Trespasser
Daisy
The rental car was white, which in Wyoming in August is a decision you regret within a mile of gravel.
By the time I turned under the iron arch at Lark Creek, the hood had gone the color of a manila envelope and my sunglasses had a fine film of road on them that I kept smearing around with the hem of my shirt. The shirt was silk. I’d bought it in Brooklyn for a buyer meeting that never happened, and I’d worn it today because it was the most expensive thing I owned and I’d wanted, stupidly, to arrive looking like a woman who had done well for herself.
Nobody was here to see it. That was the point of coming home after a funeral you missed. You got the house, the dust, and the quiet.
Except the house wasn’t quiet.
I heard it before I saw it: a deep, rhythmic thud from behind the barn, then a horse’s squeal, high and furious, then a man’s voice saying something low that the wind tore apart before it reached me. I killed the engine and sat with my hands on the wheel.
Grandpa Amos had been dead since April. I knew because I’d been in a fitting room in Manhattan with pins in my mouth when the lawyer called, and I’d swallowed one. Not all the way. Enough to cough until the model asked if I needed water. The lawyer had said “peacefully” and “in his own bed” and then “there’s the matter of the property,” and I’d said I couldn’t come until the season was over, because Lark, my label, my nine employees and my overdue invoices and my one shot, was finally getting a look from a forty-store retailer and I couldn’t leave.
Four months later the retailer had said yes, my investor had said no, and I’d flown to Casper with two suitcases of samples and a listing appointment with Peggy Dunn of Dunn Realty at nine tomorrow morning.
I hadn’t planned for horses.
The barn stood where it always stood, red going to rust, the cottonwoods along the creek throwing long blue shade over the corrals. A truck I didn’t recognize was parked beside it, black and dented in honest places, hitched to a stock trailer with Montana mud still on the fenders. The kitchen window of the house was open. There was a dish towel hanging over the sill.
Someone was living in my grandfather’s house.
I got out of the car. The heat came up off the gravel and hit me in the shins. The air smelled exactly the way it had every summer of my life until I was nineteen: sage, horse, hot dust, and the green cold breath of the creek underneath it all, as if the land were keeping a secret it would only tell you at night. My throat closed on it. I made myself walk.
The round pen sat past the barn on a little rise. I came around the corner and stopped.
A man was riding a horse that did not want to be ridden.
It was a big bay with a black mane and a white splash on one hip, and it was coming apart under him in great hard heaves, front end up, back end up, twisting in the air like it meant to wring him off. Dust boiled up around them. The man sat it with one hand on a thick rein and the other thrown high and loose, his heels raking from the horse’s shoulders back toward the saddle in long, rolling strokes, perfectly timed, as if he and the animal were dancing to music only they could hear and the horse was losing the argument about who got to lead.
I knew that rhythm.
I knew the set of those shoulders and the way his free hand never stiffened, the way his chin stayed down. I had watched it from the bleachers at the Fremont County Fair at nineteen with my heart in my teeth. I had watched it from closer than that.
The horse quit all at once, the way they do, as if someone had cut a wire. It stood blowing with its sides heaving. The man swung down, landed light, and ran a hand along its sweat-dark neck. “There he is,” he said. “That’s all I wanted. Was that so bad?”
Then he looked up and saw me at the rail.
He didn’t startle. He just went still, the way the horse had, and for a long moment we stared at each other across fifty feet of churned dirt and eleven years.
He’d gotten bigger. He was thirty-three now, if I’d done the math right, and I had; I’d done it every March on his birthday whether I wanted to or not. Not soft, never that, but heavier through the chest and shoulders, a man’s weight settled on what had been a lanky frame. His T-shirt was soaked through and plastered to him. His jeans were white with dust to the knee. He’d lost his hat somewhere in the ride and his hair was darker than I remembered, brown gone almost black with sweat, curling at the nape. And his face.
Somebody had taken a knife to Wade McCallister’s face, or a horse had, which in his line of work came to the same thing. A pale seam ran through his left eyebrow and split it in two. Another, older and thinner, traced the hinge of his jaw on the same side, down toward his throat. His nose had been broken at least once and set by someone in a hurry. It should have ruined him. It didn’t. It just made the beauty look like it had been in a fight and won.
“Daisy Harlan,” he said.
His voice had gotten lower too. It went through the hot air and found a place under my sternum I’d sealed up a long time ago.
“What are you doing here?” My voice came out higher than I wanted. I tried again. “This is private property.”
“Yeah.” He gathered the bay’s rein and walked toward me, unhurried. The horse followed him like a dog. “It is.”
“It’s my property.”
“Some of it.”
He stopped on the other side of the rail. Up close he smelled like horse and sweat and clean leather, and there was a line of blood dried at his hairline where something had nicked him. His eyes were the same. That was the worst part. Gray as creek stones, with the same gold flecks I’d spent a whole summer naming, as if I could own them that way.
“You look like New York,” he said.
“Is that supposed to be an insult?”
“It’s an observation.” His gaze went down the silk shirt, the slim trousers, the sandals that were already full of grit, and back up. It took its time. “Insult would be pointing out you just walked through a pile of horse shit in what I’m guessing are four-hundred-dollar shoes.”
I looked down. I had. I looked up again and he was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read, his mouth flat, his eyes doing something else entirely.
“Why,” I said, very carefully, “is your truck at my grandfather’s house, Wade?”
“Because I live here.”
He showed me the lease at the kitchen table.
Grandpa’s kitchen. The same oilcloth with faded cherries, the same chipped blue enamel coffeepot on the same stove, the same calendar from Corley Feed and Seed tacked by the door, still turned to April. Somebody had circled the fourteenth in pencil. I didn’t ask what it was. I didn’t want to know if it was the day he died or a vet appointment or nothing at all.
