Her father liked a spoon of sugar and two glugs of cream in his coffee.
"Sweets." Seated in his usual booth at the diner, he said, "I already know what happened," knowing full well that his daughter had a tendency to fix his coffee for him when she felt guilty. Liz wasn't on shift, so another waitress brought them their food. Maka scooted his mug towards him and glumly regarded her salad.
"What'd she say to you," Spirit asked with a concerned dip of his chin.
A wry smile made a home on her face as Maka unwrapped her napkin from her provided silverware. "Nothing I didn't already know," she replied. In fact, as she'd gone through yesterday's incident a hundred times last night, unable to sleep, she'd realized she had admitted much the same things Tina Thompson had said - not all that long ago, either, to a cowboy next to a campfire under the stars.
Her father sipped his coffee. After a moment, he said, "I'm in contact with her parole officer."
Maka looked up from her salad in surprise.
"We'll keep an eye out, should they get mixed up in anythin' they shouldn't."
A heavy pressure gently eased from her chest. "I'm sorry," she blurted as relief filled her heart.
"I know you are."
"I'll take care of it."
"I know you will."
Maka mixed dressing into her salad, solemn and grateful.
"How was your Easter," her father asked, and the heavy moment was over.
At the mention of the holiday, her memory flitted to the ghost-like sensation of a hand between her shoulder blades, and she shifted uncomfortably under Spirit's stare. "Ah... it was alright," she hedged. She recalled all too easily Spirit's dark glare when Soul had been standing in her bedroom doorway, and it was clear he knew exactly where she'd gone on Sunday. Maka attempted to avoid the ranch hand as a direct subject.
She made a show of counting all of Soul's family members on her fingers. "Wes, Tanya, Bill, and Ruth all say 'hello'. Oh, it seems like Ruth doesn't like Tina much, either," she said, a tiny smile creeping on her face.
Spirit shook ketchup over his fries. "She doesn't like any of the Thompsons."
Her smile was wiped clean. "Really?" Though she remembered getting a strange feeling about it during Easter, she'd given Ruth Evans the benefit of doubt. "Even though Wes and Liz have been together for awhile?"
He nodded and took a hurried bite out of his patty melt. "Thinks 'Lizbeth is one of them buckle bunnies."
Maka stared at her father, having never heard him use the term 'buckle bunny' in her life. "A bu- what? No she is not!"
"Of course she's not, 'hon," he said, trying to placate her. He waved a hand, gesturing to lower her voice. "I'm sayin' what Ruth Evans thinks, is all."
"So she thinks Liz is after him for money?" she hissed, a fire riling her in her seat. "I know she's wanted a nice set-up for a long time, but she's not that kind of person!"
"I know it, Maka."
"I know you know, I'm just mad," she spat. She had really liked Ruth, but now she didn't know what to think!
Spirit motioned for more coffee to be brought over. "Ruth's tryin' to protect her grandson. Miss Tina has a reputation that's runnin' off to her daughters. That's all what's happenin'," he calmly explained as a waitress refilled his cup.
"That doesn't make it right! They shouldn't be judged just over what their mother has done."
After hearing it spoken aloud, Maka sat in silence, wondering if she had any right at all to say such a thing. Her father said nothing, merely nodding once more in agreement as he tipped cream into his cup.
"Your mother'n Ruth used t'know each other. Maybe you'll talk some sense into her." Part of her reflexively winced at the mention of Suzanne, but the majority of her attention was focused elsewhere as Maka watched, rather worriedly, as Spirit drained his coffee like it was water. He set the empty mug down. Food half-eaten, he tossed the napkin from his lap on the table.
"Maybe," she said, distracted. "Papa," she started to ask, but distantly felt she was opening a lid to a box of which contents she didn't want to examine. After another glimpse of those dark smudges under his eyes, she changed her question to, "How's work been?"
He stood from the booth, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket with the familiar motions she had seen countless times before. With a sigh, he gave a cryptic answer that didn't reassure her like she'd hoped:
"Keep your wits on, sweets. Mama's not gonna call us out when we've gone too far, anymore," he said, paying for lunch.
One worry replaced another as her father left the diner. Looking up at a yellowed wall clock, she realized she needed to head back to the vet. She asked a server for a take-out box, deciding to save Papa's food for him.
Maka gathered her belongings and headed for the diner door. She was thrown off-balance as it was pulled from the outside by an incoming customer, who held it open for her. As she stepped out of the building, she turned her head up to a tall man and habitually thanked him.
She was startled to recognize his face: Maddy Georgian's burly chauffeur.
Her feet faltered when, in turn, recognition flashed across his scruffy features as he spied her from his towering height. She watched as he paused a moment, then deliberately looked away, greeting someone out of her line of sight.
