"Because I didn't think I had a choice."
The kettle screamed. Neither of them moved to take it off. It went on screaming until Claire turned and shoved it off the burner with the heel of her hand, and in the silence afterward they could both hear June's door upstairs creak open an inch, and both of them stood frozen until it creaked shut again.
"I'm going to sleep down here tonight," Wade said.
"Wade."
"I'm not doing this with her awake. And I'm not lying next to you tonight pretending I'm asleep. I'd rather sit up."
She did not argue. She poured the hot water into a mug with a tea bag she didn't drink and stood holding it, and he went back to the family room and put two more splits of cottonwood on the fire and sat down in the leather armchair facing it with his boots still on, and he stayed there, and at some point he heard her go up the stairs, slow, one step at a time.
He did not sleep. He sat and watched the fire go from flame to coals to ash and thought about every man in Fergus County who could conceivably be described as Mommy's helper, and he discovered that the trouble with an imagination like his, which had been trained for forty years to anticipate every way that weather and disease and markets could ruin him, was that it did not stop at a seventeen-year-old boy. It did not believe in the boy. It went past the boy to the others: the young day-hands who drifted through on the Kessler place, the brand inspector, the propane man, the new veterinarian from Roundup with the pickup and the good teeth. It went to Dan Albright, his loan officer at the bank in Lewistown, who had been divorced two years now and who always said Claire's name in a particular way, as though it were a word he liked the taste of. Dan, he thought. Danny. June had said Danny.
He sat up in the chair. No grown man let himself be called Danny. But a seven-year-old might call him that, if that was what she'd heard. If that was what her mother called him.