Hadley
Five-thirty in the morning and I'm on my porch in my robe with a cup of coffee gone half-cold in my hand, watching a man in a white cowboy hat walk to the kennel.
I've never been the one watching before.
For two months he's been the one watching me.
I'vefeltit—the way you feel a man's eyes on you when you're rolling out biscuit dough and you haven't said hello yet—and I've spent two months pretending I didn't notice.
Pretending it was nothing. Pretending I was a widow who didn't have any business noticing a man at all.
This morning I'm out here in my robe with my hair still in last night's braid and the chain around my neck warm from being against my skin all night, and I'm watchinghim.
He doesn't see me.
He's at the kennel gate with Diesel pushing his nose against the chain link, and Rogue is scratching that big shepherd's ear with two fingers the way he always does.
The sun isn't all the way up yet so the light is still that flat purple kind that makes a man's outline look bigger than it is.
He's wearing the white hat. He's always wearing that damn white hat.
He could walk out of that cabin in a thunderstorm at four in the morning and that hat would already be on his head.
He opens the gate. Diesel comes out. They head off across the eastern pasture together, the man and the dog, the way they do every morning at this hour.
I sit on my porch swing and I watch them until they're out of sight.
I drink my cold coffee, and think about what he said yesterday on his porch steps.
You and Nash are safe on this property. That I can promise you.
I think about the way he said it like he was reading the law, about how I should be more scared than I am, because a man doesn't promise that kind of thing unless there's a reason it needs promisin', and Rogue isn't a man who wastes words.
I think about how I'm not scared.
I don't know what that says about me, and I don't know what it says about him.
What I do know is that the chain around my neck has my dead husband’s ring on it and I haven't touched it since I came outside.
That's the longest stretch I've gone in twenty-two months without putting my fingers around it.
I go back inside to start Nash's breakfast.
* * *
Marlena knocks on my screen door around ten-thirty.
Cal's on her hip in the wrap thing, asleep against her chest the way he is most times I see them, and she's got a canvas bagover her shoulder with what looks like a sleeve of fresh peaches sticking out the top.
"Got peaches," she calls through the screen. "Phantom's cousin out in Llano dropped off a bushel yesterday, and Phantom's already eaten about a third of it standin' over the kitchen sink like a heathen. Y'all want some?"
I open the screen door for her. "Get in here, woman."
She comes in, sets the canvas bag on my kitchen table, and lifts the edge so I can see the peaches.
Six pounds, easy. Yellow-pink, soft, smelling like the whole month of June crammed into a grocery bag.
I make us lemonade from scratch because she mentioned the third week I knew her, and we carry the glasses out to the porch.