The kitchen was clean. Cleaner than Grandpa had ever kept it. There was a dish rack with one plate, one fork, one mug. A pair of work gloves on the windowsill. A bottle of ibuprofen the size of a coffee can.
Wade slid the paper across the cherries. He’d washed his face and hands at the sink and put on a dry shirt, a faded blue chambray he hadn’t bothered to button all the way, and he sat across from me with his chair tipped back on two legs like he owned the place.
Which, according to the document in front of me, he sort of did.
I read it twice. It was short. Amos Harlan, Lessor, and Wade J. McCallister, Lessee. The barn, corrals, arena, and pasture of Lark Creek Ranch, together with occupancy of the residence, for the term ending October 31. Consideration: one dollar, receipt of which is hereby acknowledged. Signed in Grandpa’s slanting hand, dated March ninth, witnessed by somebody named Lorraine Pruitt, notarized.
“One dollar,” I said.
“He drove a hard bargain.”
“March ninth. He was already sick in March.”
Something moved across Wade’s face and was gone. “He knew what he was doing.”
“Did he?” I put the paper down. My hands weren’t quite steady and I flattened them on the table so he wouldn’t see. “Because I’ve been talking to his lawyer for four months and not once did anyone mention that he’d handed the whole ranch to a saddle bronc rider for a dollar.”
“Not the whole ranch. Read it again. The land’s yours. The cattle went to the Pruitts last fall; he sold them himself. I just get to use the place.” He let his chair come down on four legs. “Through October.”
“I’m listing it tomorrow.”
“So list it.”
“With you in it?”
“Lease conveys with the property, Daisy. Whoever buys it buys me.” A corner of his mouth went up. It wasn’t a smile so much as a warning that one might happen. “Through October.”
I stared at him. The kitchen clock ticked. Outside a meadowlark went off like a burst of water from a hose, and I hated it, hated how beautiful it was, hated that I knew the name of the bird.
“Why,” I said. “Why do you need a ranch in Wyoming for two months? Don’t you have a—” I flapped a hand. “A place? A circuit? A trailer full of women?”
“Truck’s got a bunk.” He said it without any embarrassment. “Trailer’s got horses. And I need this place because I’m seventeenth in the world standings in saddle bronc with seven weeks left in the regular season, and the top fifteen go to the Finals in December, and I’ve got two practice horses and a gelding who don’t do well in motel parking lots.” He leaned back again. “Amos let me keep them here last winter while I healed up. He offered the rest when he got sick. I said yes.”
“Healed up from what?”
He touched his right shoulder without seeming to notice he’d done it. “Horse named Widowmaker in Fort Worth.”
“That’s not a real name.”
“Neither is Daisy.”
“It is so.”
“It’s a flower.” His eyes did that thing again, that unhurried slide. “You were named after something that grows in ditches.”
“I was named after my great-grandmother.”
“Who was named after something that grows in ditches.”
I stood up. The chair scraped. I didn’t care. “I want you out.”
“I know.” He didn’t move. “I’m not going.”
“I’ll call the sheriff.”
“Dale Pruitt’s the sheriff. Lorraine’s his wife. She witnessed that lease.” He nodded at the paper. “Dale’ll come out, drink a cup of coffee, tell you you’ve grown up real pretty, and go home.”
I had grown up with Dale Pruitt’s daughters. He’d taught me to fish. He would absolutely do that.
“Fine.” I picked up my purse, which was ridiculous, a little leather thing that held a phone and a lipstick and nothing useful for a standoff in a kitchen. “Then I’ll stay at the motel in town until I figure this out.”
“The Wagon Wheel’s full. Pipeline crew’s got every room till September.” He said it with a kind of lazy relish. “Next closest bed is Riverton, and they’ve got a gun show.”
“Then I’ll sleep in the car.”
“It’s going to get down to forty tonight.”
“I’m from here, Wade. I know how cold it gets.”
“You were from here.” That landed. He saw it land and didn’t look sorry. “You’ve been gone eleven years. You didn’t come at Christmas. You didn’t come when he broke his hip. You didn’t come in April.”
“Don’t.” The word came out of me sharp enough to cut. “Don’t you dare. You don’t get to stand in this kitchen and tell me who left.”
For a second, just one, I saw it hit. His face went flat and closed, like a door swinging shut in wind. His hands, resting loose on the table, curled into fists and then deliberately opened again.
When he spoke his voice was quiet. “Your room’s the way you left it. He wouldn’t let anybody touch it. Clean sheets on the bed. I put them on in May.” He stood, and he was taller than me by more than I remembered, close enough in that small kitchen that I had to tip my head back. “Bathroom’s at the end of the hall. Hot water runs out after about eight minutes, so if you’re the type to stand in there thinking about your feelings, do it fast.”
“This is my house.”
“Half of it is.” He picked up the lease, folded it once, and tucked it in his shirt pocket over his heart. “The way I see it, half of it’s mine till Halloween.”
I brought in my suitcases myself. He offered once, from the porch, and I said no, and he shrugged and went back out to the barn. I heard him talking to the horses as the light went orange and then purple. He talked to them the way other people hum, a steady low noise that didn’t need an answer.
My room was exactly the way I’d left it.
That was a lie. It was exactly the way I’d left it plus eleven years of dust nobody had been allowed to wipe, except someone had, recently, carefully, leaving the top of the dresser clean and the mirror clear. The quilt was the same blue double wedding ring Grandma had made before I was born. The corkboard over the desk still had my sketches pinned to it, nineteen-year-old drawings of slip dresses and bias-cut camisoles, the lines so eager they almost tore the paper. A ribbon from a 4-H sewing competition. A photo strip from the Fremont County Fair.
I didn’t look at the photo strip.