She dared not turn her head when he said, "Afternoon Miss Georgian." The man shifted on his feet, not invading Maka's space but still subtly suggesting that she should move out of the way.
Her blood was already boiling, remembering the owner of Lazy S and her voice forever in the back of her mind repeating 'cherish it'. She moved out of the way, resolutely walking to her truck and telling herself that she could not make another scene, because every time she lost her temper nothing good ever came from it. She shouldn't look. She shouldn't look. She had to keep her wits on.
Reaching for the handle to the truck's door, she looked.
It wasn't who she'd expected. The unfamiliar woman's features were similar to Maddy Georgian's only in that the two women were beautiful in some refined way, but that was as far as the similarities went. Perhaps they only shared a last name. Perhaps they had nothing to do with each other and everything was coincidence.
Even her manner of speaking was different, vowels drawn long in a way that called to more of Georgia or the Carolinas. "Boone. Ah know we're here on business, but ah must insist: call me Renee."
Maka forced herself to open her truck's door as she heard 'Boone' laugh good-naturedly, though it sounded a little hollow. "Force of habit, Miss Renee. Your sister ain't the most personable employer," he said, the diner door chiming as it closed behind them.
\\
She knew she was being nosy. There was no justification for booting up her laptop and Googling 'Renee Georgian', but she was watching the painfully deserted front desk at the vet, her paperwork was done, and there was high-speed internet for the taking.
Maka hadn't expected to find anything, much less see a professional photograph of the woman she'd seen at the diner, complete with Wikipedia article: Renee Georgian, CEO of Hourglass Diagnostics, brunette, and an appallingly youthful fifty-three.
Hunching closer to her laptop, Maka found Renee to have her fingers in an impressive array of pies, various businesses with her influence scattered across the country. On top of the diagnostic labs, she was involved with textiles, oil refineries, cosmetics, wineries, and even a brief mention of a law firm. Known philanthropist and a rising figure in the stock market circuit, she sounded amazing and entirely too rich to be seen eating at the local greasy-spoon diner in a town with a population of less than two thousand.
But the photo was a dead ringer for the woman she'd seen, complete with dark eyes, darker hair, and a shock of blood red lipstick on her pale, porcelain face.
"That has to be a typo," she muttered, double-checking the woman's date of birth.
Maka closed her laptop and drummed her short, blunt nails on its surface. To be honest, there hadn't been anything outright suspicious about the woman, so she shouldn't feel so apprehensive. Judging people for the actions of their relatives is something she was trying to avoid, these days.
The phone at the front desk began to ring, jolting her out of distraction. She tried to relax on her bar stool, the plastic handset chill against her ear. "Nygus Veterinary- how can I help you?"
"That you, Maka?"
She blinked, trying to place the voice on the line as she numbly waved to the local mail carrier walking past the front windows. "...Wes?"
\\
David Wesley Evans was the type of person who gave directions though landmarks and approximates, because street names were too beyond him to remember accurately. It was a common practice for those who'd grown out on farm-to-market roads with road signs bearing naught but buckshot scars, but impractical for a town that had actual lights and street names. It took Maka fifteen minutes longer than necessary to navigate to his one-story brick house in a quiet, back pocket of town.
"Honestly, if you'd just given me the address I could've looked it up before I left work," she pouted at him after she parked her truck near his mailbox. He laughed, giving her that bear hug that she still wasn't accustomed to, and she saw the tightness at the corners of his eyes.
"Yeah, prolly. Glad you made it though." He gestured toward the front door. "Lizzy's inside."
Wes's living room contained a small arrangement of cardboard moving boxes and Elizabeth Thompson sitting on the floor, head resting on a plush couch behind her. Upon seeing Maka enter with a case of Keystone Light, the older woman didn't say hello, though she half-way smiled. Worrisome awkwardness bounced between all three of them until Wes left to take care of errands he wished he could put off, trusting his girlfriend into Maka's care.
"You know," Liz said with the opening hiss of her beer when it was just the two of them, "this is about all I ever wanted." She swept her arm wide, indicating the bright windows facing the backyard, sliding glass door revealing a glittering swimming pool. "Central A/C, a house with a concrete slab under it, loungin' around with cheap beer-"
"Liz..."
"Thanks fer bringin' it, by the way. I'll pay ya back."
"It's on me."
"You're prob'ly busy."
"I have time."
"You don't wanna hear my drama."
"Yeah I do."
