How You Take Your Coffee

"Black," you say. "Two sugars."

"That's not black. That's dessert."

"It's how I take it, Mr. Branson. Write it down."

He doesn't write it down. He's driving the flatbed truck across a frozen pasture at six-forty in the morning with the heater roaring and two hundred black cows trotting after it like a slow, enormous parade. You're sitting in the passenger seat with a legal pad on your knee, because if Crewe's lawyers ask questions, you're going to have answers.

"Your turn," you say. "Middle name."

"Don't have one."

"Everybody has one."

"My mother ran out of ideas after Colt." He shifts gears. "Yours."

"Teresa. After my grandmother." You write. "Birthday."

"March ninth."

"Pisces," you say, delighted. "That explains so much."

"I don't know what that means and I don't want to." He stops the truck in the middle of the field and kills the engine. "Your turn to work, Counselor."

Feeding cattle in November, it turns out, involves standing on the back of a moving flatbed while it crawls across the field in low gear with nobody driving it, cutting the twine on enormous hay bales with a hooked knife and kicking flakes of hay off the edge while two hundred cows bellow at you like you owe them money.

"Nobody's driving," you shout.

"Truck knows the way." Colt is beside you, cutting twine with one quick flick. "Kick, don't push. Push and you go over with it."

You kick. A flake of hay sails off the truck and you nearly follow it. He grabs the back of your coat without looking, holds you steady until you get your feet, then lets go.

"Your coat's wrong," he says.

"My coat is wool. It's from a very nice store."

"It's red. And it's wool. They think you're a giant apple." A cow bawls directly at you as if to prove his point. "Wear the canvas one in the mudroom."

"Is that a rule?"

"It's a suggestion. From somebody who doesn't want to explain to Merle why his wife got eaten."

You laugh so hard you have to sit down on a hay bale, and when you look up, Colt is watching you with an expression you can't name. Like he's standing in a doorway he forgot was there.

Then a cow tries to eat your legal pad, and the moment's gone.

You study each other all week, like witnesses before trial.

He's left-handed. He sleeps on the right side of the bed, or he used to. He hates cilantro, loves westerns, reads the weather report like scripture. He doesn't swear in front of Clover but swears magnificently at fences. He can't sing and doesn't care.

You talk too much. You hum when you're nervous. You have opinions about pasta shapes that he calls "a mental condition." You set four alarms. You cry at commercials, which he discovers on Thursday night when a truck commercial with a dog in it comes on and you have to leave the room.

"It was a rescue dog," you say when you come back.

"Noted," he says, and doesn't make fun of you, which is somehow worse.

On Wednesday you go looking for a stapler in the hall closet and find a box of photographs instead.

A red-haired woman on a galloping horse, leaning so far into a turn around a barrel that she should fall and doesn't. The same woman laughing in this kitchen with a paint roller in her hand and yellow paint on her nose. The same woman in a hospital bed holding a red-faced newborn, her hair dark with sweat, looking at the camera like whoever was holding it was the whole world.

Laurel.

You put the box back exactly the way you found it. Then you stand in the yellow kitchen and look at the walls and understand, finally, whose house you're living in.

Clover doesn't like you. She makes that clear with the efficiency of a much older woman.

She doesn't like how you cut her toast (diagonal, "that's for babies"). She doesn't like that you don't know her horse's name (Biscuit, "everybody knows that"). She doesn't like that you sit in "Daddy's other chair."

On Friday you're working at the kitchen table with your laptop, three legal pads and a highlighter between your teeth, and Clover comes and sits across from you with her own paper and markers. She doesn't talk. She just draws, glancing up every so often, frowning.

After twenty minutes she says, "Ava? What does a lawyer do?"

You take the highlighter out of your mouth. "We argue. For people who can't argue for themselves. Or who aren't allowed to."

"Like Badger?"

"If Badger ever gets sued, I'm his girl."

She thinks about that. Then she reaches over, takes your yellow highlighter, and colors in the sun on her drawing with it. When she gives it back, she doesn't say thank you, but she leaves the cap off, which you're fairly sure is six-year-old for you'll do.

From the doorway, Colt watches with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth.

You sleep in his bed. He sleeps on the couch. Every night he says, "Night, Counselor," from the bottom of the stairs, and every night you say, "Night, Mr. Branson," and lie awake listening to the house settle around the two of you.

On Saturday you wake in the dark to something you've never heard before at the ranch: tires on the gravel drive. Headlights sweep across the bedroom ceiling. You look at your phone. Six-oh-two.

You go to the window. A sensible brown sedan is coming up the drive, slowly, carefully, with a bow-tied silhouette at the wheel.

Merle. Two hours early for anything a reasonable person would call a visit.

You fly down the stairs in your socks. Colt is already sitting up on the couch, hair flattened on one side, bare-chested under the blanket, his eyes on the window. He's broader than he looks in flannel. That's your first, deeply unhelpful thought.

The pillow. The blanket. The folded quilt on the arm of the couch. All of it screaming this man sleeps alone.

His eyes meet yours. Outside, a car door closes.

He throws back the blanket, stands, scoops the pillow under one arm, and takes your hand.

"Upstairs, Ava," he says. "Get in the bed. Now."