Page 100 of Coyote

"What day is it?" he mumbled against my collarbone.

"Sunday," I said, my hand settling over the fine hairs on the back of his neck.

The good eye opened. "Pancakes!"

Denim rustled and his boots scuffed the floor before I'd found the leverage to sit up. "Last one to the table is a rotten egg!"

"You can't run, little one."

"I can walk fast and you're old." He kissed me, finished dressing, and went out the door on the outside of both feet.

I sighed, smiled at the ceiling, and rolled out of bed.

Five minutes later, gravel crunched under my boots the whole way across the yard, and the smell of maple syrup and bacon fat reached me before I got to the porch. Through the screen door, Linc was hollering from the front room about being starved to death by his own family, and Mateo growled back that card cheats didn't get syrup. Mateo carried a plate through to him and came back with an empty one. Pearl held the threshold, and her thick fur dragged across my shins as I stepped over her.

The screen door slapped shut behind me. Sierra flipped two pancakes without turning his head, stacked three on a plate, slid butter between the layers, and set the plate down in front of Coyote.

"You're late, hijo," Sierra said, and scraped the griddle. "But I'll start a few more for you. You'll have to get your own coffee today."

Coyote picked up his fork left-handed, tried to scoop up a pancake, and failed. I slid his plate over and started cutting them into bite-sized squares for him.

Cruz put his chin in his hand and sighed at us. "I wish someone would cut my pancakes for me like that."

"Get your own giant," Coyote said, pointing his fork at Cruz.

Cruz grinned and said, "I just might."

I set his knife and fork down on the plate, took his own knife out of my back pocket, and slid it across the table.

The bone handle stopped against the heel of his hand. He looked at it. Sierra quit scraping the griddle. Cruz stopped chewing.

Then he thumbed it open left-handed, checked the edge against his lip, quick and automatic, and put it away.

"You sharpened it," he said.

"Sierra sharpened it. I only carried it."

After the plates were cleared, I went to check Linc's thigh. It was dry, and his foot was warm, and the wound was closing nicely. He asked me when he could ride again and cursed at me when I told him the answer.

Then I sat sideways on a kitchen chair and held still under the cold steel of Sierra's scissors, small sharp tugs as each thread came free of the sealed skin. It held. It was going to scar in a jagged line crossing two older ones.

"Done," Sierra said, tapping the scissors against his palm. "You're a whole man again."

Coyote spoke from behind the chair. "He was always whole."

Sierra looked at me for a fraction of a second. Neither of us smiled where he could see us.

I followed the uneven scuff of Coyote's boots out to the far shed, where the morning heat was already working on the tin roof and the air hung thick with engine oil and solvent. Zaroff's Sportster stood stripped to the bone on the concrete, frame on the stand, tank on the bench, the handlebars bare where his tusks had been wired on. I leaned in the doorway and waited for whatever he was about to do.

Joe stood at the bench with a wrench in his fist. He set it down and wiped his palms on a rag, the only sound in the shed.

"You've had her all the way apart," Coyote said.

"Been working on it. Nothing else to do with my hands all week."

Coyote dragged his good palm along the bare steel, one pass, light, finished with her.

"Keep her."