I looked at it.
Four frames. A girl with a sunburned nose and a straw hat laughing so hard her eyes were shut. A boy with no scars at all, his arm around her neck, looking not at the camera but at her. In the third frame he’d turned and kissed her temple. In the fourth she’d turned to meet him and the shutter had caught them half a second before their mouths touched, and the whole strip was so bright and so stupid and so sure of itself that I had to sit down on the bed.
Nineteen. I’d been nineteen, with a scholarship to a design school in New York and a boy who said he loved me under the bleachers at the Fremont County Fair, and I’d been about to throw the scholarship away. I’d had the letter written. Thank you for the generous offer, but due to family circumstances. Family circumstances. As if he’d been family.
And then one night in August he’d come out to the creek where I was waiting and told me it had been a summer thing. That was what he called it. A summer thing. That I should go to New York, because he was leaving for the circuit in the morning and he wasn’t the type to write.
He hadn’t written. Not once.
I went to New York.
I unpinned the photo strip and put it face down in the desk drawer and shut the drawer hard enough to rattle the pencils.
Down the hall, the back door banged. Boots on the floorboards. The hiss of the kitchen faucet. Then the bathroom door, and the pipes groaning in the wall as the shower came on. I could hear water hit tile, then the change in the sound when he stepped under it.
I sat on my childhood bed with my hands between my knees and tried very hard not to think about Wade McCallister naked on the other side of a wall I could put my palm against.
I lasted maybe ninety seconds.
Then I got up, opened my laptop on the desk, and emailed Peggy Dunn: Tomorrow still on. Small complication. I’ll explain. I emailed Priya in Brooklyn: Got here. House is fine. There’s a man in it. I deleted the second sentence and wrote There’s a tenant. I deleted that too and wrote Don’t worry. I’ll have the money by October.
The shower shut off. Eight minutes, almost exactly.
I heard his door. Then his voice, through the wall, much closer than I’d expected, as if he’d come to stand on the other side of it.
“Daisy.”
I didn’t answer.
“I know you’re awake. Light’s under your door.”
“Go to bed, Wade.”
A pause. Long enough that I thought he’d gone. Then, quieter, almost too low to hear through plaster and pine:
“I’m not leaving. Not this time.”
I sat in the light of my laptop with my heart going like the bay horse in the round pen, trying to work out whether that was a threat or a promise, and why, at thirty years old, with a lease and a lawyer and a buyer meeting at nine, I couldn’t tell the difference.
The Line Down the Middle
Wade
My body has opinions at four-thirty in the morning, and none of them are kind.
The shoulder’s the loudest. It’s got a plate and six screws in it now and it aches like a bad tooth whenever the weather’s about to turn, which in Wyoming is always. Then the ribs on the left side, where a horse named Cinnamon Toast stepped on me in Pendleton two years ago and I rode the next night anyway. Then the knee. Then a general background hum from thirteen years of getting thrown at the ground by animals who weigh twelve hundred pounds and have no interest in my retirement plan.
I lay in the narrow bed in Amos’s spare room and listened to the house and made a list, the way I do every morning, so I don’t have to think about anything else.
Seventeenth. Forty-one hundred dollars behind Cody Rasmussen in fifteenth. Seven weeks. Corley Days next Saturday, Ellensburg after that, then a run of little ones in Montana and the Dakotas, then the Big Horn Stampede in Sheridan the last weekend in September, which paid well enough to settle it one way or the other. Feed the horses. Ride Domino, because the bay had finally quit trying to kill me yesterday and I wanted to see if he remembered. Spur board. Stretch the shoulder. Ice the shoulder. Don’t think about Daisy Harlan asleep forty feet down the hall in a bed I’d made up for her in May, back when I didn’t think she’d come.
I got through the list fine until the last item.
The light was gray when I came out into the hall. And there, running from the front door straight down the middle of the old pine floor, past the bathroom, past my door and hers, all the way into the kitchen, was a line of blue painter’s tape.
I followed it.
It split the kitchen table down the center, cherries on both sides. It went across the counter, around the coffeepot, up the front of the refrigerator, and across the stove between the left burners and the right. At the back door it took a sharp turn and ran along the threshold so the mudroom fell on one side and the pantry on the other. It was very straight. It had been laid down by somebody who knew how to cut a pattern.
There was a sheet of paper stuck to the refrigerator door with a magnet shaped like a trout. It was written in black marker in handwriting I’d have known anywhere, even if eleven years had made it smaller and sharper.
HOUSE RULES
1. North side (barn side) is yours. South side is mine. Stay on your side. 2. Kitchen and bathroom are shared. Kitchen: you before 7, me after. Bathroom: KNOCK. 3. Coffee is neutral territory. 4. Shirts are mandatory in shared spaces. 5. This arrangement ends October 31 or when I sell, whichever comes first.
I read it twice. Then I took the marker from where she’d left it on the counter, which was on her side, and added a few lines.
6. Rule 4 applies to both parties. (Silk counts as half a shirt.) 7. Horses don’t respect tape. 8. Neither do I.
I made coffee. I poured a cup, set it on her side of the table at the place where she used to sit when she was a kid and Amos made her eat oatmeal before chores, and went out to feed.
She came out at nine with Peggy Dunn.
I was on Domino in the arena. He’d remembered, mostly. He made two honest jumps out of the gate I’d built from pallets, then threw his head and crow-hopped sideways in a halfhearted way that meant he was thinking about it and decided he didn’t care enough. I rode him out, swung off, and saw them at the fence: Peggy in a lavender blazer and turquoise squash-blossom necklace that had to weigh as much as a saddle horn, a skinny kid with a camera behind her, and Daisy.
