He Calls It Love, She Sees It as Home novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Lesson Zero
On the third night of calving season, Iris asks Jack what a line in her mother's old paperback means, and he offers to teach her himself; he sets five rules, touches her for the first time, and tells her the first lie.
On the third night of calving season, Iris walked into my office with a paperback and asked me what a sentence meant.
It was past eleven.
I had the ledger open and a cold cup of coffee at my elbow, and I had just come in from the barn with straw still on my boots.
She stood in the doorway in her white cotton nightgown with her long blonde braid over one shoulder.
She was twenty-two years old.
I was forty-eight.
"Jack, can I ask you something?" she said. "It's not about the cows."
"Go ahead."
She opened the book to a page she had folded down and read it aloud in the same clear voice she used for recipes.
"He put his mouth between her legs, and she forgot her own name."
She looked up at me.
"Is that real? Or is it just something people write?"
I put down my pen.
The book was one of Martha's, from the shelf in the upstairs hall, with the cracked spine and the cover half torn off.
Iris had been working through that shelf for three years, since the winter her mother died.
I had never checked what was on it.
"It's real," I said.
"Does it feel like that?"
"I'd say that depends on the man."
She thought about this the way she thought about everything, seriously and all the way through.
"Mama never told me anything," she said. "She said I'd learn when it was time. Then she got sick, and it was never time."
"I know."
"Who else would I ask?"
I didn't have an answer for that.
There was nobody else.
The nearest woman she could have asked was Dottie Chesbro, who came with the feed truck on the first Tuesday of the month and stayed forty minutes.
The nearest town was forty-five minutes away, and Iris had not seen it since she was nineteen.
That was not a thing I thought about much.
I thought about the girl standing in my doorway with the lamp behind her, and what the light did to the nightgown.
I had been not thinking about that for three years, too.
"Come here," I said.
She crossed the floorboards in her bare feet and stopped at the corner of the desk.
She smelled like the barn and like the lavender soap she bought out of the catalog.
"I could tell you," I said. "Or I could show you."
Her lips parted.
"Show me what?"
"All of it. Slowly. One lesson at a time, here, where it's safe."
I watched her face for the thing I was afraid of.
It didn't come.
She looked at me with her whole open face, the way she had when I taught her long division, and then fractions, and then how to read a bank statement.
"You'd do that?" she said.
"I would."
"You wouldn't mind?"
"I'd be glad to."
That was the truest thing I said all night.
She laughed, a short relieved sound.
"I thought you might be mad at me for asking."
"I'm not mad."
I stood up and went around the desk, and I turned the lock on the office door.
I told myself it was for the draft.
When I turned back, she was watching my hand on the lock.
"There are rules," I said.
"Okay."
"The first is that this happens in the house, or in the barn, and nowhere else."
"Okay."
"The second is that it happens with me. Nobody else teaches you."
"Who else would there be?"
"Nobody. That's the point."
She nodded.
"The third is that if you say stop, I stop. Right then. No questions."
She smiled.
"You wouldn't hurt me."
"The third rule is the one that matters most," I said. "Say it back."
"If I say stop, you stop."
"Good."
"Is there a fourth?"
"You don't tell anyone. This is between us."
"I never talk to anyone."
"Then it's an easy rule."
She tilted her head.
"Is there a fifth?"
"When you're ready for town, I'll tell you."
Something moved across her face, small and quick.
Then it was gone, and she nodded again.
I had been practicing that rule for three years, and it still sat badly in my chest.
She reached out and touched the cord at my collar, the leather one that held the small iron key under my shirt.
She had done it before.
"You never take this off," she said. "What does it open?"
"Old ranch papers."
"You said that last time."
"It was true last time."
She let it drop against my chest and laughed at herself.
I took her hand off my shirt, and I held it.
Her palm was warm and dry and calloused at the base of the fingers, from the fence work she did without being asked.
"Lesson one," I said. "Be still, and let me look at you."
She stood very still.
I put my thumb on her bottom lip, and it was soft and a little chapped from the wind.
She breathed in.
I slid my hand along her jaw and under her ear and felt her pulse going hard in the side of her throat.
It was fast.
So was mine.
"Jack," she whispered.
"That's right."
"Is it supposed to feel like this?"
"Like what?"
"Like I'm standing too close to a stove."
"Yes."
"Good," she said. "I like it."
My hand shook.
I had put my hands inside heifers in the middle of a blizzard and they had never shaken.
She saw it.
"You're nervous," she said, delighted. "You're never nervous."
"Sit on the desk."
She boosted herself up onto the edge, onto my ledger, and her bare feet swung and then went still.
I stood between her knees without touching her anywhere else.
She looked up at me, and she wasn't afraid at all.
"Mama said you'd take care of me," she said. "Is this part of it?"
"Yes," I said.
It was the first lie I told her that night, and it came out easy.
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