Below, another draft chapter from a longer fictional work I am working on titled “Maiden’s Choosing.” You can see earlier chapters here. I simultaneously published a shopping post spotlighting my favorite winter layers here this morning if that’s more your pace today. Happy reading, happy shopping!
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Buck stood on the ridge, squinting. The truck had trundled through the ranch gates and halfway up the drive, kicking up plumes of dust.
“That’d be them,” said Mertroe, more to precipitate action than anything else. Alee shifted feet beneath Buck, swishing his tail. Mertroe, having spent every rememberable summer of his life at Canyon Ranch, read Alee’s movements like lines on a page, but said nothing.
Buck leaned his forearm against the saddle horn. The truck was now parked out front of the ranch house, and he could see, across the wash of dry earth, Caroline stepping out of the car, gesticulating with her slender arms, and Cullen bobbing his hatted head hospitably in response. Mertroe plucked idly at the loose stitching on his leather glove, as though to proffer privacy. The sky stretched enormous and featureless above them, a bunch of nothing.
“Alee, yah,” Buck called, digging his heels into Alee’s sides, and then strode off in the opposite direction. Mertroe stared after the pair, then ran his hand down the back of his neck, sighing. He clicked his tongue three times and steered Jalopy back towards the stables.
“Mertroe!” Caroline cried, as he’d ducked into the tiled sunroom, removing his hat. She was slighter than he had remembered, her cheeks hollowed out, her silhouette sparse. She drew him in for a hug, depositing a kiss on each cheek, and then stepped back, expectantly, her eyes pool-wide. When he said nothing, she asked after his day, his family, his summer, and Mertroe replied with only the skin and bones of a conversation, recognizing her generosity — though warm — as cover. Finally:
“Is he coming in?”
Mertroe had prepared for this. “There’s cattle in the ridge,” he replied, elliptically, and she tilted her head in performed curiosity, and then a dark cloud passed over her fine features.
When he did come in, he made a great show of wiping his boots on the mat outside, and Caroline rose to her feet from across the room, her fingertips brushing lightly against the polished wood side table as if to steady herself. He removed his hat, holding it with one hand to his heart.
She stood quietly, half expecting him to call her “ma’am,” so suddenly wide was the berth between them. She had sensed this coldness for some weeks now, but he was just back from Afghanistan, and had always been unreachable beyond a certain point of intimacy, and so she had forgiven it. Thinking of this recent tour — his second, longer and quieter than the first — she dissolved, and crossed the room, her arms outstretched.
He went to her, and buried his face in her hair.
Mertroe and Cullen coughed and shuffled their feet and clacked their boots out of the dim room.
“What is it,” she said, finally, less a question than a command. She saw on his left bicep the branding of the ranch on which they now stood, and, when he dropped his arm to around her waist, the tattoo of her own name on its underside. She knew, too, that there was now a two inch long insignia of the US Army inscribed on his torso. These markings occurred to her, suddenly, and for the first time, as an empty iconography. She waited.
Then, pulling away: “What is it.”
She would later learn it was Maria,
but not that night, when she chose again the blind kindness of her way. She would later learn
it was the neighbor, the Clary girl, but not that night, when she chose to see instead the sketch of a man she drew against the shape of his uniform. Buck Adler was an army man like Caroline’s father. Both in the 82nd Airborne, too. At the time, Caroline took this as a sign from God, but she would later consider it a red herring, a cloying tether, and she would clench her jaw at her own dimwittedness.
But not that night, when she smoothed his hair and forgave his silences and poured him bourbon that crackled on ice cubes in his father’s heavy Waterford glass. It would take time for her to emerge from the wide Cimmerian darkness in which he placed her, and in which, too, she willingly placed herself.