She’d changed. Jeans, at least, if you could call them that. They were dark and fit her like she’d sewn herself into them, which knowing her she might have. A white shirt with the sleeves rolled. Her hair was pulled back in a knot at her neck and she had a pair of tortoiseshell glasses on that made her look like she was about to audit me. She’d been a skinny, freckled girl who climbed trees and wore my shirts with the cuffs rolled four times. She’d come back a woman who looked at the barn like it was a line item.
Except she didn’t. Not quite. I watched her eyes go up the side of it to the hayloft door, where she and I had sat on summer nights with our legs hanging over the drop, and I watched her look away fast like it had burned her.
“Wade McCallister,” Peggy said, lifting her sunglasses. “I heard you were squatting.”
“Leasing, Peggy.”
“Squatting with paperwork.” She looked me up and down with frank professional interest. “Lord, honey, what happened to your face?”
“Rodeo.”
“Well. It’s working for you.” She patted Daisy’s arm. “Sweetheart, I’ll be honest. Tenant occupancy through Halloween is going to scare off the ranchers. But there’s a fella from Jackson, Summit Ridge Land Company, been sniffing around the whole valley buying up places. He doesn’t care about tenants. He cares about acreage.”
“Summit Ridge,” Daisy said.
“Ranchettes.” Peggy made a face like it tasted funny. “Forty-acre lots, a log house on each one, people from California putting up those little solar lights along the driveway. But the money’s real. He’s paying top dollar. Three million for a place this size wouldn’t surprise me.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to. Daisy looked at me anyway, a quick look, almost guilty, and then back at Peggy.
“Let’s get the pictures,” she said.
The kid with the camera started at the house. I went back to work. And I’ll admit, here and now, that it wasn’t an accident when I pulled my shirt off and hung it on the fence post while they were setting up a shot of the corrals with the mountains behind them, or that I took my time walking across the frame with a saddle on my hip.
“Wade,” Peggy called. “You’re in the picture.”
“I live here.”
“Could you live here with a shirt on?”
“Rule six,” I said, and caught Daisy’s eye across the arena.
She went red. Not embarrassed red. Mad red, from the collar of that white shirt right up to her hairline. She’d always colored like that, everything she felt rushing up to the surface where anybody could read it. I used to make her blush on purpose just to watch it happen. I used to follow it with my mouth.
I put the saddle on the fence and the thought out of my head, and neither one stayed where I left it.
“I’ll photoshop him out,” the kid said.
“You’ll photoshop him a shirt,” Peggy said. “He’s the best-looking thing on the property.”
At six fifty-eight that evening I was standing at the stove with two steaks in Amos’s cast-iron pan, and I’ll admit that wasn’t an accident either.
The kitchen was mine before seven. The rule said so, in her own marker, and she hadn’t written a.m. or p.m., so I’d decided it meant both. I’d come in from the barn at six-thirty and taken my time, washed up, set the pan to heating, and I heard her door open down the hall right on schedule and her bare feet on the floorboards, and I flipped the steaks so they’d hiss loud enough to carry.
She stopped in the kitchen doorway. Gray sweatshirt off one shoulder. Glasses. A bag of salad from the Mercantile in one hand like a weapon.
“It’s seven,” she said.
I looked at the clock over the door. “Six fifty-nine.”
“You’re on my burners.”
I looked down. The pan was sitting square on the line of blue tape, two burners on my side, two on hers, the cast iron straddling the border like a fence it didn’t care about.
“Pan’s bigger than the burner,” I said. “Not my fault Amos bought the big one.”
“Move it.”
“Can’t. It’s searing.” I tipped the pan so the fat ran and the smell came up, butter and black pepper and beef, and watched her nose twitch. “Ribeyes from the Pruitts. Grass-fed. Hung three weeks. You’re going to eat that salad out of the bag standing at the sink, aren’t you?”
“I like salad.”
“Nobody likes salad. People eat salad because they’re scared of something.”
She came into the kitchen. She didn’t cross the tape. She stood on her side of the counter and tore open the bag and pulled out a piece of lettuce and ate it, looking right at me, chewing slow.
The clock clicked over to seven.
“My kitchen,” she said.
“Your kitchen.” I turned off the burner. Then I took down two plates from the cupboard, which was on her side, and put a steak on each one, and slid one across the counter so it stopped exactly on the tape. “Neutral territory. Like the coffee.”
She looked at the steak a long time.
“This doesn’t mean anything,” she said, and sat down.
We ate on either side of the line, the cherries between us. She cut her meat in small precise pieces like she was tracing a pattern. I watched her try not to close her eyes at the first bite and fail.
“So,” she said, when she’d eaten half of it and pretended she wasn’t going to finish. “Eight seconds.”
“What about it?”
“That’s the whole thing? You train all year, you drive all over the country, you get your face rearranged, for eight seconds?”
“Eight seconds is what they score.” I leaned back. “You’ve got to stay on for eight. After that, you can do what you want. Some horses, you ride a lot longer than eight. Some horses, you’d ride all night if they’d let you.”
She put her fork down. “Are we still talking about horses?”
“I don’t know, Daisy. Are we?”
The pink came up from the neck of the sweatshirt. She held my eyes anyway. “You know, in New York, eight seconds isn’t considered something to brag about.”
I laughed. It came out of me before I could stop it, loud in that quiet kitchen, the first real laugh I’d had since April. Her mouth twitched. For a second she was nineteen and I was twenty-two and we were in the bed of my truck at the county fair throwing popcorn at each other.
“You used to ride,” I said. “You were good. Amos’s old mare, Biscuit. You’d go out bareback in the creek bottom and come home with your hair full of burrs.”
“I haven’t ridden in eleven years.”
“It comes back. Your body remembers.” I picked up her empty plate, because she’d finished it after all. “Anytime you want to get back on, New York, you let me know. I’ll make sure you stay on for the full eight.”
