Page 104 of Coyote

"Good," Sierra said, and turned a page in the ledger. "Socorro was too far."

"You could've just moved out here," Mateo said. "We've got room."

"No offense," Sarah said, "but I've had enough of this ranch to last a lifetime."

"None taken," Sierra said, and dropped another biscuit on her plate, anyway.

John set his fork down. "Moving day, I'm driving the truck."

"Fine."

"And carrying the furniture."

"You're carrying lamps."

"Sare."

"You had stitches in your ribs. I love you. You get the lamps." She pointed her fork at him. "If I see you under a couch, I'm dropping my end of it."

He picked his fork back up, and his shoulders hung looser than they had when the negotiation started. He'd have carried her whole house on his back, one room at a time, if she let him. Now he was bargaining for a couch, and losing, and it looked good on him. He didn't have to be anybody's doctor at that table. He got to be her brother, hauling lamps like anybody else's brother.

Chance was on the porch when I stepped out, parked at the rail in his wheelchair.

Ransom's brother had been at Pae Saco a few weeks now, and sour about every one of them. Ransom said the two of them spent every summer on somebody else's stock, and that Chance sat a horse better at fourteen than most men ever would, and I believed it without needing the stories, because of the way he looked at the horses.

He was watching the corral, where the horses stood nose to tail in the morning sun, and he had the stillness of a man looking through a window into a room he used to live in.

I knew that stillness.

I sat down on the rail near him.

"Come to take your shift?" He kept his eyes on the corral. "Somebody's always got a reason to be on this porch lately. You all think you're subtle."

His words came slower than they wanted to, and every so often one went missing and he had to go around it. He hated that worse than the chair.

Ransom came out with two cups. He set one on the rail inside his brother's reach, close enough for Chance to find without looking, and didn't say a word about it, and didn't leave. He'd been doing that every morning for weeks. The cup sat there, steaming.

"You know what the joke is?" Chance said. "It's not the chair. It's that." He tipped his chin at the corral, at all of it. The horses, the dust, the tack shed, the whole horse-shaped world he'd woken up inside. "A working ranch. Horses in every direction. And me." His hands flexed on the armrests. "They said I was dead for six minutes. I should've stayed dead."

"No, you shouldn't have." I leaned in until he had to look at me.

"Why? All I'm doing is taking up space and resources that should go to whole men."

"You are whole, idiot." I kicked his shin and poked him in the forehead. "You're up here. In there. That's your prison. Not the chair. Who you are was never legs, or a man in a saddle. It's you. Your body just carries you around. The rest is the part that matters."

He shoved my hand away. "Fuck you."

Chance stared at the horses. Ransom leaned on the post beside him, and the coffee cooled in easy reach. He wasn't ready to hear it. He would be. I'd say it again as many times as it took.

By midday I'd run out of legitimate reasons to be anywhere, so I ended up in the doorway of the clinic, watching John work.

The outbuilding past the bunkhouse used to hold broken equipment. Now it had shelves to the ceiling, every tin and roll and bottle squared away and labeled in John's hand, a cot with the blanket folded army-flat, and the best lamp on the property. He'd signed his house away the month before, and between the sale and Rafe's ledger, the room wanted for nothing.

Cruz sat on the cot with his hand out while John splinted a finger. A story came with it, something about the hay elevator, and it changed every time he told it, and he was telling it again now. John taped the finger to its neighbor, snug and square.

"Will it scar?" Cruz asked, hopeful.

"No."