The Wrangler's Wife

Ray pulled his rental car up the gravel drive just after noon, and for a second he just sat there with the engine ticking, looking at the sky. You don't get sky like that in Minneapolis. It went on forever out here, blue and huge, with the mountains sitting off west like they were waiting for something.

Christian came out onto the porch wiping his hands on his jeans. "Ray. You actually found it."

"GPS did most of the work," Ray said, getting out. His knees cracked. Thirty-five was starting to feel real.

"Man, I owe you for this." Christian grabbed him in a hug that nearly knocked the air out of him. "Three days. Auction in Billings, Ciara's coming with to handle the paperwork. You feed the dogs, keep water in the barn, and don't let the cows out if you can help it."

"If they get out, what do I do?"

"Pray, mostly." Christian laughed and slung an arm around his shoulder, walking him inside. The house smelled like coffee and wood, big and open, boots by the door and a cross-stitch on the wall that said Blessed. "Guest room's down here. Olga's out at the garden, she'll be in for supper."

The barn tour came after, Christian pointing out feed bins, the water pump, a chestnut mare named June who stuck her head out over the stall door to investigate. "She bites, but only a little."

"That's comforting."

"She's a sweetheart. Everything here is fine, Ray. Just quiet. Honestly, that's the entire purpose of the favor. Olga gets antsy when I'm gone and I figure the house feels less empty with someone in it," he said it easy, as if it were no matter at all, and Ray nodded and didn't say anything about the way his own chest had felt empty for two months now.

By four, Christian and Ciara were loaded into the truck. Ciara, twenty-nine and sunburnt and constantly pushing hair out of her face, gave Ray a wave. "There's leftovers in the fridge, labeled. Don't touch the one marked C, that's Christian's and he counts them."

"He absolutely does," Christian said, and then he was hugging Olga, telling her he'd call from the hotel, and the truck kicked up dust all the way down to the highway before it disappeared.

Ray stood on the porch listening to the quiet. Wind in the grass. A screen door creaking.

That was Olga, coming around the side of the house with dirt on her knees and a basket of green beans. She was thirty-three, dark-haired, and she looked at him longer than a stranger would. "So you're the housesitter."

"I'm the housesitter. Ray."

"I know who you are, Ray. Christian talks about you like you're famous." She set the basket on the porch rail. "Come on in, I'll make you a drink. City boys dehydrate out here, it's a medical fact."

"Is it?"

"Absolutely." She was already inside, pulling a bottle of rye down from a high shelf. "Ice? We have ice. It's the one luxury."

"Rye, little ice. Thank you."

She fixed two glasses and handed him one, clinking hers against his. "To surviving three days of my cooking."

"You cook?"

"I burn things beautifully." She grinned and took a sip, leaning back against the counter. "So. Librarian. You shush people for a living?"

Ray laughed for the first time in what felt like weeks. "I mostly fix the printers and tell teenagers where the bathroom is."

"Still. Christian says you read more than anyone he knows. He says you two used to argue about books in grad school until the bar closed."

"He remembers that fondly. I remember the hangovers."

They ended up on the porch, and the evening came down slow and golden over the pasture. Olga tucked her feet up under her and asked him about the separation, and he was surprised how easy it was to answer. "She left in April. Ten years, and she said she just didn't want to be married to me anymore. Which is, I don't know, honest at least."

"That's awful."

"It's clean, at least. Awful and clean." He swirled the rye. "How'd you and Christian meet?"

"College. I was twenty-one, he was this big loud ranch kid who fixed my car and then fixed it again so he'd have a reason to come back." She smiled at her glass. "Married at twenty-four. He's a good man, Ray. Boring in the best way."

"Best way?"

"The way you want a man to be boring. Steady." She paused, and then she said, "There's a wrangler lives over the ridge, Kirby, with a spread about two miles east. He keeps our fence line fixed when Christian can't get to it."

Something in her voice went soft on that name. Ray heard it, the way you hear a note go flat. He looked out at the pasture and kept his face still, the way he'd gotten good at doing.

"Kirby," he said. "Good neighbor?"