Liz slumped a little further into the blue-gray carpet, her hair sticking to the couch's microfiber cushions. After tilting the can back for a sip, she helplessly said, "He's such a good guy, Maka. He didn't even ask it like a question when he found out. Jus' said 'you'll live with me and we'll git through it', and showed up like a knight on a big... Chevrolet horse." Her dim-wattage smile reminded Maka fiercely of Patti. As if reading her mind, Liz lifted up her wrist and glanced at an old, scratched watch. "Pat's gettin' home 'bout now, figurin' it out."
Everything in Maka's chest tightened. She tried to keep her voice neutral, but her hatred for Tina Thompson bled between her teeth. "Why'd she kick you out?"
Liz shrugged. "We fought 'bout gas money. Pretty dumb, huh? Then some creep came knockin' on the door lookin' for her and wouldn't tell me what for, and I was scared she was gettin' in drugs again so we fought about that too. Then I heard Pat lost her job- I'm really sorry for whatever Tina musta said to ya'll," she said in earnestness, veering off the subject. "Don't take it to heart, she's jus' gotta stir up trouble everywhere."
Maka groaned, face warming. "Don't apologize, it was my fault she took Pat away. And besides, Tina's not your responsibility-"
"Yeah she is," Liz scoffed. Her tired gaze floated to the living room ceiling. "She's got this need, like everyone's out to get 'er, so she's... harsh, and she's dramatic, and so damn tiring. All it do is git her more up shit creek." She sighed, the dry sound trapped between squat pillars of faded cardboard.
Uncomfortable with how heavily-weighed her friend's shoulders appeared, Maka said, "She's your mother though, and a grown woman."
"Naw, she ain't," said Liz. "Well, she's my momma, but she never growed up." The glowing, sun-kissed makeup she always expertly wore couldn't hide the age in her face. She idly searched the ceiling for something Maka knew couldn't be found in daylight. "I abandoned her, Maks. I left her alone with Momma."
Maka already had the recent personal experience of throwing that word around incorrectly. "No you didn't," she said, vehement.
\\
Patricia Thompson would be eighteen in two months. Until then, Wes planned to speak with a family friend who would try to help Liz fight for custody, though Liz had seemed unwilling to accept any more of her boyfriend's help.
Still troubled with the thought of the Thompsons and also extremely late for supper, Maka finally pulled onto Angel's End. She went to the stables first, finding what she'd unhappily suspected: Soul had taken care of the horses in her absence. She wasn't ungrateful, and they had agreed to split the duties because of Maka's veterinary work, but she still hadn't wanted the ranch hand to take over her responsibility the very first day - she had enough guilt to deal with as it stood.
Patti, Liz, Tina, and Soul all jumbled her thoughts as she walked into the kitchen, and she was entirely unprepared to see Blake Strickland still sitting at the kitchen table, peering intently at the screen of an old flip phone too small for his hands. At her entrance, Blake gave her a contemplative stare.
"Where've you been," he said, no question mark.
Maka glanced at the phone, then back at his guarded eyes. She moved to the cabinet that held the drinking glasses. "Wes called me. I helped Liz unpack." And got the older woman inebriated, but she kept that to herself. Though she no longer faced him, she could feel the intensity of Blake's stare lifting away, the relief not unlike having narrowly missed a confrontation with a branding iron. Behind her, she heard quiet button tapping. She poured milk into a glass.
He finished his text and snapped the phone shut just as she heavily set the glass directly in front of him.
"You want milk," she said, no question mark. Blake looked at the glass; looked at her. Maka frowned. "What, did I sprout horns or something?"
"That's what I'm still decidin' on," he said warily.
She stalked off to the kitchen pantry, digging around to her secret space behind the canned artichokes that no one named Blake Strickland would ever touch. She pulled out a brown paper sack, sat in the chair next to him, and placed the bag between them.
Elbow on the table and chin propped in a hand, she feigned indifference as he opened the bag and set out the new package of Oreos. Without a word, Blake peeled open the plastic, took a cookie, and dunked it in the milk. The only sound in the kitchen was muffled crunching until his phone buzzed on the tabletop.
He ignored it. He ignored the next two after it, but the air still hung heavy with words unsaid. It wasn't until he was through the first row of cookies, the glass of milk speckled with chocolate crumbs, that she finally opened her mouth.
Maka said, "You're hers, too."
Blake had nothing to say to this, only chewing for awhile and giving the cell phone a spin on the kitchen table with a lone tap of his finger. But he did hand her the next Oreo.
Nothing else was said as they ate, and it slowly became a challenge to finish the entire package like a gluttonous symbol of reparations - the session couldn't be complete until it was empty.
Maka rested her face on the table and groaned. "I think I'm gonna be sick."
