“Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked.
“Nah.” He held out his palms and I could see the thick calluses on all his fingers. Three fingers on his left hand reminded me of Smith’s hand. They looked like they’d been broken and not set properly.
I blew on the flower and then finally bit into it. It was stuffed with a little bit of cheese, and as I pulled the flower away a long string of it came down and scorched my chin. My tongue was singed.
“Ouch. Ow. Wow.”
“Tenderfoot,” he muttered and tossed his flower into his mouth. He chewed contemplatively. “Not quite.”
I finished mine. It was cheesy and fried, which made it pretty damn great. “That was delicious.”
“My ex’s was better,” he muttered.
From a bowl beside his chair he pulled out jalape?o peppers he’d sliced in half, added them to the still-bubbling oil, and put the whole thing back in the fireplace.
“Are you going to just eat those?”
“Fried peppers? No, I’m going to make cornbread. My wife used to put peppers in hers.”
“You’re a really good cook,” I said. He was thinking about his wife and he seemed sad, staring into that half-finished oven. I wished I knew some way to comfort him. Leach away some of this loss he was so clearly feeling.
He shook his head. “Well, I can’t drink, I can’t smoke. Don’t ride no more. Friends are in jail or dead. This is what I got left.”
“You don’t have any family?”
He pursed his lips, staring into the fire as if trying to remember, and then he shook his head. “Nah. My old lady left years ago. Went west to her sister’s.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, responding more to the grief he couldn’t quite hide under those words.
He shrugged. “It’s done business, I suppose.”
“You don’t have any kids?” I asked. I rubbed at some dirt on my elbow, carefully not watching him. I wanted someone—Dylan or Ben—to tell me that they were related, that Ben was Dylan’s father. Otherwise, I didn’t know why Dylan wanted Ben watched.
“Why are you being so nosey?” he asked.
“I can’t drink, can’t smoke. This is all I’ve got left,” I joked. He smiled into the fire.
“No. No family.” He reached into the kiln with his fork to poke at the peppers.
That killed my theory that Dylan was his son. I’d been so sure.
“You took off your scarf.”
I resisted the impulse to hide the bruises with my hands. “I don’t think I was fooling anyone.”
“No,” he agreed. “Your daddy do that? The bruises.”
“Husband.”
“No shit. I thought you’re too young for that kind of stupidity.”
“That kind of stupidity is made for the young.”
It felt oddly crowded around this fire. Like we had all our ghosts with us.
“He didn’t start off mean,” I felt compelled to explain it to him. Maybe to myself. To Joan. I’d never put any of it into words, never looked at how Hoyt had managed to isolate and hurt me so effectively. How I’d let him.
“They never do,” he said, staring into the fire.
“I suppose you’re right. My…mom died, and I was really young and I suddenly found myself alone and in charge of a farm. Mom never taught me about payroll or taxes, or how much credit we had at the grain elevator or who we owed money to. I was in so far over my head, I had no idea what to do. And Hoyt started to help me. Told me he’d take care of things at the grain elevator. Helped me pay bills and talk to people at the bank. He’d been working there a few years already, and he just kind of came up alongside of me so I didn’t have to be so alone. And he seemed…solid, you know? And interested. In me. Like…that.” I’d been able to feel him watching me. His eyes under that hat made me blush. Made me…aware. That and a few polite howdys and I’d…God, I’d been so easy.
“Interested in your land, more likely.”
And yes, wasn’t that just a stunning assessment of my appeal?