I went out to the porch before she could throw the salad at me. I heard her laugh behind the screen door, just once, startled out of her, like it had been locked up somewhere for a long time.
The days after that went the way days go when you’re living with a woman you’re trying not to want, on either side of a strip of blue tape.
She was up before me, which surprised me. I’d come into the kitchen at four-thirty and find the light already on in the sewing room at the front of the house, the one that had been her grandmother’s. She’d hauled in a folding table and set up a laptop and a little steam iron and a dressmaker’s dummy with no head, and she sat there in the lamplight in a gray sweatshirt with the neck cut out, falling off one shoulder, drawing on a tablet with a pen and talking on the phone in a fast, low New York voice to somebody named Priya about trims and duty rates and something called a forty-store purchase order that seemed to be the axle her whole life turned on.
She didn’t come into the kitchen before seven. She kept to her rules. I kept to mine, which meant I left a cup of coffee on her side of the table every morning and every morning she drank it and never once said thank you.
At night we passed in the hall like boats with no lights. I’d come in smelling like the barn and she’d be in the doorway of her room in a robe the color of the inside of a shell, some slippery stuff that moved like water when she did. She’d look at the tape. I’d look at the robe. Neither one of us would say anything worth saying.
“There’s tape on your boot,” she said on the fourth night.
I looked down. A strip of blue had come up off the floor and wrapped itself around my heel.
“Horses don’t respect it,” I said. “Turns out my boots don’t either.”
“You’re tracking it onto my side.”
“Then I guess you’ll have to come over and take it off me.”
She looked at me for a long second. Then she went into her room and closed the door, and I stood in the hall like a fool with tape on my boot and my heart going harder than it had on Domino.
On the fifth night I made the mistake of not knocking.
I’d been in the arena till full dark, then fixed a water tank float by flashlight, and by the time I came in I’d forgotten anybody else lived here. The bathroom door was shut but the light was off underneath it. I pushed it open.
The light wasn’t off. The bulb over the sink had burned out the day before and she’d lit one of those fat candles she’d brought from the city, and the bathroom was full of steam and gold and the smell of something dark and floral, like a rose that had been left in a closed car. And Daisy was standing at the sink in a towel.
Just a towel. White, from the linen closet, the old kind Amos had bought in bulk at the farm store, thin from washing. She’d wrapped it under her arms and it stopped high on her thighs, and her hair was down and wet and dripping onto her bare shoulders, and she was leaning toward the fogged mirror with a fingertip, drawing something on the glass.
She turned. We both froze.
I should’ve backed out. Any decent man would’ve backed out. I stood in the doorway with my hand still on the knob and looked at her, and I couldn’t make my feet go.
She’d been nineteen, the last time. Slim and sunburned, all elbows and nerve. She was thirty now and she’d grown into herself, curved where she’d been straight, a softness at her hips under the towel and a fullness above the tuck of it where her breathing was making the cloth rise and fall. There was a freckle on her collarbone. I remembered that freckle. I’d put my mouth on that freckle on the hood of my truck under more stars than I’ve seen anywhere since.
“Rule two,” she said. Her voice wasn’t quite steady.
“Light was off.”
“The light is broken. Which you’d know if you ever fixed anything in this house that isn’t a horse.”
“I fixed the float on the water tank.”
“Congratulations.” Her hand had gone to the knot of the towel between her breasts and was holding it there. Her knuckles were white. “Get out, Wade.”
I didn’t. I stepped in and shut the door behind me.
It was a small bathroom. One step put me close enough to feel the heat coming off her skin, close enough that the steam beaded on my arms. She backed up until her hip hit the sink. She didn’t look away. Her eyes went over my face, the scars, down to my throat, to where my shirt was open, and then they stopped on my left side, where the shirt gaped and you could see the start of the long white line where they’d gone in to fix the ribs.
Her face changed.
“What,” she said, very quietly, “happened to you?”
“Lot of horses happened to me.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only one I’ve got.”
She lifted her free hand like she was going to touch it, the scar on my ribs, and stopped an inch away. I could feel the heat of her palm through the open shirt without her touching me at all. My whole body went tight around it. I didn’t breathe.
“I read about Fort Worth,” she said. “Online. After you said it. They had to cut you out of the rigging. You were in the hospital for nine days.”
“You looked me up.”
“I wanted to know if you were lying.”
“Was I?”
“No.” Her hand was still there, still not touching. “I’m sorry about your face.”
“I’m not,” I said. “It keeps people from looking too close.”
She looked up at me then. Close. Candlelight moving in her eyes, which were brown, warm and dark as a good saddle, and I watched her see right through that, the way she’d always seen through every damn thing I ever said to keep her at arm’s length.
“I’m looking,” she said.
The candle popped. Somewhere outside, Domino whinnied in the corral, and Amos’s old heeler, Hank, who’d adopted me since the funeral and slept on the porch, let out one deep bark.
Daisy dropped her hand. “Get out,” she said again, but softer, and this time I did.
I shut the door. I stood in the dark hallway with my back against it and my hands in fists and my jeans so tight it hurt, and I heard her let out a long, shaking breath on the other side of the wood.
Then the water came back on.
I went out to the porch and sat with Hank until the shaking stopped, and then I went to bed and didn’t sleep.
At one in the morning I gave up and went to the kitchen for water. The light was on in the sewing room. I told myself I was just going to turn it off, because the bill came to me, which it didn’t, and I crossed the tape to do it.
She was asleep at the folding table with her cheek on her forearm and her glasses pushed up crooked into her hair. She’d changed into flannel pajama pants and an old Corley High sweatshirt that I was pretty sure had once been mine. The tablet had gone dark. There were papers spread all around her, pencil sketches, and I stood there with my hand on the light switch and looked at them.
