The Crawlspace Pact

Nicky Middleton had her arm in the stock tank up to the shoulder, breaking ice out of it with a hammer, when her phone buzzed against her hip. She worked the hammer loose, pulled her arm out of water that felt like it came straight off a glacier, and fished the phone out of her coat pocket.

Two hours out. Traffic past Miles City was light. Bring a jacket, it says 3 degrees here. Is that right?

"That's right," she said to nobody, and typed it back. Yes. That's right. Book club's at six. Come to the gate, somebody will let you in.

She looked at the water running off her sleeve and thought, well. Four months of texting a man she'd never met, and today he was going to drive up the county road and see her with a hammer and icicles on her cuff.

* * *

By five the kitchen at Denise's ranch house smelled like sliced ham and nothing else, because Denise did not cook for book club and never had. Nicky laid the cold cuts out on a platter, then rearranged them, then rearranged them again.

"You've moved that salami four times," Denise said from the counter. She was forty-four, forewoman of the place, and had the particular calm of a woman who had raised two kids and thirty hired hands and liked neither all that much. "Whoever he is, he's not coming for the salami."

"He might be."

"He drove six hours to meet a woman he's been texting since August. He's coming for the woman." Denise poured herself coffee she did not need. "Which reminds me. Did you tell him?"

"Tell him what."

"Denise," Lionel Montgomery said from the living room, where he'd been sitting on the couch since four thirty, hat on the coffee table, waiting for somebody to argue with. He was fifty-two, third-generation cattleman, and had once driven to Denver and back and considered it the trip of his life. "Did you all actually read chapter three? Because I've got thoughts."

"You skipped it," Denise called back.

"I have thoughts about it anyway."

"That's what you said last month."

Lionel came into the kitchen with his coffee cup held out for a refill, which Denise ignored, which was their whole relationship in one gesture. "Chapter three is where the author loses the thread. The sister comes back and nobody in the family says a word about it. That's not realistic."

"Maybe," Nicky said, "they're just tired of talking."

"Nobody's that tired."

Denise finally filled his cup. "The book is about a family that doesn't talk, Lionel. That's the whole point of it."

"There's a point?"

"There's always a point. You just don't want to hear it." Denise sat down and looked at Nicky over the rim of her cup. "You didn't answer me. Did you tell him?"

Nicky picked up the salami again and put it back down in the same spot. "Tell him what, that I've been with one person, ever, and she was a woman? That I'm twenty-eight and I've never..."

She waved a hand at the platter, as if the word were lying among the cold cuts somewhere.

"He's a grown man, he's thirty-one, he's not going to care," Denise said. "Or he will care and he'll be decent about it. Either way you'll know something by tonight that you don't know now."

"It's not the kind of thing you put in a text, Denise. 'Hey, how was the drive, also I've never been with a man.'"

"Why not? You two have texted about everything else. He told you about his mother's hip surgery. You told him about the time the well pump died on Christmas."

"That's different."

"It's not different. It's just closer." Denise stood and straightened the platter herself, which was her way of mothering without admitting to it. "You'll say it or you won't. But you've been circling it for a month and I can hear you circling from the barn."

Lionel looked between the two of them. "Is this about that crane fellow coming?"

"It's about chapter three," Denise said. "Eat your ham."

* * *

The gate was a quarter mile from the house, and Nicky walked it because the truck was blocked in behind the feed pickup and because she wanted the walk to settle her down. It did not settle her down. The cold came straight down off the hills and sat on her chest, and by the time she reached the gate her eyes were running and she could blame that on the wind, which was convenient.

The car that pulled up was a gray sedan with South Dakota plates and a crack across the whole windshield. The man who got out was tall, windburned across the cheeks, wearing a canvas coat that had seen actual work. Bryan Hampton. He looked at her the way people look at a photo they've studied and then at the real thing, checking the two against each other.

"Nicky?"

"That's me." She stuck her hand out, because what else was there, and he shook it, and they stood there at a closed gate shaking hands like two people about to discuss fencing rights.

"Hi," he said. "You're shorter than I pictured."

"You're taller. And colder, probably, you've been in that car for six hours."

"Ten years driving a port crane in all weather. A sedan with a good heater is a spa day." He looked past her at the house lights coming on down the fence line. "That the famous ranch?"

