Page 132

I could have gone to the bunkhouse. Cash was up — I’d heard his boots at five-forty, the bunkhouse door, the porch steps. He was probably in the barn. Tuck wouldn’t be here until seven. The hands Wyatt had assigned to the hay crew started at six but they were on the south fields, a quarter mile away, and pulling one off the line meant explaining why, and explaining why meant admitting I needed help moving two panels that weighed sixty pounds each.

I went to the panels.

The first one moved when I lifted from the bottom rail and walked it sideways along the post line. Heavy but manageable — the steel was cold and the condensation made it slick, and I braced it against my hip while I repositioned the clip. The wind had bent the clip arm slightly. I straightened it with my thumb, lined up the panel, and secured it.

The second panel was the problem. It had caught in a rut — one of the shallow drainage channels that scored the arena floor where the clay had cracked and heaved in the dry weather. The bottom rail sat six inches below grade, wedged against the edge of the cracked clay, and when I lifted from the top rail the panel rocked but didn’t free. I shifted my grip, got both hands under the bottom rail, set my feet, and pulled upward and sideways at the same time.

The panel came free.

My right wrist did not.

The pain was immediate — a bright, localized flare at the ulnar side of the joint, the sensation of something stretching past its intended range and then snapping back. I let go of the panel. It dropped back into the rut with a clang that sounded across the empty arena.

I stood holding my right wrist in my left hand.

The pain settled from the sharp first flare into something lower and steadier — a deep ache that pulsed when I rotated my hand, which I did, because I needed to know what I was dealing with. Flexion was possible. Extension was possible. The pain was worst on supination — turning the palm up — which meant the triangular fibrocartilage, or the tendon, or something in the architecture of the joint that I couldn’t name but could feel.

Not broken. Wrenched. Badly.

I stood in the arena at six-twenty-two in the morning with my wrist in my left hand and my phone in my back pocket and the panel in the rut and the sun coming up behind the Madison Range, and I considered my options.

I could go and find Cash. Tell him I’d hurt myself working alone at six in the morning on panels I should have waited for help to move, on two hours of sleep, on a wrist that was already swelling in the early light.

Or I could go to my bag, get the ace bandage I kept in the side pocket because I kept ace bandages in every bag I owned, wrap the wrist, and finish the alignment before anyone arrived.

I went to my bag.

The bandage was where I’d packed it — a two-inch elastic wrap, beige, slightly stretched from a previous use I couldn’t remember. I sat on the arena rail and wrapped the wrist in a figure-eight pattern, starting at the palm, crossing the back of the joint, circling the forearm, back across. I’d wrapped wrists before. Not mine — vendors’, contractors’, a stagehand in Denver who’d fallen off a riser and needed to finish the load-in. The technique was the same. Snug, not tight. Support, not immobilization.

I tucked the end. Flexed my fingers. The wrap held. The pain dimmed from a flare to a constant low signal, present but workable.

I moved the second panel with my left hand and my hip and my boot, kicking the bottom rail free of the rut, then walking it sideways until the clip arm caught the post. I secured it one-handed. The clip was stiff. It took three tries.

By seven, both panels were aligned and the fence line was straight.

Tuck arrived at seven-twelve. He looked at the fence, looked at me, and said, “You been here a while.”

I said nothing.

I spent the morning with the clipboard in my left hand. The phone in my left hand. The pen in my left hand. My right hand stayed at my side, the wrapped wrist pressed against my hip, the fingers curled loosely to keep the joint stable.

Josie came through at ten with the vet kit, checking the holding pen water trough for the bulls. She glanced at my clipboard, asked about the panel alignment, and moved on. Her eyes passed over my right hand, which was in my jacket pocket, and didn’t stop.

Cash arrived at eleven.

He walked the arena rail from the south end, checking the panel clips as he went — the same inspection I’d done at six, the same posts, the same string line. He was checking my work. Not because he didn’t trust it. Because that was what a man did when he co-owned the thing being built.

He reached the northwest section. The two panels I’d realigned. He tested the clips — both held. He looked at the rut where the second panel had been wedged, the clay scored with drag marks, the panel sitting clean in its new position.

Then he looked at the ground. At the boot prints in the soft clay. One set. One person, standing, pulling, lifting. The marks of a single pair of boots working a panel that should have taken two.

He straightened.

His gaze moved to me. I was at the north end, clipboard in my left hand, pen in my left hand, right hand in my jacket pocket. He looked at the clipboard. At the hand holding it. At the hand in the pocket.

He walked toward me.

I didn’t move. There was nowhere to move to. The arena fence was behind me and the panel rail was beside me and Cash was walking across the dirt with the expression I’d seen once before — the night he’d said you’re not done yet, the face that lived under the grin, the one that meant the charm had been set down and the thing underneath it was standing up.