Face pinched with a nauseated kind of sneer, Blake twisted the last cookie apart for them to split. "Quit whinin'. I ate the first row by myself."
She chewed on the cookie-half like an unwanted vitamin and swallowed. She stuck out her tongue in disgust.
Chugging the last of the milk, Blake let out an uncomfortable belch that rang throughout the kitchen like signalling the end of a rodeo ride. "Oh yeah, 'fore I forget," he said before slapping a crookedly-folded sheet of paper next to the carcass of Oreo packaging.
His chocolate-marred grin put her on edge as she cautiously closed her hand over the paper. "...What is it."
"Bought and paid for is what. So you'n the spitfire better not waste my cash, right?"
Maka opened the sheet and dimly registered the creaking of the stairs as Blake Strickland's hasty retreat from her growing ire. She gazed at her name snuggling up next to 'Soul Evans', both listed in a sixteen step competition for an upcoming rodeo.
Nobody said anything about a competition! "Black Starrrr," she hissed, wishing to roar but not willing to wake anyone who might be asleep at this hour, and that damned skunk-heart's evil chuckle cartwheeled down the stairs to her steaming ears.
\\
Tsubaki made a sigh of relief as she sat down. "I'm worn out. Will you call in the stragglers for me?" she asked, propping her feet up on an empty chair.
Maka took a quick headcount of who was already tucking into lunch (which was easy, because it was only Blake), and made her way outside. Three missing. No, she corrected, two missing, the third in guilt-tripping absence (but it didn't sting so much because she was usually still in school during lunch time). Then Mifune bumped into her on the porch.
"Ah-"
"Pardon."
"Dinner's ready."
For a moment, they stood in silence as she took in the worn laundry basket filled with what would normally have been considered a random assortment of clothing, but she knew better. Maka didn't mention it or the tell-tale rattle of a sewing kit in his shirt pocket. They parted ways without incident.
One down, one to go. She knew the ranch hand had been spending his free time working on his truck. She hadn't yet had a chance to talk to him alone since their joint trip to town the day before last, and she thought she might, maybe, if she felt like it, if he didn't call her some variant of 'short', thank him for a few various reasons that she would not catalogue right this moment.
Also, that dance registration paper had been burning a hole in her back pocket with the fury of a hundred summer suns. She wanted to know if Soul already knew about it - and what his reaction had been when he found out. Walking down to the guest house, she found Soul's truck parked in the gravel driveway. Various auto guts were scattered across a tarp on the ground, including a recently scrubbed fuel tank.
She neither saw nor heard any sign of him. She hesitantly bowed to look under the truck, but found the space unoccupied. A knock and a peek behind the unlocked door of the guest house proved the same result.
Maka shut the door, eyes scanning the surrounding fields. Had he gone in the house from the other direction and she'd somehow missed him in the process? Annoyed, she walked back to the main house and entered the kitchen.
Tsubaki noted her befuddled expression and asked a question with her eyebrows.
"Did Evans get around me?" Maka asked.
Blake was already wiping crumbs from his decimated lunch off his shirt. "Wasn't at his truck?"
"Or in his place, either."
The kitchen went very still.
"...He couldn't have gone far," Tsubaki tried to reassure as Maka stomped over to the counter where the handheld radios were charged and were all very obviously present and accounted for. She yanked one from its cradle: the oldest, and yet the least scratched and battered from ranch use, because it had become the least used.
She didn't wait to see which directions Blake and Mifune chose to go ranch-hand hunting, she simply walked straight to that old red truck and let her guts do the rest. Fuming, Maka studied the horizon for idiot-sized shapes, wondering if she should've taken Skully, wondering if she should've taken a gun to shoot that idiot-sized-shape in the foot so he couldn't wander off...
Then Crona came around a tree, pushing his way through fresh spring grass already taller than himself to come greet her. She scowled, but tried to keep her voice light for the dog, seeing as he wasn't the one she wanted to strangle to a pulp. "Hey buddie," she grumbled, and hurried in the direction the chihuahua had come.
Ankles crossed and hat over his face, Soul Ethan Evans was having himself a doze under a budding cottonwood tree. His chest rose and fell, and Maka, two steps beyond irate, started cussing so colorfully her mother would've been proud. Her intensity scared the poor dog away, and Soul bolted upright, hat falling off his face to tumble out of his lap.
He yelped in surprise, swearing his own slew of words. "What in the hell's wrong with you!?"
That was precisely what she wanted to say. "I'm gonna knock you so hard you'll see tomorrow today!"
"Well mornin' to you too, sunshine," he sneered, dusting off his hat.
Incensed, she wedged her boot under his knee and shoved, wanting nothing more than to kick him in his grumpy face but settling for this instead because she didn't want his stupid brains dirtying her boots. "You jackass fool! If you aren't at home, you take a goddamn radio!"