They were lingerie.
I’d known that. Peggy had told half the county by now: Amos Harlan’s granddaughter makes fancy underwear in New York City. I’d seen the website once, late, in a motel in Salinas, and closed it fast like I’d been caught at something. But knowing it and seeing it were different. These weren’t the pictures on the website. These were rough, quick, full of erased lines and arrows and notes in her small black hand, and they were the most beautiful things I’d ever seen drawn by a person.
A corset with boning stitched like the tooling on a saddle. A set of straps across a woman’s back that crossed and buckled like a headstall. A slip, long and loose, cut from something she’d labeled dove charmeuse, with a hem that dipped in back like the line of a horse’s spine. She’d written conchos? next to a garter belt and circled it twice. She’d drawn a pair of panties with a little silver buckle at each hip and written beside them, in tiny letters, for W, and then scratched it out so hard the pencil had torn the paper.
At the top of the page, in block capitals, she’d written the name of the collection.
LARK.
I stood there a long time with my hand on the switch.
She’d named it after this place. All of it. The whole business, the website I’d closed in Salinas, the forty-store order, the thing she’d given up the boy and the ranch and her grandfather’s last ten years for. She’d gone to New York and built a life out of satin and wire and stubbornness, and she’d named every piece of it after the land she was about to sell to a man who’d cut it into forty-acre pieces and put solar lights along the driveways.
I turned off the light and left her sleeping in the dark.
Then I went back down the hall, stepped over the tape, and lay awake until four-thirty, when my body started in with its opinions, and for once I didn’t make a list.
I just kept seeing two scratched-out letters on a page. For W.
Weather
Daisy
On my ninth day home I drove into Corley for thread and found out my grandfather had not died alone.
The Mercantile still had the same bell over the door and the same smell of floor wax and seed packets. It still sold everything, motor oil and baby formula and fishing flies and, in two dusty aisles at the back, fabric and notions, because the Corley Quilt Guild had been meeting on Tuesday nights since Eisenhower and would burn the place down if it stopped. I was crouched in front of the thread rack looking for an ivory heavy enough for topstitching when a pair of pink orthopedic sneakers stopped beside me.
“Daisy Jean Harlan,” said Lorraine Pruitt. “Stand up and let me look at you.”
I stood up. She looked. She was seventy if she was a day, five feet tall, her hair a cloud of white, and she had witnessed the lease that was ruining my life. She took my face in both hands like a cantaloupe she was thinking of buying.
“Too thin,” she said. “New York doesn’t feed you.”
“New York feeds me fine, Mrs. Pruitt.”
“Lorraine. You’re a grown woman. Grown women call me Lorraine and bring me pie.” She let go of my face and picked up the spool of ivory I’d been holding and squinted at it. “This is for upholstery.”
“I know. I’m using it on leather.”
“On underwear?”
The entire Mercantile, all four people in it, went quiet to listen.
“On a corset,” I said. “With leather binding. Like saddle stitching.”
Lorraine considered this. Then she nodded, as if I’d passed something. “Your grandmother would have liked that. She used to say if you can sew a saddle blanket you can sew anything.” She handed back the spool. “You’re staying out at the place.”
“For now.”
“With Wade.”
“In the same house. Not with.”
“Mm-hm.” Lorraine’s eyes were very blue and very shrewd. “He was good to Amos, you know. At the end.”
I didn’t know. I didn’t want to. I said, “I’m sure.”
“No, you’re not. You think he talked a sick old man out of a lease so he’d have a place to park his horses.” She picked a packet of needles off the rack and turned it over in her hands. “He drove Amos to Riverton for every treatment. Twice a week, January to March. Sat with him in that awful room with the vinyl chairs and read him the stock report and the rodeo standings and that Louis L’Amour book with the pages falling out. When they moved Amos home for hospice, Wade slept on the floor beside his bed so he could hear him if he needed to turn over.” She put the needles back. “He was holding his hand when he went. Somebody ought to tell you that, since nobody else has.”
The fluorescent light buzzed. I stood in the notions aisle with an upholstery thread in my hand and something rising in my throat so fast I couldn’t swallow it.
I hadn’t been there. I’d been in a fitting room in Manhattan, swallowing a pin.
“Why,” I said, and had to stop. “Why didn’t anyone call me?”
“He did call you, honey.” Lorraine’s voice softened. “Amos told him not to. Said you were busy making something of yourself and he didn’t want to be the reason you stopped.” She patted my arm. “That man was proud of you every day of his life. He had your website saved on that computer the library gave him. Showed it to the guild. Half of us didn’t know where to look.”
I paid for the thread. I walked out to the car. I sat in the parking lot of the Mercantile with the windows down and the hot wind blowing through and cried so hard I couldn’t see the dashboard, for Amos and for the vinyl chairs and for a man I’d spent eleven years hating sleeping on a floor beside a hospital bed so he’d hear when my grandfather needed him.
Then my phone rang, and it was Priya, and I wiped my face with the back of my wrist and answered, because that’s what you do.
“Halvorsen’s wants the samples by the first,” she said without hello. Priya didn’t do hello. She’d been my first intern and was now, somehow, my business partner, which mostly meant we were broke together. “Final fit photos, all eight looks. And the factory in Queens needs the production deposit by October first or they give our slot to a sportswear brand.”
“How much again?” I knew. I wanted to hear it in a voice that wasn’t mine.
“Three hundred and eighty thousand, plus fabric.” Priya paused. “Daisy, without the deposit there’s no order. Without the order there’s no Lark. And without Lark I’m going back to work for that man who made us call him Creative Director in the email signature.”
“I know.”
“Has the realtor got a buyer?”
