slid closer to him. Gently extracted the wineglass from his fingers. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. At this distance, she could see a burst vein within the curve of his nostril. She took his hand. This wasn’t easy for her. Her fingertips on the knobs of his knuckles. Don’t talk. She brought her other hand to his cheek. To the dark stubble going gray. She put a knuckle to his chin, and turned his face toward her. Just like that, easy as tripping down stairs, she kissed him.
But his lips stayed closed, and his breathing went shallow; a slight, controlled whistle through his nose. At least he had the good grace to leave the pulling away to her.
“Well.” She sat back, nonplussed. “Well.” She willed her eyes to fill with ice and ashes. “So. You’re gay?”
He shook his head. “You really think this could work out, me and you? Montana, New York, back again? Not to mention, me being so much older?”
She took a few seconds. Okay, Chloe. Find the right tone, just the right word. “What the fuck, Singer.”
“Eh now?” He’d already been congratulating himself for his level-headedness.
“You don’t think we could work, but then, what? You were just, what, you were just waiting for me to make an ass out of myself before you mentioned it?”
“I just don’t . . . Shit.”
“Don’t what.”
“Look at you. How pretty.” He took her hand. “Then look at me.”
She was simultaneously offended and touched. What’s the right play here? What’s to be done. It took her only a second to decide. Don’t hesitate, don’t falter. They’d just opened another bottle of wine. She stood and bent for the bottle, letting him have a glimpse of freckled cleavage. “I’ll be out on the porch.”
He half stood, courteous to the end. “Chloe, listen, I’m . . .”
Kiss my ass and go fuck yourself. “Sleep well, Singer.”
So, yeah. The next morning? I’m outta here.
She woke early. Padded softly through the house toward the shower. His yellow legal pad lay open on the kitchen table. She snuck a glance. Expecting poems, sketches, doodles, she found instead one long block of script. “Nature abhors not a vacuum but a line, a square. Every bristling, Euclidian porcupine eventually decomposes into a mound. The natural state resists corners. Entropy favors a circle. For a language to be more natural, shouldn’t it aspire to this same geometry? This same shying away?” She’d hoped that he might have written something about her or her visit, but no. His last line referenced only William Stafford. “The light by the barn. More to be explored?” A few minutes later in the shower, she put her forehead against warm tile. Let the water run.
Coming out into the kitchen later, she heard the rattle of pans. Voices. Wrapped in a robe, drying her hair, she found a new face at the stove. “You must be Abe?” Short as a teenager, his skin was as wrinkled as a crumpled newspaper, as stained as a walnut. Singer’s hired hand. He’d apparently been in Miles City paying a visit to his ninety-four-year-old mother. A little Jack Russell terrier lay in a corner of the kitchen, curled nose to tail, watching her alertly. Abe raised his spatula in a salute, grinning around a shelf of cheap dentures. “Eli said you were pretty, but he didn’t say how pretty. I mean, damn.”
Singer, at the table with his pad, was amused. “Good lord, Abe. Tell her what you really think, there.”
“I aim to. Right after we introduce ourselves.” He set the spatula aside to shake hands. “I’m Abe, and you’re Chloe Barnes from New York. How do you like your eggs there, Chloe from New York?” He assessed her hips, her breasts. If she’d been a watermelon, he’d already be knocking against her hull. She wasn’t offended. Old men exist in their own netherworld of harmless flirtation.
Abe talked nonstop. Over her eggs (“Fried, thanks”), she learned that he tended the farm’s chickens and butchered the pigs. “So I cook the breakfast, ain’t that right, Eli.” He scratched at an ancient corrugation of razor burn around his wattled neck. “Had me two wives, hosted two funerals. Second wife died in childbirth. Lost the baby, too.” He said this matter-of-factly, without self-pity. “And now it’s just me and Eli here. Running the place. Just enough ranch to starve on, ain’t it, Eli?” Cowboys, both of them. The real deal.
She touched the corners of her mouth with a paper towel napkin. “When can you drive me back to Billings, Singer?”
Singer was studying his coffee. Raising it to his lips, he held her gaze, but it cost him something. “I was hoping you might stay awhile longer.”
“I don’t see how.”
Abe glanced back and forth between them, catching up.
“Just a day or two, maybe. I was thinking you could ride Peaches out again. Explore a little on your own. Give her a workout for me. It would be a favor.”
Christ, Singer. Apology meets pleading puppy. She felt a flare of power. Whatever vulnerability she’d shown by coming here, whatever measure of pride had been sacrificed by walking off that plane, things were realigning in her favor. She smelled regret, a soupçon of self-flagellation. And besides: When would she have a chance to ride a horse again?
“What do you think Abe,” she said. “Should I go for a ride?”
She had her own agenda. Of course she did. Did Singer think he could just buy her off with a horseback ride? Think again, mister. During their ride yesterday, he had pointed out Abe’s trailer. A hunched-up antique camper settled low on four flat tires. Abe ate his lunch alone, apparently. Part of his daily routine. Breakfast with Singer, dinner with Singer, but lunch and a nap back at his trailer. If she left Singer’s around ten or so, circled to the south, came around from the north, she should catch the old guy by himself.
Despite the heat, a thread of smoke rose from the stovepipe. Paths in the grass, parking pad to door. She dismounted and wrapped reins loose around a bumper. Knocked flimsy tin. “Anybody home?” The door’s aluminum handle had been repaired with a cracked porcelain knob.
Shrill barking sounded from inside, followed by a pot clattering on a stove. “Yeah, hello there. Just a minute.” The door opened. “Chloe?” He held his dog away from the door with his heel. “Help you with something?”
“Mind if I come in?”
“Um.” Abe glanced around his trailer, half-panicked. “Give me a second?”
“Sorry for just barging in.”
“Just give me a second.” He closed the door, left her standing on the stoop. Inside, the sound of cabinet doors, a rattle of a shower curtain. Five minutes later, Abe was back in the door, saying, “Get you a cup of tea or some such?”
“Sorry to barge.” She stepped past him into the trailer, noting the bath towel thrown over a sink full of dirty dishes. The wet trail of a dishcloth still glistening across his counter. A wood stove, metal coffee pot blackened on the bottom. A combination shower and restroom filled with hanging shirts. A coil of rope hung from the back of her chair. A not unpleasant smell of dogs and aged body, a sharp tang of disinfectant.
She’d imposed on him. But this thing with Singer. She had questions.
“You got to understand about Eli, I never seen a man so determined about doing the right thing.” Abe had his mug of hot tea and was squeezing in a thread of honey. “I’ve known him, what, thirty years now. I ain’t never caught him in a lie. You think about that for a minute. How many folks you know never lie? It ain’t natural, is what I’m saying. But that’s Eli Singer.”
“Everybody lies.”
“You’d think so, but no. Reason I mention it, I saw how you and him were locking horns this morning, and normally I’d say I don’t blame you.”