While he showered off the dust and smell of horse and cow, Caroline stared out the window and watched the foreground collapse into a great and caliginous flatness across the ridge. From the stable, Mertroe studied her silhouette out of the corner of his eye. He busied his hands with the saddles, and the bridles, and the horses, a triptych now lit by moon luster, but he wondered about this city girl whose name was on Buck’s arm, and who had flown across the country, and who — in spite of her wraithlike stature — seemed so full and soft with love for someone who — could he think it? — did not deserve it. Buck had always been inscrutable, vacillating between radiating silence and barreling loudness with a volatility that set even his closest friends on edge. He could be tender-hearted with women, though, and, for a time, he had spoken about Caroline with open and unflustered awe. Mertroe had kicked at the ground during these interludes, but he could see, plainly, that Caroline was cut differently than the rest. Buck had called Caroline “my Linie” openly, with all the guys at The Tin Can, and reflexively, too — an endearment so broad-faced that no one dared scoff. But since this last tour, Buck had said little about Caroline. He’d talked instead about a girl named Maria, and Mertroe had watched implacably as Buck tied a piece of straw around the Clary girl’s finger three nights prior, a shy smile on his face. “That’s what you call a Canyon bride!” the Clary girl had cried over the blare of the jukebox in The Tin Can, rotating her wrist to show her girlfriends.
He stood alone with these thoughts under the canyon moon, knowing — or believing — they could never find expression in company. Tomorrow, he would wake with the sun, and make the rounds, and talk with the other ranch men about the conditions and the cattle, and the wide space around him would persist.
Caroline would leave the ranch two days later, and for good.
“I never liked that flat land,” she’d say, dodging the real question of what had happened between her and Buck that weekend in Texas. But it was true: she did prefer New York, and Boston, and D.C., where things were so bunched together they forced the truth out.
Still, one night in Vieste, at her best friend Violet’s wedding, she would stand on the dance floor, scanning the periphery for her boyfriend, Powell, and, turning her heel, would run right into — smack dab, forehead-to-chest into — Buck Adler. She would not know where to place her eyes. She would stare at his shoes (he owned black wing tips?). She would eye the lapels of his tuxedo (he owned a tuxedo?). She would skim the Adriatic Sea, the bob-haired woman to her left, the bar. A silence would pool between them, and it would be filled with all of the things that Caroline had wanted to say but would never, and she would feel a narcotic mix of humiliation, confusion, and white-hot anger. Anger at Violet for inviting him. Anger at him for being there knowing she had to be here. Anger at his indifference, at his petulance, at his quiet. And oh! Yes, anger, but oh! — the figure he cut on his horse, his chiseled profile against the sun, his army uniform hanging in his closet. That afternoon in the rainstorm on the ridge, the clouds moving so quickly across the void that they just sat in the truck and stared, and he reached across the gear shift and held her hand and said, “It’s you I don’t want to lose.” It was the perceived earnestness of this statement, staring down the cyclonic storm ahead of them, that undid her, in all of the elaborate post-mortems she conducted on their now-deceased relationship.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Caroline would say, finally, resenting herself both for breaking a carefully-observed one-year silence and for her evident bitterness.
“Couldn’t not,” he would reply. And she would resent him for breaking his carefully-observed one-year silence and for the flirtatiousness lining his reply. She would looked around helplessly, Powell nowhere to be seen. Georgina, in a throng of Violet’s friends, would catch her eye and wave her over, and she would wait for Georgina to notice that she was standing with Buck and that she was absolutely drowning. But Georgina wouldn’t have known — couldn’t have known — all about Buck. They would be only accidental acquaintances by virtue of Violet’s coquetry.
She would see Violet then, radiant as ever, the delicate bones of her face reflecting the extravagant sunset, caught in laughter. Violet was astonishing in white.
“I don’t want to make a scene,” Caroline would say, studying Violet across the crowd, “But I can’t be around you, and you know that.” Buck would look her square in the eye.
“Linie,” he would say, and Caroline would scoff audibly at the nickname. She would misread a softening around his eyes. “I’m here with Maria Gracia.”
Suddenly, the Texas Maria would become Violet’s Maria Gracia, and Caroline would never forgive the merger.