9. The Visitor

Back when she'd first decided to take Boyd in there had been, vaguely, the thought that it would really piss Raylan off that she had taken in his old friend, or enemy, or obsession, or whatever it was that Boyd was to him that only the two of them could properly understand. She'd be lying to everyone including herself - and she tries not to do that anymore - if she said otherwise but it's been nearly three months since she's seen Raylan and now it is otherwise and when he suggests it she's mad at him. More mad at him. She's still mad at him.

He had been her reward, the thing that would make up for the mistakes she had made, for all the crap that life had thrown her way because she had been stupid enough to fall for Bowman's cute smile and swagger and promise that they'd move to a nice apartment in Lexington and he'd never work down a mine.

She remembers Winona - grits her teeth - remembers Winona telling her it's hard to stay mad at Raylan but she's finding it pretty easy. He picked Winona over her, he even picked Boyd over her, in a way. In the time since Bulletville he hasn't so much as called her just to find out if she's okay. To apologise. Even now he's only here for Boyd; from the start he'd only been at her house - from that first day when she was still scrubbing Bowman's blood off her walls - for Boyd.

They deserve each other, she thinks, and manages to find a little bit of extra mad for Boyd. Just on principle.

Both times he's there Raylan is all business, hand on his hip like he's waiting to draw his gun, eyes watchful and sharp even when his voice is soft and sweet. He studies her face, as though he can tell everything there is about her just from that. She resents it. He warns her about Boyd and she resents that too, because just like he thinks he knows her, all of her, he thinks he's the only person who knows Boyd Crowder, the only one who can make the right call on everything all of the time.

And they both know that isn't true, but you wouldn't guess it from the way he eases himself up onto her porch like he has every right to.

She hadn't needed him the night she found Hestler and his scumbag buddies in her house and she hadn't needed him when she'd faced down Bo Crowder in the back of Johnny's bar, and even before that when she'd smashed a man's face into a steering wheel and liberated herself from the back of his van. She hadn't needed him when she'd driven herself and Boyd back from Lexington and spent one half of the night terrified that he'd bleed to death on her couch and the other half wondering what the hell she'd do with him if he didn't.

So she doesn't need him now, standing in front of her, trying to organise her life for her when he's chosen to have no part in it.

And she's tired of being treated like an idiot - just because she had been stupid enough to marry Bowman doesn't mean that she is stupid. And just because Raylan had dug coal with Boyd back in the day and they were bound, doesn't mean he knows him better than anyone else does, than she does. Factoring in the near twenty years Raylan had been gone from Harlan, she's known Boyd longer than he has - and how she's known him. He's been under her roof these months and she's seen what she's seen and even before that she had thought, believed, that maybe he wanted to start over, carve out a new life for himself, even if it meant tearing at it, hacking at it like coal out of rock.

Raylan hasn't been there, he hasn't seen and they- she doesn't need him.

After he leaves she sits on her porch, for a long time, until shadows slip down the mountain, swaddle the holler in a haze of heather and washed-out indigo. The air cools to early-evening sweetness, falls below that and she shivers against it. The sky deepens and she watches cigarette smoke curl against the velvet blue. Headlights cut across it, flaring as they hit the porch, then die.

She watches him cross the grass from his truck to the porch steps, limbs slow and stiff with the weariness that comes from a long day of work, the tread of his work-boots heavy on the wooden boards. From the day Bowman had started working down the mine he'd been bitter and mean; Boyd never mentions it. He looks relieved, sometimes, when he returns, setting foot back in her house like it's his sanctuary; sometimes he looks relieved to be heading out of it.

It's hard to stay mad, and she hadn't really been to begin with.

'Raylan was here,' she tells him when he reaches the screen door.

'I had surmised that.'

'Twice.'

His hand drops. He sits on the porch swing and he smells of the the earth and coal dust and sweat. 'Well, Ava, it must have set your mind at rest to know that I had nothing to do with the robbery of that Oxy bus.'

She blows out a plume of smoke. 'He didn't have to, I knew that already.' She looks at him and his head tilts to one side. 'I heard you and Dewey talking; I ain't deaf.'

She'd just had her ear pressed to the door and they both know that eavesdropping - to be kind - is the only way she would have heard.

His eyes fix somewhere beyond the edge of the pool of light from the porch lamp; she studies his profile, the fine strong line of his jaw. His chin lifts but his voice, still, doesn't: 'You could have told him that the first time.' No reproach, just a sort of mild curiosity.

'I could. But I don't reckon it's on me to do a marshal's job for him. Besides, Raylan ain't never believed anything anyone told him unless he gone and seen if for himself.'

He smiles then, if you can call it that. 'He's always been an empiricist, that Raylan Givens.'

She runs their conversation in her head and takes a stab at what that means. There's a dictionary somewhere and she thinks that she's going to have to start dipping into it more frequently. She pulls a cigarette out of the pack, rolls it between her fingers, puts it back.

'I smoke too many of these damn things,' she tells him.

He nods.