I have been waiting to hear it since the rope. He didn't have an answer for that, either. Didn't try very hard to find one. Just walked the rest of the way home beside her, the both of them quiet again, but a different kind of quiet now than the one they'd started with three weeks back. No longer strangers learning to share for roof.
Something further along than either one of them had a name for yet. It was mending fence, of all things, that finally let her return the favor in a way he couldn't wave off with pride. He'd been working too fast, the way he did when his mind wandered somewhere it shouldn't thinking if he was honest with himself about the way she'd laughed at his expense not an hour before, low and warm and entirely too pleased with herself and the wire slipped in his grip and opened a gash clean across his palm before he'd even registered the sting of it. Wit, it's nothing. It is bleeding through your shirt sleeve already.
That is not nothing. She had his hand before he could argue further turning it palm up in the afternoon light with a gentleness that surprised him more than the strength usually did this same set of hands that lifted fence posts and drove iron pins with two strikes now cradling his torn palm like it was something rare. Sit, she said, not a request. He sat on the porch step obedient in a way he wasn't entirely used to being. She disappeared into the cabin and returned with a strip of cloth and the small tin of salve Adeline used to keep for exactly this kind of ranch injury.
You went through my shelf, he said, half amused despite the sting. I have been paying attention to where things are kept. It seemed useful given how often you injure yourself doing work, I could simply finish for you. I don't injure myself often. You have cut yourself twice and burned your hand once on that stove in the three weeks I have been here.
I am only counting. Feels like a lot of counting for someone who claims not to be keeping track of things. That earned the same near smile quick as ever, gone before he could hold on to it properly. She cleaned the wound with a care that belied the roughness of her own hands, wrapped it tight but not too tight, tied the cloth off with a knot he suspected would outlast the injury itself. There, she said, now you will not bleed on the fence you have already mended twice this month." "Much obliged." "You are welcome." He flexed his bandaged hand testing the wrap watching her gather the leftover cloth and the tin with the same efficient economy of motion she brought to everything.
Something about the whole exchange being tended to instead of doing the tending sat strange in him at first and then slowly didn't. "Adeline used to do this," he said before he'd fully decided to say it out loud. "Not the same hands. Same care though." Inaba paused cloth half folded in her grip. "Is that a difficult thing for me to remind you of her?" He thought about the question longer than it probably deserved because it deserved an honest answer and honest answers took him longer these days than they used to.
"No," he said finally, "not difficult, different. You're not standing in for her if that's what you're asking. You're just you doing a kind thing your own way." He met her eyes. "I don't reckon I've thanked you properly yet for any of it. The fence, the listening, this." "You cut me down from a rope," she said simply.
"A bandaged hand seems a small thing to offer back against a debt that size." "Wasn't keeping a ledger." "Neither am I," she said, "not anymore." And something about the way she said it not anymore told him the ledger she'd been keeping in her own quiet way since the moment he'd cut that rope had finally somewhere in these three weeks been sit down for good. That night the sky went the color of ash heavy and swollen wind picking up in long gusting waves that scraped grit across every exposed surface. Whit moved fast shuttered the windows herded the horses and the milk cow into the barn dropped the crossbar on the cabin door. Inside firelight jumped across Yanaba's face while Whit cleaned his Winchester at the table, more out of habit than need. Hands wanting something to do besides sit inside the silence.