* * *
Claire did not ask where he had been. She made supper, elk steaks and potatoes and canned green beans, and the three of them ate it at the kitchen table, and June talked enough for everybody, about a boy in her class who had thrown up on the bus and about the Halloween parade at school and whether she could be a barrel racer, and Wade answered her and Claire answered her, and they did not look at each other more than they had to. Twice during the meal Claire's phone buzzed face down on the counter, and twice she got up and looked at it and set it back down without answering, and the second time Wade saw her jaw tighten.
After supper he went out to feed the horses, though they had already been fed. He wanted to be out of the house. The sun was down behind the Snowies and the whole western sky was a long band of orange going to violet, and the cold was coming down out of it fast, and the cottonwoods along the creek were black against it, holding up the last of their yellow leaves. He stood in the barn door with a flake of hay under his arm and watched the light go and tried to think of nothing.
Headlights turned in off the county road.
He watched them come down the lane, bouncing in the ruts, one beam slightly cocked, the way the headlight on an old pickup went when the mount was rusted. It was not a vehicle he knew by sound, a tired gas engine with a tick in the valves and a muffler that was going. It came past the house without stopping and swung wide around the yard, the way a driver does when he has done it many times and knows where the soft spot by the water trough is, and it pulled up in the shadow on the far side of the barn, where it could not be seen from the county road.
The engine died. The driver's door opened and shut with the specific hollow clang of a door that did not quite belong to the truck it was hung on.
Wade stepped out of the barn door and around the corner.
In the last of the light he could see it plainly. A white Ford half-ton, early nineties, rust coming through along the rocker panels, and the driver's door a dull, faded forest green. And he remembered where he had seen it. He had seen it parked in front of the Ferris house on Flatwillow Creek, years ago, when he had driven over to help Ray pull a calf. He had seen it parked on the street outside the courthouse in Lewistown on a windy Tuesday morning three springs back, with Ray Ferris sitting in the cab alone, not getting out, watching the steps through the windshield while men he had known all his life bid on his land.