One morning, this time he didn't turn away. He walked over and stood beside her at a comfortable distance. Both of them looking at the two markers in the winter ground. She didn't acknowledge him. He didn't announce himself.
They just stood there together in the cold for a while. "What was she like?" Nayeli said finally. He considered the question. Considered how to answer it honestly, which was the only way he knew how to answer anything.
"Stubborn," he said, "about specific things." Wouldn't let a fire go out because she thought a cold house meant the cold had won. Wouldn't leave dishes unwashed overnight. Had an opinion about the correct way to fold a blanket that I never fully agreed with. He paused.
Patient with everything else, particularly with me. Another pause. She saw things clearly, people, situations. She'd tell me what she saw and I'd argue with her and she'd wait me out. And she was almost always right.
A longer pause. I miss that most, having someone who'd tell me the truth. Nayeli was quiet then. You seem to manage. I've gotten better at telling myself, he said.
But it's not the same. She looked at Eleanor's marker. "No," she said, "it's not." They stood for another minute. "My grandmother," she said, "was like that.
She'd look at you and you'd know she already understood the thing you were still figuring out how to say." Her voice was even. "But not without effort. She died the year before." "Before the attack."
She paused. "I think about her every morning. I hear her voice when I'm making decisions." "Is that useful?" "More than anything," she said.
"More than any actual advice she ever gave me." He thought about that. "Eleanor would have liked you," he said. It just came out. He hadn't planned it.
Nayeli turned and looked at him. He met her eyes. "Both of you," he said. "She'd have liked Tsula's drawings." She'd have argued with you about something important within the first week and respected you for holding your ground."
He paused. "She had no patience for people who folded." The corner of Nayeli's mouth moved. "I don't fold," she said. "I noticed," he said.
And something passed between them in the cold winter air at the back of a Wyoming cabin. Something that didn't have a word for it yet. Maybe it didn't need one yet. They went back inside that evening. Tsula finished the spring section of the drawing.
Green coming up at the base of the cabin outline. Just suggestions of it. The way early spring looks in Wyoming, tentative, testing, not committing fully yet. Small shoots. A curve of something growing up from the ground near the second marker.
She stepped back and looked at it. Hadley and Nayeli were at the table. "Done," Tsula said. They both looked. The drawing covered most of the wall now.