The Hayloft Sessions

I'm thirty-four years old and I have built my whole life out of sensible choices, the way a mason builds a wall, one flat stone at a time, and I have spent eleven years telling myself that wall is what I wanted. I married Alfred five years ago, when I was twenty-nine, after a two-year courtship that started years after I first showed up at Holloway Ranch applying for a trainer position and he stood there in the dust looking at me like I'd answered a question he'd been asking. I love him. I need to say that first because it's true and because everything else I write down after it is going to look bad. But loving a man and being settled into a man are two different animals, and I have been riding the settled one for a long time now, and some mornings I catch myself at the fence line looking down the county road at nothing, absolutely nothing, just because it's the only direction that isn't part of the routine.

So I trained horses, and I got up at five, and I ran the breeding book and the vet schedule and the farrier rotations, and I was good at it, good enough that people in three counties say Geraldine Holloway's the steadiest hand around, and I let them say it because steady was the thing I picked when I was twenty-three and picking stupid instead. That was the year of the rodeo. I don't think about it much, or I tell myself I don't, a weekend with a traveling man named Anders Beck who was twenty-one and all shoulders and nerve, and I ended it on a Sunday because I wanted a house and a job and a man who'd still be there in November, and I have never once regretted it out loud. That's the trick of a sensible life. You keep the regret in the same locked tack room as everything else.

* * *

Branding season comes down on us in July like a hot hand on the back of the neck, and this year Alfred went and hired a chiropractor to travel with the outfit, because last summer that stallion threw his hocks out and cost us the whole late breeding run. He tells me about it over coffee on a Tuesday, reading off his phone. "Fella's got a good name in the circuit," he says. "Beck. Anders Beck. Starts Thursday."

And I set my cup down slower than I needed to and said, "Beck," in a voice I hope sounded like a woman hearing a common name, and Alfred just nodded and went back to his phone, because why would it be anything, eleven years is eleven years.

Thursday comes in at a hundred and two degrees and the barn air sits on you like a wet saddle blanket, and I'm in the indoor arena working a two-year-old when the diesel pickup pulls in and I know the sound of it before I see it, which is stupid, nobody has the same truck twice in eleven years. But I know it. I keep my eyes on the colt and I finish the set, and when I finally do look up there's a man standing at the rail in a gray tee shirt with a duffel over one shoulder and a folding table under the other arm, and he's older, of course, we both are, but he walks the same, like the ground owes him money.

Alfred goes out to shake his hand and does the intro thing, and then he waves me over. "Geraldine, this is Anders, he'll be with us through branding. Anders, my wife, she runs the training side."

"Mrs. Holloway," Anders says, and puts his hand out.

And I take it, because you take it, that's what you do, and his hand is exactly as warm and as rough as my body remembers it being when I was twenty-three, and he holds on maybe half a beat longer than a handshake needs, half a beat, that's all, and my whole sensible wall just sits there while something behind it leans. "Mr. Beck," I say. "Welcome to Holloway."

"Anders," he says, and he's smiling, not big, just at the corners. "I'd say you look good, but I figure your husband's standing right there."

"Well, don't say it then," I say, and walk off with my back straight and my face doing whatever it decided to do without asking me.

* * *

The first week I manage to be professional the way I'd manage a bad-tempered stallion, meaning I give him plenty of room and I never turn my back on him. He works the horses in the main barn two at a time, and he's good, I hate that he's good, the mare with the SI issue that's been short-striding since April moves out fluid on Friday and I have to tell him so, because I'm honest about stock even when I'd rather chew glass.

"Thanks," he says, wiping his hands on a rag. "Your set-up's good here. Chutes are smart, the layout. Easy to work in."

"It should be. We built it right."

"You always did build things right," he says, and lets that sit there in the aisle between us with the flies buzzing through it.

That's Saturday evening, after the crew's knocked off and gone into town, and I'm in the tack room doing bridles, which is a job I do when I want to not talk to anyone, and he comes in to put up his table pads and doesn't leave, just leans against the door frame with his arms crossed like he's got all the time that ever was.

"You look at the county road a lot," he says. "Out by the fence. I noticed it my first morning."

"I look at weather."

"You look at away," he says. "I remember that look. You had it at the rodeo too, standing by the chutes, right before you decided to be sensible and go home on Sunday morning instead of riding to Billings with me."

And there it is, eleven years old and out loud in a tack room that smells like leather and neatsfoot oil, and I should tell him to mind his own business and walk out and tell Alfred this isn't going to work and mail the man his check. That is the correct list of actions. Instead I snap a billet strap harder than it needs and say, "You were twenty-one. I was doing you a favor."

"Best favor anybody ever did me," Anders says, and he's got that knowing half-smile on again, the one that says he's watching my face to see what it does. "You regret it?"

"Regret what?"

"Sunday. Ending it."

I look at him, finally, square on, because I've been avoiding that all week and it turns out avoiding it takes more work than doing it. "I don't regret my life," I tell him. "You want me to say I do, so you can feel like you left a mark. I got a good husband and a good operation and I built it myself."

"I know," he says, easy as anything. "I'm not asking about your life. I'm asking about Sunday."

And the honest answer, the one I keep in the locked tack room with everything else, is that I have thought about that Sunday maybe four thousand times and never once on purpose. But I don't say that. I hang the bridle on its peg and say, "Branding's coming. You'll want sleep," and walk past him through the door he's not quite blocking, and he doesn't move and doesn't smile and doesn't say a word, and that's worse than all of it.

Alfred notices before anybody else does, because of course he does, he's been reading me across a barn aisle for eleven years and he doesn't need a word, he needs about thirty seconds. It's Sunday afternoon and we're hosing down the bay broodmares and I'm supposed to be talking through weaning dates and instead I've run the same mare's left side twice and he's watching me do it. "Geri." He shuts off his hose. "You're somewhere else. Take a day off. Go into Billings, get a motel with a tub you didn't have to scrub yourself, let me deal with the crew Tuesday."

"I'm fine," I say. "Branding's in four days, nobody's taking a day off, including you."

"I know I'm not," he says, and shakes the water off his boots. "But you, honey, you've been wound tight since Beck rolled in the drive. And don't tell me it's the SI mare, because that mare's been sound since Friday and you've been chewing on something else all weekend."

And the problem with being married to a man who pays attention is that he pays attention, and I stand there with the hose running water over a leg that's already clean and I look at my husband of five years, who is broad and plain and good and whose idea of a wild Friday night is reseeding the pivot field, and I say, "It's nothing. Old business. It'll pass."

"Does old business need to be fired?"

"No," I say, too fast, and then slower, "no. He's good at the work. He stays through