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The creek ran thin outside, and the budget had a hole in it, and I had broken every rule I’d signed, and the morning was here, and I got up.

***

I was at the table when Cash came in with the eggs.

Not sitting. Standing at the counter with the phone propped against the toaster, scrolling through the reply from the county water office, reading it with my coffee in one hand and my pen in the other, making notes on the margin of the haulage sheet because the notebook was in the other room and the margin was closer.

Cash set the plates on the table. Two eggs, whites set, yolks intact. Toast on the side.

He didn’t say anything about the phone.

He didn’t say anything about me standing at the counter.

He pulled out his chair and sat down and ate his breakfast the way he ate breakfast — unhurried, present, the fork and the food and the window and the morning all held in the same easy attention.

I ate standing up. Three bites of egg, a quarter of the toast, the phone in my left hand, the pen in my right. The coffee went cold before I finished it.

Cash watched me set the plate in the sink with the egg still half on it.

His jaw moved once. A small, lateral motion, the kind that happened before he decided not to speak. I’d learned that motion. I’d learned it the way I learned vendor tells — the small involuntary signal that preceded a decision.

He didn’t speak.

I took the phone and the pen and the haulage sheet and went to the arena.

***

By noon the sun sat flat and white over the valley and the arena stakes threw shadows like spokes. I’d been checking the panel alignment for two hours, walking the perimeter with the clipboard, measuring gaps between sections, documenting every variance on a site condition sheet that was growing longer than the spec.

Tuck appeared at the south end carrying two sandwiches wrapped in wax paper.

“Lunch,” he said, holding one out.

“I’ve got it.”

He stood there with the sandwich extended.

“You don’t have it,” he said. “That’s why I brought it.”

“I’ll eat in a minute.”

He looked at me the way Tuck looked at things — openly, without the adult filter that made most people pretend they hadn’t noticed. His gaze went from my face to the phone to the clipboard to the fact that my hands were full and I had no free hand to take the sandwich.

“Cash said to bring it,” he said.

“Cash is not my supervisor.”

“He said you’d say that too.”

I pressed my lips together. Tuck kept holding the sandwich. The wax paper crinkled in the wind.

“Leave it on the post,” I said.

He set it on the fence post. Walked away. Looked back once.

The sandwich stayed on the post. The wind moved the wax paper. I finished a call with Dale, made three notes, and started walking the perimeter again.

At 2:15, Cash appeared at the arena rail. He had two water bottles. He set one on the top rail beside where I was working and unscrewed the other.