"Would you quit kickin'-" he said, struggling to get on his feet and away from her. His breath came out in a rush once he stood, because she immediately jabbed the radio into his gut. "It weren't like I was far, dammit," he wheezed. "You can see my truck from here."
Maka grabbed a fistful of his shirt and hauled him down to her height, hearing a couple snaps pop open. She hissed, "I don't know what it was like on your ranch, but on mine, if you're by yourself where no one knows, you take a radio."
"Alright, fine! My mistake!" Soul shrugged out of her grasp, anger splotching high on his cheekbones. "Calm the hell down, why're you so red-assed about-"
"Dinner's ready so you best get in and say sorry to Sue for waiting on you and then apologize to everyone else for wasting their time looking for your dumb ass!" Spinning away, Maka set a determined march back to the house to try to cool her head and maybe reassure Crona that none of her anger was with the dog.
"Albarn. Maka, jus' wait a minute," he called. A hand wrapped around her upper arm and held fast until he could twist her to face him. His mouth opened and started to form around words Maka did not give a good damn about, but then his anger and confusion were wiped clean, replaced by bewilderment the moment he took in her face.
With the weight of that silence, she didn't want to know what was on it. Whatever it was, she tried to mask it with a glare, shoulders inching up as she wished for a thousand miles to appear between her and Soul Evans.
"...Maka, what," he started to ask, and his voice was too soft, too horribly gentle for her to keep a grip on the fury she kept sealed around something she hadn't wanted to feel - something she hadn't wanted him to see her feel.
Baring her teeth in a helpless snarl, she could only say, "Ask Sue," in desperation before she slid out of his grasp and retreated. Nothing else could have been squeezed out of her closing throat but that, anyhow.
\\
Once back in the kitchen, she tried to absorb the normalcy her surroundings offered, but other things were pressing in that she couldn't confidently hold at bay. She tried her best not to stomp up the stairs, attempted to appear serene, apathetic, uncaring, as Tsubaki radioed the other cowboys to announce Soul was accounted for; as Soul both apologized and asked halting, cautious questions; as Maka holed herself up in the bathroom and securely locked the door.
She leaned heavily against the sink's tiled countertop. A glance to the mirror clued her in to what Soul had seen, and she averted her eyes. Her hands, which tried to suck the stability out of the very bathroom tile because she needed to get a grip, seemed to belong to someone else - as if this particular splay of fingers or this collection of blunt, uneven nails or this combination of vanity lights and midday sunshine streaming in from the small window above the bathtub temporarily disguised them as her mother's hands - and she's caught between wanting to stare with a guilty, craven sense of homesickness, and wanting to look at anything besides another mirror.
Through the door, even though Tsubaki's words were muffled and indecipherable, Maka could hear the cadence, the amount of syllables, the unforgiving, still-waters-running-deep ring to them; her voice was so familiar that it was the easiest game of fill in the blanks.
"Mrs. Albarn forgot her radio, once," she said to Soul.
And it was his, now. Older, but just a little more pristine than the others.
\\
Somehow, in the moment she'd believed she was safe from those not subtle glances at the kitchen table from a certain nosy ranch hand (for whom she still held a grudge after making her heart momentarily collapse at the sight of him at the foot of a tree, motionless), he appeared. He seemed to be very good at that. Around her, horses munched on feed as she cleaned out and refilled water buckets, and there he was, pulling his shady materialization trick, shock shooting to her toes.
"Keep that up and I'll cancel your birth certificate," she said.
"...Keep what up?" he slowly asked.
Maka growled to herself and kinked the hose as she walked to the next stall. He hadn't shown those typical signs of an Evans playing innocent, so she didn't pursue it. Instead, she said, "I can take care of it all today, so don't worry about it."
He merely replied, "Then take care of it," which made her want to chew up her tongue and just spit it at him.
If he wasn't here to help, then he was here to confront her about earlier, and past events had taught her that she wouldn't find a way out of it. "Just ask it," she said, weary to the core.
There was a long silence, punctuated by the splash of water in the bottom of the bucket she was filling. Eventually, Soul said, "I won't."
Water swirled in the bucket. Her hands tightened around the hose, heart uncertain.
"You still look pretty sore about it, so."
She wished she could decide if she was grateful for his observation or frightened that he had observed anything to begin with. If she glanced at him now, would his hat brim be up or down? She couldn't bring herself to look.
"Ain't why I came here, anyhow." He paused while she moved on to the next stall, which was, unfortunately, closer to where he was leaning on his preferred post. "'Pologized to everyone else, but didn't get a chance to say it at you."
