“Everybody likes women.”
“No, they don’t. Lots of guys are irritated by women. They tune out when a woman talks. You can see their brain clicking off behind their eyes, the moment when they start thinking about sex or cars or the game or whatever. They don’t pay attention, maybe because the stuff she cares about doesn’t seem important. They tell her what she ought to think, orhowshe ought to think. If you don’t like the way somebody thinks, you don’t really like them. And, see, I think women are awesome. Sure, they don’t necessarily think the same way guys do, straight line. They think more … laterally, too. They don’t just think about what you just said, they think about why you said it. They make more connections than men do. It’s interesting.”
He understood most women, anyway. Other than his mom. He’d thought he did, but it had never occurred to him that she’d leave her kids. Never in a million years.
Which was another thing he didn’t need to think about right now.
“I guess,” Owen said. “I don’t know. I like a logical woman.”
“Doesn’t mean she isn’t logical,” Harlan said. “She can be logicalandlateral. Trust me. Three sisters here. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to observe.”
“God knowsthat’strue,” Owen said. “I’ve observed you observing. And your vast experience is saying: Hawaii.”
“Hawaii,” Harlan agreed. “She gets to buy that swimsuit, do all that body preparation, go someplace totally different, get him focused on her there. Oh—and tell him you’re actually glad he doesn’t want to go to Yellowstone, because now that we’re out of it, you kinda want to spend the day doing anything else but watching the game.”
Owen made a face, and Harlan said, “Yeah, you’ll be giving him the edge on this one. Man, don’t you know how much edge you already have?”
“It’s not that,” Owen said. “It’s that I’m going to have to admit that you’re right. I hate that. Fortunately, there’s the skiing. Which I know how to do, and you don’t.” He sighed. “I just hope my phone camera works in the cold. Can’t get enough shots of that.”
* * *
The next day,Harlan spent a riveting morning in and out of the calving shed, during which he considered the possibility of hypothermia, forked a whole lot of clean and nothing-like-clean bedding straw, and didn’t cut the heavies out of the herd on horseback or reach into any cows to hook a chain around a hoof, since he (A) didn’t know how to ride a horse, (B) didn’t know how to get a cow to go through a gate, and (C) in a stroke of extreme good fortune, didn’t know how to reach inside a cow. After that came a pause to wash up and eat a hot lunch prepared by Owen’s mom, Joan, which rivaled the size of any NFL training camp meal Harlan had ever seen. Once they’d worked their way through most of it, Owen’s dad, whose name was, believe it or not, Waylon, looked Harlan over and said, “You didn’t do half as bad as I expected.”
“Thanks,” Harlan said. “I guess. I figure I’ve got just about enough skills to dump a bale of hay out of the back of a truck, though.”
“Nope,” Waylon said. “More like you’ve got enough hard work in you not to wander off after an hour, since nobody’s paying you any ten thousand bucks to be there. Owen brought home this old boy once, kid from Seattle or someplace. A couple of the cows were having some real trouble, and he just about threw up. And then he went inside and took a shower.”
“He did throw up,” Dane said. “Nose tackle. You wouldn’t think a nose tackle would be all squeamish like that. It’s just fluids. And some solids, of course, but that’s how everybody comes out. I know that, because I’ve watched all four of my boys come out the same way. Only difference is, for once I wasn’t the one with my arm up there.”
Joan said, “It’s a good thing Amy’s at work. If you say that in front of her, you’re going to be sleeping on the couch for a month. A woman wants to believe that’s a moment of awe for a man, not that he’s thinking how much she reminds him of a heifer.”
“I didn’t say it wasn’t a moment of awe,” Dane argued. “Just that it was messy, but that I was used to it. That’s actuallymoreromantic, because I could look past the heifer aspect and see the beauty.”
Waylon shook his head slowly. “Son,” he said, “no. Any time you’re using the word ‘heifer’ in a sentence when you’re talking about your wife, that’s a moment you’re going to want back.”
“Then how come she still loves me?” Dane asked.
“A question we ask ourselves constantly,” Owen answered.
Dane said, “Yeah? Where’syourwife?”
A moment of silence, during which Owen looked at his brother, the red flush mounting on his cheekbones, and then Joan said, “That’s enough.”
“Time to get back out there anyway,” Waylon said. “Harlan, you want to take a break, you go on. Ranching’s hard work if you’re not used to it.”
“I’m good,” Harlan said. “I do have an errand to run, but I’ll head back out there afterwards.”
Maybe everybody needed a break from having a visitor, keeping them from being able to say the bad stuff. Or maybe they’d never say it. If you asked him, though, it needed to be said.
Owen’s wife had taken off a year or so ago. “Didn’t like the ranch,” Owen had said. “She thought it’d be different, I guess. Wyoming dude ranch. Billionaire ranch, like in the movies. I’m not sure she liked me that much, either.” And that was all.
Owen had met her in a bar, which wasn’t always the best start, but you had to meet people somewhere, and an NFL career wasn’t the best for daily social interaction. She’d been tall, willowy, beautiful, and as animated as Owen wasn’t, and Owen’s eyes had followed her around the room whenever he’d been with her. When she’d smiled at him, he’d lit up like Christmas. Harlan had gone to the wedding, but he was lousy at telling who’d make it and who wouldn’t. He’d seen women stay with men you’d never imagine could hold them—his mom, for example, until she hadn’t, or the ones married to the guys with a different girl in every town they played—but a solid guy like Owen, who never did a crappy thing off the field and knew how to be there for somebody, couldn’t do it? Didn’t make sense to him.
The others headed out into the cold again, and he changed into a clean pair of jeans, then drove into Wheatland and scouted the wide, windblown, empty streets a while without finding what he needed. After his third pass by the Cut ‘n’ Yak, he gave up, parked the SUV outside Betty’s Diner, and headed inside.
It was quiet, like you’d expect, except for a table full of old guys in the corner, looking like the same guys you’d find in every farm town in the country. Their joints a little stiff from a lifetime spent outside, their shirts plaid, their arms ropy with the remnants of lean muscle, their battered caps advertising seed or farm equipment. Their sons would be working the ranch now, leaving them not much to do but sit around, drink diner coffee, and criticize the government. They took a look at him, summed him up as a big-city guy with suspicious hair who’d probably made a wrong turn off the interstate, and turned away again.
Harlan sat down at the counter, and when the waitress came over, told her, “Cup of coffee, please.”
