Page 5 of Devoured

Helen met her in the kitchen, and Helen's face was the wrong color. "Oh," she said, when she saw Lara, like she'd forgotten there was supposed to be a new office assistant today, like the office assistant belonged to a different and easier version of the morning. "Oh, Lara. I'm sorry. I… John collapsed. In the south pasture, about an hour ago. Dean's gone with him to the hospital, Chase went too, and I don't…" She stopped. Her hands were full of a dish towel she wasn't using. "I don't know what to tell you to do. I'm sorry. It's not a good day to start."

"Is he alive?" Lara asked, because it was the only question that mattered and nobody had said.

"He was when they left." Helen pressed the towel to her mouth for a second. "He was talking. He was angry, actually, that they were making such a fuss. That's John." A laugh came out of her that was mostly not a laugh. "And of course Wendy's off today, the nanny, and her phone's going straight to voicemail, and I've got the kids coming home from school at three and a house full of…" She gestured at the kitchen, the counters, the open door, the whole impossible day. "I'm sorry," she said again. "You should go on home. Come back when it's settled."

Lara stood in the kitchen doorway. Through it she could see the office she'd been hired for and never seen: a good-sized room off the hall, and even from here she could tell it had gotten away from someone. Mail in drifts. A phone she could hear ringing. A casserole dish sitting square in the middle of the desk like an offering nobody had known where to put.

She could go. Helen had told her to go, had practically begged her to, and it would have been the easy thing and the reasonable thing and nobody, Pearl, Elena, the whole sensible half of the county, would have blamed her for it. She had known these people for less than a day. She owed them nothing. She had spent three months being owed nothing by anyone and calling it freedom.

The phone in the office kept ringing.

"Where do you keep your coffee?" Lara said.

Helen blinked at her.

"You're going to need it," Lara said, "and so am I, and that phone isn't going to stop. Go sit down for five minutes. I've got the phone."

She set her bag down on the chair by the door, walked into a room that was not hers, in a house that was not hers, and picked up a phone that was not hers.

"Royston Ranch," she said.

By eleven she’d answered the same question forty times.

How's John. Everyone in the county, it seemed, had the ranch's number and a casserole and a need to ask. She learned to say it without making it worse — he's stable, they're keeping him in, the family thanks you, yes I'll tell them you called — and she learned the names by writing them down, a long column of them in the margin of an envelope, because Helen would want to know later who'd reached out and a woman like Helen would be ashamed not to thank them all.

She signed for two more casseroles, three cards, and a fruit basket the size of a toddler. She found the thermostat and shut the front door and got the house back under seventy. She found, by going through the drifts of mail because she had to do something with her hands while the phone rang, the rough shape of how the office worked, which was that it didn't, that it had been somebody's job once and then it had been nobody's, and that the somebody had been gone long enough for the nobody to become a crisis.

She did not let herself think about whose job it had stopped being. She had a fair guess. The guess sat at the edge of the day like the live oak sat at the edge of the land, and she did not look directly at it.

At two Helen came into the office with her hands twisted in her apron and the specific helplessness of a person who has run out of self before she's run out of day.

"The kids," she said. "School's out at three. I can't… Mack's at the hospital, and I can't leave, the specialist is supposed to call, and I can't send you; the school won't release them to someone they've never…"

"Call Mason," said one of the ranch hands, passing the doorway with a coffee he'd made himself. He said it like it was obvious, like everyone knew, and kept walking.

Helen's face cleared a degree. "Mason," she said. "Yes." And then, to Lara, by way of explanation that explained nothing: "Dean's cousin. Other side of the family, but he's… he's good. He's on the list at the school."

She made the call in the hall, low and fast, and Lara heard only the shape of it — John, this morning, I hate to ask, the kids — and then Helen came back and said Mason was on his way, and the relief in her was its own kind of exhausting to watch.

The man who brought the children home an hour later was tall and easy and unhurried in a way that reminded Lara, unwillingly, of someone she was trying not to think about. He had two kids and a backpack apiece and the calm of a man who'd dropped whatever he'd been doing without making anyone feel it.

"Helen." He set the backpacks down inside the door. "How's Uncle John, any word?"

"Stable. They're keeping him."

"Good. That's good." He looked at Lara then, openly but not rudely, the way you look at a new face in a house you know well. "You're the one Uncle John hired. Lara." He put out a hand. "Mason. I'm the cousin nobody warns you about."

"He warned me," Lara said, tipping her head at the ranch hand, and Mason laughed, a real one, and it changed the temperature of the kitchen by a few degrees, which she suspected was a thing he did everywhere he went.

He didn't stay. He crouched down to the smaller kid's level and said something quiet that made the boy nod, ruffled the girl's hair and got a look of dignified eight-year-old tolerance for it, told Helen to call him if anything changed and to call him for nothing too, that he'd rather be bothered. At the door he stopped and looked back at Lara.

"Holler if you need me again," he said. "I mean it. Today or any day." And then he was gone, and the kitchen was quieter, and the two children were standing in the middle of it looking at her.

The girl spoke first. She had her chin up, the way kids do when they've learned early that adults will get their name wrong and they've decided to head it off.

"I'm Giana," she said.

"Giana," Lara said, the way the girl had said it, Jah-na, the soft g, the open vowel.