Was every confrontation with him going to involve falling into an entire ocean of guilt? She shook her head, trying to concentrate on her work and failing spectacularly. "Forget about it," she said, head bowed. "I overreacted. I was..."
Seeing ghosts. Seeing ghosts that lived in the shadows knit by familiar trees, who left caricatures of her mother in her face and on the backs of her hands when she hadn't been looking.
Soul moved close, sneaking in from the side to stand before her. He stooped a little, to catch her eyes. On a better day, she'd spray him with the hose to get him out of her face, but as it was, she could only scramble for a thin veneer of calm, unable to keep up with his myriad of little polite surprises.
The hat brim was pushed out of the way. He said, "Sorry. If you got worried 'cause of me."
It was programmed in her, it seemed - her response to his apology something deeply ingrained from hearing it so many times in her youth, refreshed in her memory from receiving it the day before yesterday.
"I know you are."
That ruddy color was saturated with a dusty cinnamon, even in the darkening evening. "I'll not do it again."
She was back at the diner, but it felt as if she hadn't switched booths, though the words in her mouth belonged to the other side.
"I know you won't."
Satisfied with this, he took a step back, straightening in silence as she moved on to the next stall with the hose. Maka heard his boots scrape across the floor, headed towards the door. But they stopped, and, damn her, she looked back.
He turned on a heel, and she was reminded of that icy night in the mudroom, when he'd told her his name.
"But, don't tell me to ask Sue again," he called from the door. Maka's eyebrows furrowed, wary and toeing the edge of defensive anger on pure reflex, but then he added, "Jus'... whenever you feel like answerin'. I'll ask you."
Why this distinction was important she couldn't fathom, and why this distinction seemed to ease just a little bit of the tightness in her throat, she equally couldn't fathom. She said, "Okay," but so quietly she wasn't sure anyone in the world had heard her, and Soul adjusted his hat back over his eyes, disappearing around the corner.
\\
Bluebonnets were beginning to bloom on the unkempt shoulders of the backroads, though it was hard to pick them out in the slate grey gloom of a spring storm. Water sluiced up the windshield of her father's old diesel pickup, occasional gusts of wind tugging on the empty gooseneck trailer she was hauling.
She'd asked for the day away from the vet so she could help haul the yearling cattle born the spring prior, and though she knew the full shipment wouldn't have been able to be taken without her, she regretted having taken the day off, considering the outcome.
The morning had started sub-par: riding out in the rain to gather the herd and trailer them had taken longer than it should have, the cattle being uncooperative and breaking away multiple times.
Their buyer had been the worst of it, though. She didn't know the figures off the top of her head like Tsubaki, but she had a feeling the deal they'd been cut didn't even cover the upkeep of the yearlings they'd just sold. Going into the deal, they had expected a loss, but not one quite this large.
A handful of pea-sized hail dropped from the sky before the storm mellowed to a warm drizzle, thunder rumbling far away. By the time their caravan of empty stock trailers pulled onto Angel's End, the rain had stopped completely, which at least made unhitching a little more bearable, and gave Maka enough time to take care of the horses before supper.
If there was one thing she was grateful for today, she decided as she mucked stalls, it was a lack of strange men appearing from the ether.
The evening meal was a chatterless, subdued event, with an air of defeat made more apparent by Mifune's silence. The foreman was naturally a quiet sort of man, but this brand of quiet was loud. He was always pensive when he found he'd miscalculated something, and with an error this large, Mifune wouldn't even touch his string beans or cornbread, and excused himself from the table early.
Tsubaki, who looked ready to fall asleep in her chair from stress and work and growing a human being in her belly, still had her reading glasses forgetfully perched on her head. She must have already gone through the finances and reported the results to Spirit. Also noticing her exhaustion, Blake and Soul offered to clean up the kitchen after supper, so Tsubaki hobbled her way up to bed.
Still seated with most of her food on her plate (she'd found she hadn't much of an appetite, either), Maka gazed at her father's chair and the nothing which sat in it, wondering how Spirit had taken the news, if that offer letter he kept in his shirt pocket felt a little heavier. And wondered how heavy it must become before he couldn't stand under the weight of all those zeroes anymore.
She ate a few more bites and then replaced them from the spread still on the table, adding them to her uneaten food and saving the plate for when her father came home, whenever that would be.
Before going upstairs, she made a stop at the laundry room, grabbing her designated basket of clothes and carrying it to her bedroom. She set to the task of folding her things, mind focused inward. She'd already decided she would find a way for Angel's End to break even, but with all the drama and work going on, she hadn't come up with a decent idea on how to do it. The situation weighed heavily on her mind, especially after the loss they'd taken today; she had to do something soon.
