Chapter 5: Tack Room

I stared at the hooked J until the screen went dark.

"Send me those," I said.

"Already did. To Rance and to you." Kacey shoved the phone back into her dress. "Don't text me back. She reads my phone at breakfast."

Somebody tried the pantry door.

Kacey shut off the faucet and grabbed a pie off the shelf.

Coy was in the doorway.

He looked at the pie, then at me, then at his wife.

"Took you long enough," he said.

"Apple's on the top shelf," Kacey said. "Shiloh's taller."

She walked past him with it.

Coy stayed where he was, blocking the door.

"You smell like him," he said to me, low.

"Move, Coy."

"Five years, and you never once smelled like that for me."

I walked into him.

He moved.

Rance didn't say a word until we were past the Jessup cattle guard.

Then he pulled onto the shoulder and got out of the truck.

I watched him walk into the sagebrush in the headlights, unbuttoning his shirt.

He dropped it. Then his boots. Then the rest.

Then he went down on all fours, and his back bowed, and the sound of his bones moving came through the glass.

A wolf the size of a yearling calf stood where he'd been.

Black down the back, silver at the throat.

He threw back his head and howled at the waning moon until the hair stood up on my arms.

Then he ran.

I slid over and drove his truck home.

He came in at three in the morning, barefoot, with sage in his hair.

He stood in the bedroom doorway for a long time without speaking.

Then he went to the couch.

The next evening I found the tack room.

It was a lean-to on the side of the barn with one bulb and a woodstove nobody had lit in years.

In the back, under a tarp, was a bronc saddle.

Association rigging. Freckles of dried mud still on the fenders.

The leather had gone dry and gray and was cracking at the swells.

I lit the stove, pulled the saddle onto a rack, and started oiling it.

I was on the second fender when I smelled him.

"Leave that," he said from the door.

"It's going to rot."

"It's been rotting for six years. It doesn't mind."

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