The Last Pasture

I was twenty-eight the summer I drove Ian out to his uncle's farm, and I could claim I was doing it out of pure friendship, but that would be a lie with a nice frame on it.

We'd known each other seven years by then. He was thirty, a farmhand with a former Marine reservist's haircut and a habit of saying "yep" where other people said paragraphs. His uncle had a sheep-and-alfalfa place out in eastern Oregon, and Ian had a two-year contract overseas, the kind people don't ask follow-up questions about. He wanted to see the farm one last time. His truck had just died. I had a hatchback and, apparently, nothing better to do.

He was standing outside the Pilot station in Ontario with a duffel bag and a gas station coffee when I pulled up.

"That's a small car," he said.

"That's a rude greeting," I said.

He opened the back door and dropped the duffel straight on top of my canvases. Just tossed it, no pause, no look.

"Careful, those are paintings. Well, paintings and one collage I gave up on."

"They're fine." He got in. "The duffel's mostly socks."

"That's not the point of art, Ian."

"Yep," he said, and drank his coffee.

* * *

The drive north was two hours of nothing but sagebrush and one hawk doing business over the road. My car smelled like turpentine and the gas station coffee I'd bought at six in the morning, which I regretted by seven.

"So how long's the contract again?" I asked.

"Two years. Maybe two and a half if they renew."

"And your uncle just leaves the farm sitting?"

"He's in Boise now. His knees. The sheep stay, the neighbor checks on them. I'm mostly going out to say goodbye to the place and fix whatever's about to fall down."

"Very sentimental."

"I'm a very sentimental guy." He looked out the window. "You talk to Kiara lately?"

That's the thing about Ian. He dated my friend Kiara for a few months, six years back, and they ended it so politely I half suspected a lawyer was involved. He never acted weird about it afterward. He just also never let me forget he knew the whole map of my social life.

"Yeah, she called last month. She's in Denver now, doing something with databases."

"Huh. Good for her." He shifted the coffee to his other hand. "She always said you two were the close ones."

"We are."

"Did she ever say anything about me?"

"Why, you want a review?"

"Just curious what version she settled on."

"The version where you're a decent guy who couldn't sit still," I said. "Which, now that you're taking a contract to the opposite side of the planet, tracks."

He laughed, that low single-syllable laugh he had. "Fair."

We went through a stretch of silence that wasn't awkward, which was the whole problem with Ian, if I'm honest in the privacy of my own skull. Silence with him was easy. Seven years easy. I met him at a house party when I was twenty-one, still in my undergrad glue-gun phase, and we'd flirted exactly once, over a bowl of chips, and then never again because life is good at scheduling.

"Can I ask you something dumb," I said.

"Those are my favorite kind."

"Why'd you never come to any of the gallery things? I invited you like four times."

He was quiet for a second. "Felt strange showing up. Kiara's friend, you know. Didn't want it to be a thing."

"You know she married some guy named Trevor, right? She's not monitoring the situation."

"Yep. Heard." He tapped the cup against his knee. "Honestly? I figured if I came, I'd want something I didn't have a right to want. Easier to stay home."

I kept my eyes on the road and my voice very casual, which took actual work.

"And what would that be?"

"You know what."

"I genuinely might not."

"Deb." He said it like a warning shot. "Drive."

So I drove. My face felt hot the whole way through Baker City and neither of us said one more word about it, which was somehow both the most we'd ever said and nothing at all.

* * *

The farm showed up the way farms do, all at once, a scatter of buildings in flat gold grass. The house had a long porch with a wind chime missing two tubes, hanging crooked. A barn leaned sensibly behind it, crowded with rusted irrigation pipe stacked like giant metallic asparagus.

"Uncle Ray left it tidy," Ian said, walking the yard. "That's suspicious. Usually there's a tractor part in the sink."

Inside was exactly empty. Swept floors, bare counters, a note on the fridge that said ICE CREAM IN FREEZER HELP YOURSELF in pencil, dated three weeks ago.

"He's a poet," I said.

"Yep."

I claimed the porch. I'd packed my little travel setup, a folding stool, a small board, four tubes of paint and a jar for water. Late summer light out there is the whole reason to paint anything. I got a small study going of the barn while Ian went out to check the sheep pasture, and I watched him from the porch climbing through the fence line with his sleeves rolled up, and I painted approximately four brushstrokes in an hour.

He came back at dinner time with a report.

"East fence has two broken stays. Trough's got a crack but it's holding. Sheep look bored."

"Sheep always look bored."

"They're entitled to. Everything out here is their food." He looked at my board. "That's good. You made the barn look important."

"It is important. It's full of pipes."

"Yep." He grinned at me. "I'm going to make dinner. You eat fish?"

"There's fish?"

"There's a freezer."

* * *

After dinner he came out with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses that didn't match, and we sat on the porch steps with our feet in the dirt. The wind chime did its broken two-note thing whenever the breeze came through, like a phone ringing from a house where nobody lived.

"To Uncle Ray," I said. "And his ice cream."

"To Ray."

The whiskey was cheap and warm and fine. We each stopped at one glass, and Ian went in and came back with two glasses of water, and we sat there another hour with the dark coming down before anything else happened. Somewhere down the field a sheep said something rude.

"Two years is a long time," I said.

"It's twenty-six months. I did the math. Twenty-six months is the number that doesn't scare you. Two years is the number that does."

"That's actually smart."

"Don't tell anyone."

He shifted, and his hand came down on the step between us, and the side of it brushed my knee. Then it stayed there. Not grabbing, not moving, just resting there like it had always been on the way somewhere and had decided this was the destination.

I looked at his hand. Then up at him. He was looking straight out at the dark pasture like sheep could give him privacy cover.

"Ian."

"Yep."

"Is that hand doing anything in particular?"

"Thinking about it," he said.

"Well," I said, and my mouth had gone dry in a way the whiskey wasn't fixing, "tell it to keep thinking out loud."

He turned his head then, slow, like the pasture had finally said something worth hearing. "You want me to say it out loud."

"I've had seven years to wonder. I'd like the answer."

"The answer is I've thought about it since you were twenty-two and wearing paint on your elbow and I was dating your friend, which was six years ago, which made it a bad idea, and then I stopped dating your friend and it still felt like a bad idea."

"Why?"

"Because you'd have said no!"

"That's a coward's math," I told him.

"Yep." He was still not moving.

Fine. I did it. I leaned over and kissed him, quick, a test, the way you touch a fence to see if it's hot. He made a small sound into it. Then his hand came off the step and found the back of my head and the kiss stopped being a test. It went on long enough that my neck complained about the angle. I pulled back an inch.