Around two in the morning, he went to the back door, sat on the bench, and pulled his boots off at last. He sat there in his sock feet looking at the pile of work gloves on the floor, his and Claire's, and he saw that one pair in the pile was not theirs: brown cowhide, cheap, worn through at both forefingers, a hole in the left thumb that somebody had tried to close with black electrical tape. He picked one up and turned it over. It was a large.
* * *
At first light he went out to the barn.
It was cold enough that his breath hung in front of him, and the grass in the yard was furred white and crunched under his boots. The sky over the Judith Mountains was the color of a trout's belly. The barn stood where it had stood since 1911, a big gambrel-roofed hulk of red boards gone the color of dried blood, and he had been walking into it every morning of his life that he had been home, and this morning he stopped at the door with his hand on the latch as if he were about to walk into a stranger's.
Inside it smelled the way it always did, of hay and horse and old oil and the cold sweetness of oats. The two saddle horses, Dutch and the little bay mare, nickered at him from their stalls. He saw at once what he should have seen the night before if he had walked down here when he got home: the stalls were clean. Not Claire-clean, which was good enough. Clean the way he kept them himself when he had the time, which he never did, with fresh straw banked up against the walls and the aisle swept. The hydrant by the bull pen, the one that had dripped all summer and frozen solid twice last winter, had a new handle and a new packing nut, and somebody had wrapped heat tape on the riser and run a cord to the outlet by the door, neat, stapled up along the post.
The tack room was the same. Bridles hung in order on their hooks. Somebody had oiled his old roping saddle, the one he hadn't used in years, and the leather had darkened and come back to life. Under the window where the light came in sat a five-gallon bucket turned upside down for a stool, and next to it, a coffee can full of horseshoe nails that somebody had been sorting, straightening the bent ones with a hammer on the anvil.
On the inside wall of the tack room, at the height of a seven-year-old's reach, someone had drawn in white chalk on the dark boards. A horse, or a dog; it was hard to tell. Two people, one big and one small, with stick arms and hands like rakes, standing next to a box with wheels. The big one wore a hat. Under it, in June's careful, backwards-leaning letters, it said ME AND DANY. The small figure had braids. The truck, if that was what the box was, had been colored in white except for one door, which had been left dark, or had been scribbled over with something greenish, a piece of grass maybe, rubbed on the boards.
He stood looking at the drawing for a long time.