always been on the list.
The mail came at eleven, and that was when the day turned for a minute.
She was at the kitchen table with the checkbook when Helen, back early, alone, the kids still in town with Marge, came in with the stack and started sorting it onto the counter the way she did, bills here, catalogs there, and stopped, and went still over one piece of it.
A postcard. Lara could see it from across the table: a strip of impossibly orange sky over a flat dark country, REPUBLIC OF something curving across the bottom in a font built for tourists who'd never come. Helen turned it over, read whatever was on the back, and her face did a complicated thing, soft and sad and careful all at once, and then she pinned it to the cork board by the phone, in the gap between the vet's card and a Sunday-school flyer, and didn't say a word about it.
Dean came in twenty minutes later for water, hat off, shirt stuck to his back, and the first thing he did, before the water, before anything, was find her at the table.
She felt it before she saw it, that weight on the side of her face. She looked up and his eyes were already on her, and the whole of last night was sitting in them, unhidden, undefended, a slow dark look that went down her once and came back up and stayed. He was doing it on purpose. She knew it the way she knew her own name, that he wanted her to know he remembered, all of it, the sounds she'd made and the low things he'd said against her skin and the way she'd come apart under his hands in that little bed across town, every second of it right there in how he was looking at her across his mother's old kitchen at eleven in the morning like a man working out when he could do it again.
She held his eyes and let nothing reach her face, and that was its own answer, and he took it as one. The corner of his mouth moved. He knew what the composure cost her. He knew she was on fire under the level surface of herself and holding it there by main force, and being seen straight through like that, read down to the studs by the one man who'd gone and learned how, turned out to be a heat all its own.
Then his gaze went past her, to the cork board by the phone, and caught.
She watched the change come over him, watched the warm dark thing go out of his face the way a lamp goes out, all at once, and leave the room colder. He crossed to the board and stood in front of it and read the few lines on the back, his face giving away exactly nothing, which she'd learned was the thing his face did when there was the most to give away. He read it twice. Then he unpinned it and held it a moment, just held it, the card small and bright in his big scarred hand, and something moved through him she couldn't name and wasn't sure he could either. He put it back on the board. He didn't read it out loud. He didn't say anything at all.
"Your brother?" Lara asked. Careful. Light as she could make it.
"My brother." A beat. He picked his hat back up off the table. "Brody."
And that was the whole of it. Not where he was, not why he was there instead of here, not why a grown man sent his sick father a postcard from the far side of the planet instead of getting on a plane, none of the things sitting plainly behind his face. He offered her the name and nothing else, and she understood that the name was already more than this family said out loud, and she didn't push. She'd learned that much about the Roystons: that the love and the grievances ran in the same deep water, and you didn't go wading into a current you couldn't see the bottom of.
She set it instead alongside the rest of what she was slowly learning about the man she'd just spent the night with. A brother on the other side of the world. A whole hurt with a name on it she'd been handed exactly once and not a syllable more.
He stopped on his way back out.
She was crossing the kitchen with the checkbook, headed for the office, and he was at the door with his hat already on, and as she passed him his hand came out and closed around her wrist, not hard, but sure, the whole easy authority of a man who'd earned the right to it sometime around midnight, and turned her, and pulled her in against his chest, and kissed her.
Once. Hard. Thorough enough that she lost the checkbook to the counter and her train of thought to the floor and made a sound into his mouth she'd be reviewing critically later. His hand spread warm at the small of her back the way it had outside Harvey's, the way it had on the dance floor, except that now it had been everywhere, now it knew her, and the knowing was in the kiss, in the unhurried certainty of it, and she felt it go all the way down.
He broke it off with his mouth still close to hers. He didn't apologize this time. He never would again, and that absence was its own kind of language.
"Tonight," he said. Low. Not a question.
"You have a one-word vocabulary," she informed him, because her dignity required she say something and that was what came up.
The corner of his mouth went, the thing it almost never did. "Got more than one word last night."
And he was gone out the door with his hat before she could find anything to throw, and Lara stood in the empty kitchen with her mouth warm and the checkbook abandoned on the counter, glad straight through in a way she didn't bother arguing with.
She picked the checkbook up and went and ran the feed-store account, which was reliably free of feelings.
