Page 6 of Desired

He called Owen from the tailgate. It took four sentences, which for the two of them was a long conversation. You busy. Merritt place, well pump's dead, need the pulling rig. Stop at the supply house, tell Earl to put a four-inch on my ticket. Yeah, that Merritt place. He could hear his brother not asking the next question, could hear it plain as if he'd asked it, and Mason hung up before either of them had to deal with what wasn't being said.

Owen came out an hour later with the legs of the pulling rig hanging over his tailgate and a new pump in a box on the seat like a passenger, and got out, and stood a minute looking at the wellhead, the windmill, the roofline, the whole tired sum of the place, wearing the frown he was born wearing, the one that took things personally on their behalf.

"Owen," Mason said. "Lauren Merritt."

"Ma'am." Owen shook her hand like it was a regular thing to do, no weather in it at all, and that was the whole of his charm, that he didn't have any and never once tried to borrow some. "Sorry about your granddad."

"Thank you." She said it different than she'd said it to Mason. Mason noticed that, and put it away, and didn't look at why.

They stood the rig up over the wellhead, three steel legs with a chain hoist hung off the top of them, and then it was the long slow business of pulling a well by hand, a length of pipe at a time, break the joint, stand the length against the shed, lower the grab, again. Owen ran the hoist and Mason broke the joints and Lauren, true to her word, worked. She steadied pipe. She fetched before she was asked twice. She learned the difference between the two wrenches by getting it wrong once and never again, and somewhere in the second twenty feet she quit being careful with the flannel sleeves and just let them take the grease, and Mason caught himself watching her forearms, rust-streaked and cold-pink and surer of themselves by the hour, with the attention he owed the joint he was breaking.

She talked to Owen. That was the thing he hadn't planned on. She asked Owen how deep wells ran out here and whether the water was good and what a norther actually was, and Owen answered in his flat dry way that was never once a performance, and twice she laughed, easy, unguarded, a laugh Mason hadn't gotten within a county of yet. He hauled on the hoist and had the small mean thought that his brother had never in his life been charming and was somehow winning at it, and then the honest thought underneath, which was worse. Owen wasn't a threat. That was the whole of it. She'd sorted the two of them inside the first minute, the way she'd sorted the wrenches, put Owen on one shelf and Mason on a different shelf entirely.

He decided he could live with his shelf.

The old pump came up out of the ground on the last length looking like something recovered from a shipwreck, scaled and streaming, and Owen stood it against the shed with a kind of respect.

"Forty years, could be," he said. "Maybe more. It owed nobody anything." He looked at the house then, and at her, and Mason watched his brother decide to say something, which with Owen was like watching weather come, slow and certain and no stopping it.

Lauren was looking at the dead pump too. "He did all of this himself," she said, half to it, not really to either of them. "Forty years. Alone."

"He didn't, though." Owen said it plain, not looking up from coiling the safety rope. "Nobody does anything alone out here. It doesn't work that way, land like this. He just quit letting anybody help him, somewhere along the line." He tied off the coil. "There's a difference."

She went still, the careful kind, the kind Mason was learning meant something had gotten in under the fence. She didn't say anything. Owen didn't either, and Mason stood between the two of them holding a pipe wrench and feeling like a man watching somebody else's rain land on his own dry field.

She brought coffee out after that, three mugs on a cookie sheet for a tray, and Owen drank his leaning on his tailgate and asked her nothing about selling and nothing about her plans and nothing at all with a price tag on it, and by the time he'd finished the mug she was talking to him about Denver like Denver was a thing she was allowed to be from. Mason drank his coffee and watched it happen and understood that his brother had done more good out here in an hour than Mason had managed in two visits, purely by not wanting anything.

Then Owen loaded the rig, and Mason walked him to the truck, and at the tailgate, out of her hearing, his brother looked at him a moment with the frown at rest.

"This Dad's play?" Owen said. Quiet. Just the once.

"No."

Owen looked at him the way he looked at a column of numbers that didn't add, patient, unhurried, certain the error was in there somewhere. "All right," he said, and got in the truck.

He could have said the rest of it. Four more words, I told him no, and Owen would have carried them home and laid them down in front of Jace and Knox like a man laying out tools, and the whole quiet wrongness growing in his family's heads would have died right there in her yard. The words were sitting in his mouth. They cost nothing.

Mason watched his brother's taillights all the way out to the county road, and kept them.

Setting the new pump was the same job backward, and it was just the two of them for it, which was different, and both of them knew it was different, and neither of them said so.

She held each length steady while he threaded the joints, close work, her hands a foot from his hands, her breath fogging in the cooling afternoon, and she caught her lower lip in her teeth when she concentrated, which he now knew, which was information he had no use for and no way to give back, and it sat low in him the whole length of pipe. He watched the wrong thing and cross-threaded a fitting he'd have chewed out a hired man for cross-threading, and backed it off, and did it again right, and did not look at her mouth for the whole rest of that length, which took roughly everything he had.

Twenty feet down, she passed him the pipe wrench.

Her fingers were under his on the handle, cold-knuckled and rust-streaked, and the cold of them went through him hotter than any touch had a right to, and neither of them moved for one second, then two, then three, and the afternoon went very quiet around one wrench handle, and then she let go, unhurried, like nothing, and wiped her hand on her jeans, and Mason turned the wrench and gave a threaded coupling the most complete attention any coupling has received in the history of water.

"Almost there," she said, to the well.

"Don't jinx it," he said, to the wrench.

The last joint went home in the blue end of the afternoon, and he wired the pump in and set the cover plate, and sent her inside to the breaker while he stood at the yard hydrant, and when the pressure came up the pipes knocked once, all through the house, like the place clearing its throat.

"Kitchen," he called. "Let it run muddy first."

He heard the tap open. He heard it spit, and cough up its rust, and then he heard it run, full and clean and steady, and he heard her laugh, and it wasn't the guarded one. It was the one Owen had gotten twice, except bigger, and Mason came up the porch steps and stood in the doorway and there she was at her grandfather's sink with both hands under the water like it was money, laughing at it, wet to the elbows of the old flannel, and the low light coming through the window landed on her like it had been aiming.

The pull did its work on him again, quiet and total, same as in the yard two days ago. He was getting to know the weight of it now. It didn't ask, and it didn't ease.