Page 40 of Broken Ride

The bottle sits on the dresser where it's been sitting for two nights, unopened, keeping its ledger. That's two nights the whiskey hasn't collected. The deal never changes, only the price, and it's going to want everything I owe in one payment. Debts like mine never come due on quiet days.

I tell myself I'm good for it.

11

LANEY

The clock on the nightstand is the old kind that clicks when the minutes change, and I've been listening to it click for the better part of three hours.

Wade said dark. He stood in the doorway this morning with his rigging bag over his shoulder, said he'd be here by dark, and kissed me like a man leaving collateral.

Dark came and went. The clock keeps clicking, and I keep sitting on the edge of a bed in a town whose name I'll forget by the next one, running differentials on an absence.

The day itself was ordinary, which should have been my first warning. Ordinary days are when the bill comes due.

I spent the last of the afternoon light on a barrel mare two rows down from the arena, a big-hipped sorrel who'd gone off her feed and started pawing at her belly. Her owner hovered at the stall door the whole time, a hard-handed woman named Dellwood who runs cattle when she isn't running cans, chewing her stampede string while I listened to gut sounds and ran a tube.

It was gas colic, caught early. By the time I pulled the tube the mare was back on her hay and Dellwood was reaching for her checkbook, and I told her to walk the mare every hour until midnight and call me if anything changed.

"You're the one," she said, writing. "The vet everybody's talking about."

"Depends on what they're saying."

"That you're worth the wait." She tore the check loose and held it out. "Around here that's a eulogy. We bury nicer things than we say about the living."

I liked her. I also carried the word everybody under my sternum while I packed, because a woman in my situation is supposed to be nobody, and I traded nobody away the night I knelt in that arena with the cameras running.

I packed up, checked under my truck the way I check under my truck, and drove back to the motel with the windows down and the smell of cut hay coming in off somebody's field, feeling for one unguarded mile like a woman with a good job and a man waiting on her.

He wasn't waiting. That was three hours ago.

By the second hour my mind has worked every branch of the differential and none of it is benign. His phone goes straight to voicemail, three times, which in our particular life has a short list of explanations, all bad. Torres said the next thing that reached for us would be reaching to end it, and Wade Ashcroft is a wall, and walls are what you go through to get to what they're guarding.

I've got Torres's number pulled up when headlights swing across the curtains, and the truck I'd know in my sleep rolls into the slot beside mine and shuts down. Relief hits first, hard enough to make me sit back down.

What comes in behind it is slower and colder, because I'm listening to his footsteps on the gravel and they're careful. Late men with excuses walk fast. Wade is walking like the ground has to be negotiated with.

The key works the lock. He comes in with his hat in his hand and a grin already built, and he's clean, showered clean, shirt fresh out of the bag with the fold lines still crossing his chest.

"Before you say it," he says, "I can explain.”

"Three hours." I stay on the edge of the bed and make him come to me. "Don’t even try.”

"Then you've never been pinned against a truck by Hancock talking about equipment breakdown problems." He drops his hat on the dresser, next to the bottle that's been sitting there unopened since the barn meeting, keeping its seal like an alibi. Then he crosses the room like he holds the deed to it, hooks two fingers under my chin, and tips my face up to his. "Say the rest of it, Doc. You'll sleep better."

"You're not worth the wait."

"Liar." He bends and kisses me, unhurried and thorough, one hand closing warm around the back of my neck, and it's a good kiss, it's always a good kiss, and somewhere in the middle of it I understand that the kiss has a job tonight, and its job is ending the conversation.

He tastes like mint over nothing at all, which is its own kind of confession.

It's good. The story has a name in it, the grin is the one that works on me, the mouth is the one that works on me better. It also covers maybe one hour of the missing three, and he knows I can count, and he's betting the rest of him covers the balance.

Not long ago I'd have let it and told him about the sorrel.

But I survived a marriage to a performance, and I've spent my working life reading animals who can't say where it hurts, and the two educations are turning him over together whether I want them to or not.

When he lets me go he moves to the sink, fills the plastic cup and drinks it down, fills it again, drinks that too.