"That's the famous ranch. Book club starts in forty minutes, and the book club is me, my forewoman, and a neighbor who didn't read the book."

"I didn't read the book either."

"I know. Neither did I. That's how we met, remember? You lied about it first."

He laughed. She had heard him laugh over text, in a way, little ha ha's and voice memos in the truck cab with the wind rushing past, but the actual sound of it, up close, in cold air, was different. She filed that away.

They walked toward the house, slow, because neither of them wanted the walk to end and neither of them said so.

"You look like your pictures," he said. "Better, actually. You look like somebody who breaks ice off water tanks."

"Is that a compliment?"

"It's the highest compliment I've got. I spent the whole drive trying to guess what you'd look like walking a fence line, and I nailed it."

On the porch he stopped, and she stopped, and the porch light came on over the door because Denise had been watching from the window, obviously.

"Can I ask you something before we go in," Bryan said.

"You can ask me anything. You've asked me everything already. I know your mother's hip surgery schedule."

"That's exactly why." He had his hands in his coat pockets and his breath went up white between them. "Four months of texts, and it's all real stuff, and I keep thinking, at some point tonight, there's going to be a thing you haven't told me. And I'd rather it came out on a porch than in the middle of something."

Nicky looked at the porch boards. Then at him.

"Yeah," she said. "There's a thing."

"Okay."

"I've been with one person. Six years. A woman. I've never been with a man. Like, ever. At all. Tonight is..." She stopped. "Tonight's not that. I'm not saying tonight's that. I'm saying if it ever got there, you'd be the first, and I thought you should know that before you're standing in a kitchen eating Denise's ham."

Bryan nodded, slow, and she watched him actually think about it, which was somehow better than any fast answer would have been.

"Thank you for telling me," he said. "Can I tell you the thing I haven't told you?"

"Please!"

"None of the dating-app flings I've had since I was twenty-five stuck. Not one. And I stopped minding that around August, which is when I stopped texting other people, which is a thing I haven't mentioned either." He shrugged inside the coat. "So we're even."

"We're even," she said.

"You didn't read the book."

"Not one page. You?"

"I read the back cover. In a gas station. In Wibaux."

"The pact is sealed," Nicky said, and opened the door, and the warmth of the house rolled out over the porch, and Denise's voice came from inside, already mid-argument: "Lionel, put the hat back on the table, the guest isn't even in the door yet."

The kitchen smelled like ham, because Denise had said she didn't cook for book club and then cooked anyway, and Lionel was already seated at the table with the book shut on his finger like he'd been reading it all week.

"This is Bryan," Nicky said. "Bryan, Denise Pearson, she runs this place. Lionel Montgomery, he drives in from two sections over to argue."

"I don't argue," Lionel said. "I correct."

"He skipped chapter three," Denise said.

"I skimmed chapter three."

"You skimmed the back of chapter three."

Bryan took his coat off and shook Denise's hand, and Lionel leaned around to look at him. "Port crane, she said on the phone. Ten years?"

"Since I was twenty-one, off and on. Full time the last six."

"Hauling containers."

"Mostly. Some scrap."

Lionel nodded like a man approving of a bull. "Honest work. Sit down, the ham's getting dry."

They sat. The ham was not dry. Denise poured coffee, Lionel asked Bryan three questions about the port and none about the book, and Nicky watched Bryan handle it, the way he let Lionel finish, the way he said "ma'am" to Denise without it sounding like a joke. Four months of texts and she had never once seen his hands. They were big and they were steady on the coffee cup and she kept noticing them and made herself stop.

"So the book," Denise said finally, because she had to.

"Terrible," Lionel said.

"You didn't read it."

"I read enough."

"The chapters you did read were out of order."

"A man knows where he stands."

Bryan laughed into his coffee and Nicky kicked him under the table, not hard, and he kicked back, and the matter settled for a while, the two of them trading little kicks under the table like a couple of fools while Lionel explained at length why the protagonist was an idiot, which, from the summaries, Nicky had to agree with.

It was about twenty minutes in that Lionel poured himself more coffee from the pot on the counter and stopped.

"This coffee's cold."

"It was hot ten minutes ago," Denise said. She got up and turned the tap in the sink and held her hand under it, and her face did a thing.