"If we're doing this properly." He looked at her. She looked at the table, but the corner of her mouth was doing something. "Six," he agreed. The last snow fell on a Sunday light, the soft apologetic kind that doesn't stick.
Like the winter knew it was time to go and was just saying a brief last word before it did. By Monday, the yard was showing more brown than white. By Wednesday, the south slope of the hill behind the cabin was entirely clear. By Friday, the creek was running fully. That urgency of water that's been held all winter and is finally moving again.
Hadley stood at the back of the cabin on a Friday afternoon in early March and watched the creek. Heard footsteps. Nayeli came to stand beside him. "They looked at the water together, my grandmother would have said." She said after a while, "That water knows where it's going.
It doesn't worry about the obstacles. It just goes around them." He thought about that. "And if it can't go around, then it waits." She said, "until there's enough of it to go through."
He looked at the creek running, urgent, sure of itself. He looked at Nayeli, who was also looking at the creek, her profile in the afternoon light, the steadiness of her. The quality she had that he'd been trying to name for weeks and still couldn't exactly, of being fully present in a moment without performing it, without showing you she was present, just being there. "What do you want?" he asked. "For yourself."
She turned. The same words Tsula had used. He wasn't sure if that was intentional. Probably it was. These two had a private language of echoes.
She looked at him. "I want to build something," she said, "that lasts." She paused. "I've been part of things that were taken. I want to be part of something that holds."
"That can happen here," he said. "I know." "And your people to the south?" "We'll find them," she said, "when the road opens, we'll go, and we'll come back." She said it simply, certain, not a plan or a negotiation.
A statement of the way things were going to be. "That's not a contradiction." "No," he said, "it isn't." She looked at the creek. "This land," she said quietly, "is old."
My people knew land like this. Different place, same kind of old. She paused. "I don't feel like a stranger here." "You're not," he said.
Another pause. "No," she said. "I'm not." That evening, the three of them had dinner at the table. The way they always did now.
Three chairs, no one at the head, just at a round. Equal. The food simple. The conversation moving in and out of English and Apache. And the particular shorthand people develop when they've been together long enough.