I looked out the windshield. The Wind River Range sat on the horizon like it always had, purple and white-tipped, indifferent to everything. Somewhere out there was a man from Jackson with a checkbook and a plan for forty-acre lots.
“Maybe,” I said. “There’s a developer.”
“Then take the developer’s money and come home.”
Home. As if the word meant only one thing.
“Are the fit photos covered?” Priya asked. “Because Jasmine’s booked through September.”
“I’ll do them myself. I’m the sample size. I’ll set up a mirror and a tripod.” I rubbed my eyes. “The only problem is the corset. I can’t lace the back of that thing myself.”
“So get someone to lace you.”
“I’m on a ranch in Wyoming, Priya. Who am I supposed to—”
I stopped.
“Daisy?”
“Never mind,” I said. “I’ll figure it out.”
The storm came in at four.
You can see weather coming for an hour out here. It stacks up over the mountains first, a white tower on a blue day, and then it goes the color of a bruise and comes across the valley dragging a gray curtain of rain under it like a hem. By the time I got back from town the cottonwoods were showing the pale undersides of their leaves and the air smelled like wet pennies.
Wade’s truck was there but Wade wasn’t. Hank was on the porch, whining. Domino and the two practice horses were running the fence in the big corral with their heads up and their tails flagged, and the barn door was banging open and shut in the wind like somebody slamming out of a fight.
I didn’t think. I’d grown up here. You get the horses in before lightning.
I ran across the yard, dropped my bag on the porch, and hauled open the corral gate. The rain hit me halfway, not drops but sheets of it, cold enough to knock the air out of me. My white shirt went transparent in about four seconds. I didn’t care. I got a hand on the first practice horse’s halter, a sorrel mare named Sugar who’d been nosing my pockets for apples all week, and talked her through the gate and into the barn, and the second one followed because horses mostly do. That left Domino, who stood in the middle of the corral with rain sheeting off his back and the whites of his eyes showing, looking at me like I was the storm.
“Okay,” I told him, wiping water off my face. “Okay, I know. I know you’re not a fan.”
“Daisy.”
Wade came out of the downpour at a jog from the direction of the creek, soaked to the skin, a fence tool in one hand. He’d been out checking the wire. His hair was plastered to his forehead. His shirt was stuck to him so completely I could see every hard line of his chest and stomach, every muscle shifting when he moved.
“Get in the barn,” he said.
“I’ve got him.”
“He’ll kick your head in.”
“He won’t.” I held out my hand flat and low. Domino looked at it. Lightning cracked open the sky over the mountains, and he flinched, and I said, “There he is, that’s all I want, was that so bad?” in the same low voice I’d heard Wade use on my first night home, and the bay dropped his head and walked to me through the mud and let me take his halter.
Wade stood in the rain and stared at me.
I led Domino past him into the barn without a word.
The barn was dark and loud with rain on the tin roof, a roar like being inside a drum. It smelled like it always had, hay and leather and horse and dust turning to mud. I got Domino into his stall and latched it. My hands were shaking. Cold, I told myself. My teeth were chattering and my shirt was a wet second skin, and I could feel Wade come in behind me and haul the big door shut against the wind, and then it was dimmer and closer, just the gray light from the high windows and the horses shifting in their stalls.
“Where’d you learn that?” His voice was rough.
“From you.” I turned around. “First night. I was watching.”
“You were watching me.”
“You were riding a horse in my front yard. It was hard to miss.”
He was leaning against the door, rain running off him, the fence tool still in his hand. He set it down very carefully on a hay bale, the way you set something down when you’re afraid of what your hands will do if they’re empty.
“Your shirt,” he said.
I looked down. It was worse than I’d thought. The white cotton had gone clear as a window and the lace of my bra showed through it, every scallop, and the cold had done what cold does. I crossed my arms. Then, because I was tired of crossing my arms around this man, I uncrossed them.
“I saw Lorraine Pruitt today,” I said.
Something went still in his face.
“She told me about Riverton. The vinyl chairs. The Louis L’Amour book.” My voice cracked and I didn’t stop it. “She told me you slept on the floor.”
“Lorraine talks too much.”
“She told me you called. That he told you not to.” I took a step toward him. “Why didn’t you call anyway? You never did what anyone told you.”
“I did once,” he said.
The rain roared. A gust hit the barn and the whole building groaned around us.
“What does that mean?”
“Nothing.” He pushed off the door. “Go up to the house, Daisy. Get dry.”
“No.”
“I’m not doing this with you in a barn.”
“Doing what?” I was close now, close enough to see the water on his eyelashes, close enough to smell the rain on his skin and the sweat underneath it. “Talking? Explaining? Because I’ve been waiting eleven years for you to explain, Wade, and I’m starting to think you never will. You said it was a summer thing. That’s all I ever got. A summer thing.” I shoved his chest with both hands. He didn’t move. It was like shoving the barn. “You don’t sleep on the floor for a summer thing’s grandfather.”
“You want to know why?” His hand came up and caught my wrist, not hard, just holding it there against his wet shirt, over his heart, where I could feel it going like a hammer. “Because he was the only person in this whole goddamn county who ever treated me like I was worth a damn. Because when my old man was drunk and swinging, Amos let me sleep in this barn and never asked why. Because I owed him.”
“And me?”
His eyes dropped to my mouth.
“What did you owe me?” I whispered.
He kissed me.
Or I kissed him. I’ve gone over it a hundred times since and I still can’t tell you who moved first. All I know is that one second I was shaking with cold and fury and the next his mouth was on mine and I wasn’t cold at all.
