The ranch, wooden house, two rooms, a covered porch he'd built badly and redone twice, a stable with six stalls four occupied, a barn the corral with the fence he kept meaning to fix. Red dirt everywhere and the specific Arizona scrub that survived by needing nothing a drought could take. Kaya looked at all of it. He waited for disappointment. Surprise.
The expression women made when they saw where they'd ended up. His neighbor, Braddock's wife, had made it arriving from Ohio. His mother had, apparently, made it and then kept going. Kaya's face did nothing. She looked at the house, the stable, the corral fence, the barn, the house again.
Then she dismounted, handed him the reins without looking at him, and walked into the stable. Well, Cole stood holding two horses. Make yourself at home, he followed. She was already moving through the stalls, methodical, running her hand along the walls, checking joints, looking at where posts met beams overhead. She pressed the hay, smelled it, checked how it was stored.
She looked at each horse with the specific attention of someone assessing condition. Then she stopped, looked up at the ceiling. At the three crossbeams Cole had replaced himself two summers ago when the originals went soft. She looked at them for a long time, turned to Cole, shook her head. "Those beams are fine," he said, automatic, the way you defend something you built with your own hands.
"I replaced them myself, two years ago, good pine." There. She shrugged one shoulder. The shrug of someone who has said what they have to say and will say it exactly once. I warned you.
Cole looked up at the beams. They looked fine. They had looked fine for two years. He would continue to believe they were fine. He would remember this moment.
He would remember exactly how certain he'd been inside the house. Main room, table, two chairs, the sofa where he slept, the fireplace he used three months of the year. He started to explain the sleeping arrangements. Sofa, obviously he'd already decided the situation was what it was. But she was already moving, already picking up her bag, already walking into the bedroom, the door closed, not slammed, no drama.
The soft absolute click of a latch engaging. Cole stood in his own main room looking at the closed door of his own bedroom and thought about how up until 4 days ago he had lived here alone and the silence had been the ordinary kind and now it was a different kind and he wasn't sure it was better exactly just different. Occupied. She doesn't want to be here. Obvious.
She never wanted any of this. Also obvious. You have no idea what you've agreed to. Getting more obvious by the minute. He made a bed on the sofa.
The sofa that had the indent of his specific left hip from enough nights. And lay in the dark listening to the new quiet of a house with two people in it who weren't speaking then. Very faint almost imagined a sound from the direction of the ceiling. He looked up darkness. The beams visible in the ambient light from the window.