The bruising had faded to something yellowish and faint. One morning she walked out to the paddock and stood at the fence while Rex regarded her from across it with his usual expression of deeply considered skepticism. She held out her hand. Rex looked at it. Rex looked away.
Rex looked back, made a decision, and walked over in the slow deliberate way of an animal that wants you to know this was entirely his choice and not a response to your invitation. He smelled her hand, then her arm. Then he put his head over the fence rail and bumped his nose against her shoulder in the way he sometimes did with Hadley. Which Hadley did not appreciate being told meant nothing. Tsula laughed out loud surprised by it.
A real laugh, sudden and unguarded, the kind that comes out before you've decided to let it. Hadley, who was on the other side of the yard doing nothing in particular, heard it and stopped doing nothing and just stood there because it had been a while since he'd heard that sound in this yard. Because the sound of a woman laughing in the cold morning air of this Wyoming yard was something he'd forgotten had weight to it. A way of existing in space, a way of making the air feel like itself again. Rex, extremely pleased with himself, shook his mane and Hadley went back to what he'd been doing.
The yard felt different than it had an hour ago. He couldn't have explained why. He didn't try. The days had a shape now. This kept surprising him.
Not because the shape itself was strange, it wasn't. It was the ordinary shape of a working day on a working ranch. Wake early, fire, food, work, more food, more work, evening, sleep, but it had never felt like this, like something inhabited rather than maintained. He'd been maintaining this place for seven years, keeping it going. Keeping the fences up and the animals fed and the roof from developing new opinions about where to let water in.
All of that was maintenance, competent and joyless and fine. This was different. And he couldn't entirely articulate why, except there were voices in the morning now. Two of them. Speaking to each other in Apache mostly, that soft liquid cadence he'd grown used to as a kind of background music to the day.
And occasionally in English when they were including him or asking something or when Tsula was in a mood to be funny in a language she could be sure he'd understand, which was more often than you'd expect. The woman had a dry sense of humor that came out sideways when you weren't prepared for it. She'd deliver something devastating about the weather or the state of the barn or Rex's personality in a tone so level you almost missed it and then look at you with perfectly innocent eyes and Nayeli. Nayeli was serious the way mountains were serious, present, grounded. The kind of person who only said what she meant and meant everything she said.