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There was nothing on this place worth anybody's trouble.

She turned off the porch light and went up to bed in the small back room she still couldn't make herself trade for his, and slept better than she had since she crossed the cattle guard, which she put down to the war with the gate and not, under any circumstances, to anything else.

CHAPTER THREE

There was a spool of wire in the truck bed and a story to go with it about her windmill, and Mason had the story polished so smooth by the second cattle guard that he almost believed it himself.

Two days. He'd lasted two days, which he understood was not a number a man bragged about, and he'd spent the better part of both of them finding work along the west fence line, where a man could see the Merritt place if he happened to look up, and he happened to look up about every four minutes. He was being neighborly. That windmill needed bracing before a norther put it in her stock tank, and he was the one who'd said so out loud, which made the job his.

It had nothing to do with his father, either. He'd asked himself that straight out on the first drive home, whether any part of this was him running Clay's errand after all, and the answer was no, not one inch of it. He was out here because he wanted to be. Somehow that was worse.

He turned in at her cattle guard and heard her before he saw her.

She was around the back of the house, and she was cursing and Mason sat in the idling truck a second and admitted that he could already pick her swearing out of a lineup, and that he'd missed it.

He found her at the pump house, kneeling in the doorway of the little leaning shed with a rusted toolbox open beside her and a pipe wrench in her hand that was too big for anything she could reach, wearing her grandfather's flannel with the sleeves shoved up and an expression that said the wrench was about to become a weapon. Her hair was tied back, first time he'd seen it up, nothing in the way of her face, and he stood there looking at her a beat too long for a man who'd come about a windmill.

"Don't," she said, without turning around.

"Wasn't going to."

"You were. You had a whole lecture ready." She sat back on her heels and looked at him, and there was a streak of rust across one cheekbone like war paint. "No water. Since six this morning. The taps spit at me and quit."

"Breaker on?"

"I found the breaker. I flipped the breaker. I have flipped the breaker so many times the breaker and I are in a relationship." She gestured at the shed with the wrench, at the squat tank and the pipes going down into the ground. "The internet says check the pressure switch. This is me checking it. It looks like a switch. That's as far as I've gotten."

Mason came over and crouched at the tank and put his knuckle to the gauge, which sat flat on zero, and ran his hand down the pipe where it went into the concrete, and listened a moment to the shed doing nothing at all. The power was there. The switch was fine. The silence was coming from farther down.

"It's not your switch," he said. "There's a pump down that well, forty feet or so, been down there since before either of us could vote. It's done. Water doesn't come up on its own."

He watched her do the math, because she did it right on her face, where she seemed to do everything. Not the plumbing math but the money math, and then the alone math, the quick inventory of a woman adding up what a well costs against an envelope somewhere in that house, and he had a sudden low opinion of every mile of distance between her and anybody who owed her help.

"Okay," she said, even. "How bad?"

"Pump's six hundred, thereabouts, for one that'll outlive us both. The rest of it's labor, and out here labor's not for sale."

"Everything's for sale."

"Not this. This is how neighbors say hello." He straightened up. "I can't fix it alone, before you ask. Pulling forty feet of pipe out of the ground with a dead pump on the end of it is a two-man job, and I've got a brother twenty minutes away with the rig for it sitting in his shed doing nothing."

"I didn't ask for⁠—"

"I know you didn't." He said it easy, no edge, and let it sit there between them, the whole shape of her not-asking. "You've got no water. I've got a free afternoon and a brother who owes me one. I physically can't drive off this place knowing all three of those things at once. It's a diagnosed condition."

"Is that so?" She was fighting a smile and mostly winning. "Terminal meddling."

"Chronic. Terminal would fix itself."

She stared at him a long moment anyway, and he watched her want to fight the whole arrangement and watched her look at the dry tank and lose, and there was something in the losing that cost her more than the pump would, and he pretended not to see that, because a man could be neighborly without taking inventory.

"I pay for the pump," she said. "The actual pump. Receipt and everything."

"Receipt and everything."

"And I work. I'm not going to stand there holding lemonade like it's a barn raising in a commercial."

"No lemonade," Mason agreed. "It's November."