Page 66 of Coyote

Sarah had quit asking where the spare apron hung about three mornings ago, and she and Sierra were moving around each other at the stove without bumping, trading the skillet and the tongs without a word between them. I'd been on this land nine years, and Sierra still slapped my hand off the tortilla press.

She flipped an egg one-handed, and I hated that it was a good flip.

Cruz banged in through the screen door, saw a strange woman at the stove, and sat down without taking his eyes off her.

"Was he always..." Cruz raised a flat hand over his own head, as high as his arm reached.

"Nine pounds at birth." She slid the egg onto a plate. "My mother never let him forget it."

"Sare," John said.

"Ask him about the tomatoes."

"That was one summer."

"It was every summer, and Mom guarded those plants like the federal mint."

John laughed. The sound came up out of his chest, and it went up my spine and into my back teeth. I reached over and took the salsa. Close up, the lemon sat on him where his collar was open, over the pulse, right where I put my nose when he let me. My jaw clenched tight enough to creak.

I wanted him in the bathhouse under the well water until he smelled like himself again. He hadn't offered it, and the asking stayed stuck somewhere behind my teeth, so I put salsa on my eggs and ate them without tasting anything.

After we cleared the plates, Sierra took the field kit down off the shelf and set it on the table in front of me.

"Dressings," he said. "My hands are in the masa."

John looked at the kit. Then he glanced at me across the table, and for a moment nothing in the kitchen moved, not Pearl, not Sarah, not the air.

He turned his chair sideways for me and pulled his shirttail up out of the way. "Go on, then, little one."

I held my hands steady when I reached him. I peeled the tape back a corner at a time, eyes on his stomach instead of the dressing, watching for a flinch. The stitches sat clean in skin gone green and yellow at the edges where the bruising had started to fade. No heat under my fingers, nice and dry. The smell of him came up off his skin under the gauze, river and cedar and John, no lemon anywhere on that part of him, and I unclenched my jaw.

"That one pulled when you got out of the truck last night," I said. "Don't lie about it."

"It pulled. It held."

"Breathe in."

The stitches pulled tight over his ribs when he breathed in, and every one of them held. I laid the new gauze and taped it, then moved down his forearm and unwound Sarah's straightened wrapping and did it right.

She watched my hands the whole time. She'd pulled her chair back to give me the light, and she sat with her coffee going cold in both hands, watching me handle her brother. Good. Let her see how I taped the edges down flat so nothing snagged.

I pressed the last strip of tape along his forearm and took my time with the corner.

"I'd have kept him from you forever," I said, without looking up from the tape. "Fed him. Moved him somewhere better every time you got close. I want you to know that before you decide anything about me."

Sierra's rag stopped on the counter. John's ribs went up and down under my palm, no catch in them, and he said nothing.

"At least you're honest." She glanced at John. He was looking at me, and whatever was in his face made her set the coffee down and turn her chair back to the table, and that was the end of it. She didn't thank me again. I liked her better for that.

Sierra put a plate of sopapillas down between us, and Cruz came back in asking whether Sarah knew John's shoe size, and nobody said anything else about it.

I rode along the east fence with Mateo, reset two leaning posts, and pulled a tumbleweed the size of Pearl off the wire, and all day my hands worked while the rest of me stayed back in that kitchen with my palm on his ribs and John saying nothing under it.

After supper, I pulled the string on the shop light in the tack room, dug the roll of butcher paper out from behind the tins where Sierra kept it, and cut a piece the length of my arm.

Nimue slid off my shoulders onto the workbench and coiled against the battery charger where the casing ran warm. I shaved the pencil stub to a point with my knife, then weighted the paper's corners with a hoof pick, a tin of pine tar, a dead phone somebody had left charging since spring, and the knife, and sat there awhile with the empty paper.

I'd never had the whole ranch on paper before. It was in my legs. It was in the soles of my feet. Every wash and tank and cut, and the pencil felt smaller in my grip than the knife.