Shaking out a pair of jeans, something was flung to the floor and skittered under her bed. Maka groaned as she bent to hands and knees, pulling out a small, unidentifiable wad. After an eyebrow-scrunching moment of silence, she finally placed it: washed and dried into a stiff, almost velvety block, the sixteen-step registration paper had faded to near illegibility. She sighed. She still needed to talk to Soul about that.
Maka tossed the folded paper to her bedside table like skipping a rock on a pond, but then, as if the idea of the rodeo had been dragged up from the depths by the ripples, she suddenly knew what to do. She flew out of her bedroom, hurrying down the stairs to shove her feet into her boots.
She'd sworn off segregated rodeo games, and coming out on top wouldn't be enough to break even, but it would be a start, at least, even if she had to sacrifice a bit of her pride. That stuff was getting too much in the way lately, right?
Maka half-ran through the soggy gravel all the way down to the guest house. He must have already made himself comfortable before she knocked, because he was preemptively loaded with a drowsy glower when he answered his door, but she was too breathless and excited to care. She said, "Did Black Star tell you about it? The competition. At the rodeo."
The glower was replaced by surprise when he looked down to her height, but her straightforward dive into conversation got him over his surprise quick enough. Soul sighed. "He did," he said with a sour twist of his mouth.
Maka waved off his attitude - she had more important things to tackle, excitement pushing her ever forward. "Look, I'm- I know I said I wanted nothing to do with it, but things keep getting crazy, and now our buyers have gotten spoiled rotten 'cause of that Lazy S ranch, so something needs to be done! And so I'm thinking about entering," she said rapid-fire, only now taking a moment to catch a breath. "For the purse, that is. I decided if I have to lose a little face to keep Mama's land, then I'll do it."
After her spiel, Soul simply blinked, though it would be more accurate to say the cowboy closed his eyes for a long moment while a small crease slowly formed between his eyebrows and he rubbed his bandana-covered head with a hand. "Okay?" he said dubiously, opening his eyes. "I'll... help you? Is that what you're askin'?"
In her haste, she realized she hadn't asked him a question in the first place; no wonder he looked so confused. Ears getting hot, Maka flashed a shy smile. "Y-yes, that's why I'm... if you don't mind, that is." As much as she hated to admit it, the ranch hand was district calf-roping champion, and there were probably things she could learn from him. If she entered for the competition, she'd be stupid to not seize any opportunity to help her win the prize money.
Soul shrugged, eyes askance. "Not particularly," he said. "But what is it you're needin' help with?"
She had to coach herself to say it, to shove her pride away for just five seconds to allow the words to escape her mouth. "It's been, um, a long time for me, so I was hoping you could help me practice?" she asked, every inch of her skin alight. "Whenever you got some time."
His weight shifted over to one foot, and if she didn't know any better, she might say he was suffering some second-hand embarrassment with that tint to his cheeks. "Yeah, sure," he said, rubbing under his nose. "Got time now, I 'spose."
It was her turn to do that long, perplexed blink. Maka glanced over her shoulder at the darkening spring sky, murky with the leftovers of the day's storm. "Now? It's getting kinda dark, isn't it?"
Soul gave her a quizzical look. "It's light enough inside," he replied, leaving her at the open doorway.
Critically eyeing the small guest house and not seeing any way for there to be nearly enough room inside to swing a rope, Maka balked. But Soul didn't appear to be speculative about the practice space - only expectant and slightly bemused at her hesitance.
Well, she thought as she stepped forward, she had to admit that he was mister six-point-eleven, so it was possible the man had some tricks he could teach her that didn't require a practice rope. Maybe.
Even in her head, the idea was a bit of a stretch, but the ranch hand stood in the middle of the room at one edge of Mama's floor rug, openly waiting on her with his thumbs hooked in his pockets. She closed the door behind her, leather and shaving cream filling her lungs. She pushed her ponytail off her shoulder. "Sooo..."
Exasperated, Soul quietly grumbled, "Well come here, then."
Maka took a big step forward, unwilling to show any weakness, though she still lingered on the outskirts of the rug.
He wasn't buying it. "Would you jus' stand in front of me?" he griped.
She snapped back at his tone. "Well say so in the first place!"
As if she were his damned horse caught being an idiot with a bucket, he said, "I'd think at least that much shouldn't need sayin'."
Maka bristled. Just because he was a stupid champion didn't mean he had to be so condescending about it! She glared needles at him, but stepped forward again until she was directly in front of him. He stared at her a moment, and then scoffed. She deserved an award for not decking him.
