Plainly without drama because it was simply true and there was no reason to dress it up. She already dislikes me. If she thinks you're spending time with me, she'll use every opportunity she has to make my situation in this town worse than it already is. He was quiet for a moment. That isn't he started.
Don't tell me it isn't fair, she said. I know it isn't fair. Fair has very little to do with how things actually work, Mister Carter. I've had 8 years to study how things actually work. He looked at her, really looked at her the same way he had on the porch with that full unhurried attention.
"What would you have me do?" he asked. "Stop coming." She thought about it. She thought about it honestly, which meant admitting to herself that the honest answer was not the one she was expected to give. "I don't know," she said finally. "Neither do I.
But I know that I've had about 500 conversations in the past 2 years and not one of them felt like anything at all. And I've had exactly two conversations with you and both of them felt like something. Amelia looked at the street. That's a reckless thing to say, she said. Probably, he agreed.
No, he said, but I'd like to. The clock in the hallway behind them chimed the quarter hour. She stood, smoothed her apron, looked down at him, still sitting on the step, his hat in his hands, squinting slightly in the morning sun. If you come back, she said carefully. Don't speak to Mrs.
Caldwell. First, speak to me. He looked up. Is that an invitation? It's a condition, she said.
There's a difference. He considered this. Then he put his hat on. Yes, ma'am. He said, and he came back.
He came back. The faltosing Tuesday and the Tuesday after that and eventually the Tuesday stopped being the point and he came whenever he had reason to be in town which turned out to be more often than a man with a ranch to run had any real business being. He always stopped at Caldwells. He always asked for her first. And if she had time, they sat on those front steps or walked the two blocks to the edge of town where the land opened up toward the mountains.
And they talked. They talked about everything about the drought that had hit two years back and how it had changed the grazing patterns on his north pasture. About the books she had read she had a small collection kept under her bed. The kind of books she'd bought secondhand from a traveling seller who came through twice a year. About the way she had taught herself to read financial records from a ledger she'd found in a hotel store room in Cincinnati, working through it line by line in her spare hours until it made sense.