He kissed like he rode. Like it was the last thing he’d ever do and he meant to get every second of it. His hand let go of my wrist and slid into my wet hair and closed there, tilting my head back, and his other arm went around my waist and hauled me up against him so hard my feet nearly left the floor. He tasted like rain and coffee. His stubble scraped my chin. I opened my mouth under his and he made a sound low in his chest, rough and helpless, a sound I’d been hearing in my sleep for eleven years without knowing it.
I got my hands in his shirt. I walked him backward, or he walked me, and my shoulders hit the tack room door with a thud that rattled the bridles hanging inside it. He pinned me there with his whole body, one forearm on the door beside my head, and kissed me deeper, slower, dirtier, his tongue sliding against mine until my knees stopped working and I was holding on to fistfuls of his wet shirt to stay upright.
“Daisy.” He said it against my mouth, against my jaw, against the side of my throat, where his lips found the place under my ear that I’d forgotten anyone knew about. “Tell me to stop.”
“No.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I.” My fingers found the scar on his ribs under the wet cotton. I traced it, the whole long line of it, and felt him shudder. “You don’t get to stop. Not this time. You said so yourself.”
He made that sound again. His hand slid down my back, over the curve of my hip, and pulled me against him, and there was no mistaking what this was doing to him. He was hard and heavy against my belly through two layers of wet denim, and I pressed back without thinking, rolled my hips into him, and he swore against my neck, a short filthy word that went straight down my spine and pooled low and hot.
Lightning hit something close.
The flash turned the whole barn white. The thunder came on top of it, not a rumble but a crack, like the sky splitting down the middle, so loud I felt it in my teeth. Somewhere outside a tree groaned and went over with a long tearing crash. In his stall, Domino screamed and kicked the boards, once, twice, a sound like a gunshot.
We broke apart.
Wade stood back with his chest heaving and his hair wild and his mouth wet from mine. He looked at me like he’d just come off a horse he didn’t remember getting on.
“That,” he said, “was a mistake.”
The word went into me like cold water. I lifted my chin. “Yours or mine?”
He didn’t answer. He turned and went to Domino’s stall and put his hands on the horse and talked to him low, easy, easy, I know, I know, and didn’t look at me, and after a minute I opened the barn door and walked back to the house through the rain.
I was not going to cry about Wade McCallister twice in one day.
I took a shower, all eight minutes of it. I put on the shell-pink robe. I went into the sewing room, turned on every lamp, and set up the tripod in front of the long mirror that had hung on the back of Grandma’s door for fifty years. I laid out the corset on the folding table.
It was the best thing I’d ever made. Ivory duchess satin over coutil, steel-boned, with a narrow binding of tan glove leather along every edge, saddle-stitched by hand in that ivory upholstery thread from the Mercantile. Twelve pairs of grommets down the back. Garter straps with little brass buckles, the kind you’d find on a bridle. I’d made it for the collection. I’d made it for Halvorsen’s. I’d made it in my size because I couldn’t afford a fit model, and every single one of those reasons was true, and none of them was the whole truth.
I put it on over the matching set: a thin ivory demi bra that was almost not there, and briefs in the same satin with a buckle at each hip. I clipped the garters to a pair of sheer stockings with a seam up the back. I hooked the busk closed down the front, one, two, three, four, five, and then I reached behind me for the laces and couldn’t get them.
I tried for ten minutes. I tried twisting. I tried the mirror. I tried pulling the laces over my shoulder like a backpack strap. The corset sagged at the waist and gaped at the back and looked like exactly what it was: a beautiful thing that didn’t work unless someone else helped.
I stood in front of the mirror in my grandmother’s sewing room, in ivory satin and leather and silk stockings, with the robe thrown over my shoulders and my face still blotchy from crying, and thought, That was a mistake.
Yours or mine.
I tied the robe closed. I walked out of the sewing room, down the hall, and across the blue tape. It felt like stepping off the edge of the hayloft.
I knocked on his door.
He opened it with a towel around his neck and his hair still wet from the shower he’d taken after mine. Gray T-shirt. Jeans. Bare feet. His eyes went to the robe, to the stockings showing beneath the hem, and stopped. He swallowed. I watched it happen.
“I need hands,” I said.
“Daisy—”
“Fit photos are due to the buyer in twelve days. The corset laces in the back. I can’t reach it.” My heart was going so fast I could feel it in my fingertips. “You said it was a mistake. Fine. I’m not asking you to kiss me. I’m asking you to lace a corset and sit in a chair and watch me work and keep your hands to yourself unless I tell you otherwise.” I lifted my chin. “Unless you can’t.”
He stared at me. The hallway light caught the scar through his eyebrow and turned it silver.
“You’re daring me,” he said slowly.
“I’m daring you to stand in a room with me in my own work and not look away.” I held his eyes. “You never could, Wade. Not when it mattered. Prove me wrong.”
For a long moment he didn’t move. Somewhere outside, the last of the storm muttered off toward Montana. Water dripped from the eaves.
Then he pulled the towel off his neck and dropped it on the floor and stepped out into the hall, onto my side of the tape.
“Show me,” he said.
I led him into the sewing room. Lamps everywhere, gold on the old wallpaper roses. The headless dummy in the corner. The mirror, the tripod, the camera’s little red eye. I pulled Grandma’s ladder-back chair into the middle of the floor, facing the mirror, and pointed at it, and he sat. He sat the way he’d sat in the kitchen my first night home, legs spread, forearms on his knees, except nothing about him was relaxed now. He looked like a man about to come out of a chute.
The door was still open behind him. The dark hall. The tape.
“Close it,” I said.
He got up and closed it.
“Lock it.”
The old brass lock was stiff. It turned with a click that went through the whole room, through the floorboards, through the soles of my bare feet.
He turned back around and leaned against the door and looked at me, and his voice when it came was low and rough and wrecked.
“Your move, Daisy.”
I untied the robe.