"It really has been awhile, hasn't it." His eyes crinkled around the edges. "You said 'practice', but I didn't think you meant 'teach'," he teased, and, heaven as witness, Soul Evans smirked in such a way that, if she weren't in full control of her faculties and were mercilessly tortured by relentless horse wranglers and general managers, she might admit was becoming on him. While Maka battled her dismay at this observation, Soul put his hands on her shoulders and spun her to face the opposite direction, with him standing (closely - close enough to dance along that boundary line between 'necessary' and 'Now Wait A Minute') behind her.
The faint scents of the guest house and its main occupant appeared to prevent her from thinking properly. Why was this position necessary? Wouldn't it be easier to teach her if they faced each other? He was left-handed, after all.
Which is what she asked him, though it came out like a squeak. "But aren't you left-handed?"
Adjusting to his voice emanating from behind her at her height was an experience she did not desire to explain to anyone, because a person simply did not give up potential blackmail material about oneself. He asked, sounding sincerely curious, "That don't matter much for this, do it?"
Warning bells were going off in the distance (the distant-distance, beyond the crickets and frogs and wild dogs and owls, and perhaps beyond even the stars), and her knees suffered the tiniest of precarious wobbles. She felt more than heard Soul take one step to the side, and a familiar warmth seeped through her shirt, blooming on her shoulder before running down her arm, molding to the shape of it in a dizzying balance of firm gentleness. She had seen him do this to calm a horse before lifting its leg, but instead of fitting her for a shoe he simply took her hand.
He raised their connected fingers so they were near her shoulder, her palm facing upward, while her other hand was smoothly seized by his opposite, held out to the side and in such a manner that she was reminded of words like 'gentleman' and 'chivalry' and all order of things that had absolutely no bearing on calf roping no matter how hard she tried to fit them together.
It took her an entire four seconds of frozen silence before she realized what was happening.
She bolted, blazing like a supernova from head to toe. "N-not! Not a- NOT!" she stammered while Soul backed away, hands held up as if she had him at gunpoint.
"What, what, what'd I do-"
Her scrambled brain finally made the appropriate connections required for human speech. She sucked in an anxious breath. "I was talking about roping, not dancing!"
And in that instant, she rolled back two months (and twenty years) in time, to that top-of-the-stairs, You'll Get Cooties state of being, in which the two of them were both children who realized they had touched, which for some reason was a big deal.
Soul's arms fell to his sides, Long-Blink already initiated. "Well then say that in the first place!"
"I thought I did!"
"Obviously you neglected that bit," he said as he sat down on the edge of his bed, rubbing his face with his hand. "Left-handed," he muttered, in either disbelief or embarrassment. "Shoulda figured."
A nervous giggle bubbled up her throat. "Sorry, I was just... I got ahead of myself." The idea of how cooperative he'd been about it just made her laugh. "Thanks anyway, for going along with it? Kinda question your mentality though," she teased.
Soul glared at her. "Preacher to the choir, shortstack," he said wryly. "Found that goin' with it's the safest thing to do on account of not knowin' what to expect from you."
She wanted to take offense at that, but for some reason the admission stroked her pride just the smallest bit. "So a-anyway," she said, fiddling with her bangs, "about the roping. Could I get some advice or anything from you?"
He sighed. "Already said 'yes', didn't I?"
"For something you misunderstood..."
"Well it's not like I woulda said 'no'."
At that statement, what little composure she retained was shaken by the thick thump of her heart, and she couldn't find it in herself to reply.
Soul also seemed to realize his words had sounded a bit suggestive, so he added, "Jus' wanna help how I can, to break even n'all." He rubbed the back of his neck. "Thought about ropin', myself, but with Harley still healin'..."
"Why?" she asked, all lightheartedness bleeding away to be replaced with apprehension. "That doesn't concern you- it's got nothing to do with you."
"Of course it does," he said. He leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and leveled a flat stare. "Or were you jus' talkin' when you said 'you're ours too'?"
She tried to catch flies with her open mouth before stammering, "I-I wouldn't say something like that if I didn't mean it!"
He seemed to gauge her for a moment, then freed her from that stare, face and eyes turning away with a new expression that would normally be hidden with a hat on.
Lacing his fingers together, Soul said, "Lost my home once, already. So if I can stop it from happenin' again, I will."
With a long silence, Maka thought of what she wanted to prevent, protecting her home from an end that Soul had already been living. She thought of the hay bale hauler, and how it had no purpose until it was brought here, given new meaning.
She thought of the floor rug between them, the guest house feeling lived-in. A peculiar sense of pride filled her then, though maybe a different kind.
Finally, she said, "Do you think you'll have some free time tomorrow?"