"Very good." She was smiling a little, at the sky more than at him. "He's been coming by more since the spring. Brings things. Saddle soap, once a whole pie, and once he stood in the yard talking to me for two hours about horses I don't care about, and I listened to every word."

"Sounds like you care about horses."

"I care about being listened to," she said it light, like a joke, but it didn't land like one. She drained her glass and stood. "Supper in an hour. Don't burn down my husband's barn, city boy."

Ray stayed on the porch after she went in, working on his drink, thinking about a voice going soft on a stranger's name, and thinking, worse, about how badly he wanted someone to say his own name that way.

* * *

Ray was up early, mostly because cows were loud and the guest room downstairs had a window facing the pasture. He made coffee and stood out on the porch watching the light come up, and by nine he'd already read forty pages of a paperback he'd grabbed off Christian's shelf.

Around ten, hoofbeats.

A man on a bay horse came down the ridge trail at an easy trot, and Ray watched him the way you watch weather. Thirties maybe, older, weathered, hat low. The screen door creaked behind him and Olga was suddenly out on the porch, wiping her hands on a dish towel, and her whole face had changed.

"Kirby! What did you break this time?"

"Nothing yet, ma'am. Give me the day." The man swung down and tied off at the rail. "Fence on the north quarter's sagging where the creek cut under. Thought I'd ride it before the rain comes."

"There's no rain coming."

"There's always rain coming." He tipped his hat at Ray. "Morning."

"Ray. Housesitting."

"He reads books," Olga said, like this was a vital credential.

"One of us should," Kirby said, and Olga laughed, a real laugh, head back, and she reached out and touched his arm while she did it. Just the forearm, just a second. Just fingers on a sleeve.

Ray felt it like a hook behind his ribs. Ten years of marriage had trained him to notice exactly that, a hand landing where it didn't have to, and he hated that he'd noticed it, and he hated more that his stomach did the cold drop thing it used to do at dinner parties in Minneapolis when his wife laughed at somebody else's joke.

"I'll bring up that fence post chunk from the barn," Kirby was saying.

"You know where it is. Christian reorganizes everything and then forgets where."

"Man reorganizes like it's a religion."

Ray stood there holding his coffee while the two of them walked toward the barn, talking over each other about posts and wire and some horse named June, and their shoulders were easy together, and Olga kept touching the fence rails like she owned them, which she did, but there was a way she did it that was showing off and not hiding it.

He went back inside. He washed his mug. He told himself, firmly, that he was a guest in this man's house and this woman was his friend's wife and the drop in his stomach was just hunger, so he ate the leftover eggs, not the one marked C, and he read another chapter and understood none of it.

Around noon he heard Kirby's horse leave. He did not go out to watch. He was proud of that for about four minutes and then he went out to watch.

Too late, just dust on the ridge trail. Olga was at the barn door, and she caught him at it, caught him looking, and he saw her see it. She didn't say anything. She just smiled a small private smile and carried her basket inside, and Ray stood in the yard feeling like a man caught shoplifting air.

* * *

That evening she came out to the porch with two glasses and the rye bottle and sat down across from him like they'd planned it, which they hadn't, which was somehow worse.

"Beer's in the fridge but you strike me as a rye man."

"I am, actually. Little ice."

"I remembered." She poured his, poured hers, and looked out at the pasture going purple. "Christian's probably at a hotel bar right now talking to strangers about cattle prices."

"He does love that."

"He does. God, he does." She sipped. "You sleep okay? Downstairs?"

"Great. Quieter than my apartment."

"Your apartment. Not your house anymore."

"No. Not anymore." He turned the glass in his hand. "She kept the house. I kept the books. Fair trade, I guess."

"Was it?"

"Was it what?"

"Fair."

Ray laughed, short and dry. "You ask questions like a nurse taking a pulse."

"I ask questions because nobody out here asks me any. Everybody assumes I'm fine because I married well," she said it evenly, not bitter, just flat. "So. Was it fair?"

"No." He looked at his drink. "Honestly? I never felt chosen. That's a weird word for it, I know. But she picked me the way you pick an apartment. Good location, reasonable rent. And